Press release of eMediaWire Los Angeles, CA (PRWeb) January 30, 2007.
Is now the right time? Paul Bodine, Senior Editor at Accepted.com, discusses the pluses and minuses of being a young applicant to business school.
Young applicants to business school -- meaning those just coming out of college or with one year of work experience -- can learn a lot about their chances of admission and the advantages and drawbacks of being a young MBA student in a short, 20-minute podcast with Accepted.com Senior Editor Paul Bodine.
"Advice to Younger Applicants" (http://www.mbapodcaster.com/Podcasts.asp ) offers key insights into the recent trend in business schools to actively recruit "early career candidates."
"MBA schools have a genuine interest in changing the perception that you need a certain number of years of experience to get in," says Bodine. "Still, the important thing to remember is that while they may want to dispel that myth, business schools are not admitting young students at significantly higher percentages because of it."
In Paul Bodine's blog, The Admissions Insider, (http://www.theadmissionsinsider.com:80/journal/2006/12/7/young-mba-applicants-the-latest-data.html), Bodine gives stats on the percentage of first-year MBA students admitted with one year or less of post-college work experience. "In 2005, only four of BusinessWeek's top 30 programs admitted more than 10 percent of such applicants, and 12 top schools admitted virtually none at all. In 2006, only six of BusinessWeek's top 30 programs reported a larger percentage of younger entrants, and only Vanderbilt's increase can be called substantial (from 3 percent to 9 percent). And, while there does seem to be a modest down-tick in the average age of MBA students, the bottom line is that the 'trend' toward admitting younger applicants is a modest one at best, and very young applicants are still not being welcomed by most top schools in large numbers."
"It's the exceptional applicant who will apply and be admitted," says Bodine, who is also the author of Great Application Essays for Business School (http://www.accepted.com/Ecommerce/MBA/applicationessay.aspx ). "You must have extraordinary experience that shows you're a 'fast track person.' Schools are not going to be comparing a young applicant to people with five or six years' experience, because the youngster just won't have it. But, schools who are willing to admit very young applicants will want to see extraordinary successes and that there's something atypical about your potential. At a minimum, you've got to be meeting school's requirements for GPA and GMAT test performance. Your record needs to demonstrate that you exceed your peers on leadership and impact in classes, community or extracurriculars."
Leadership is the key, emphasizes Bodine...
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