[00:00:15] Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. I'm Graham Richmond, and this is your Wiretaps for Monday, February 17, 2025. I'm joined by Alex Brown from Cornwall, England. Alex, what's going on this week?
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Everything's very good, Graham.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: So I guess are.
Are there invites still? I guess some of the schools are still rolling out interview invitations, but it seems like we're getting towards the end of that whole phase. When is.
[00:00:41] Speaker B: Have you seen a Wharton interview invite yet or one from Sloan?
[00:00:44] Speaker A: I haven't, no. At the time of this recording, I have not seen from either of those.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Two schools, and they're not due out till at least next week anyway. I mean, Wharton's due out next week, and Sloan, I assume, will be sometimes next week. So. So, yeah, some of the big schools still haven't yet released interview invites. The majority of programs have, but there are also still programs that tend to trickle them out, as we know. Stanford Haas. Yeah, several others. So. So there's still plenty of interview invite activity.
[00:01:17] Speaker A: Yeah. The other thing that I know you've been spending time on is we. We're really proud of the Ask Clear Admit AI bot that we built, but you did something over the last week with Lauren on our team. Do you want to talk about that?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Sure. We've created what we call a prompt guide.
The key is, with these types of app chatbots, it's like however you query, it impacts the quality of the response that you'd be getting and so on and so forth. So we're just trying to guide folks on how to best use the tool if they want. Let's say, for example, a profile review or some feedback on a draft essay. We sort of show them how to best nudge the bot to give them that sort of feedback. I mean, for most queries, the bot does a really good job, but there are certain ways to ask questions or to create queries to maximize the experience. Anyway, that's what the prompt guide's for. And yeah, that was one of the articles we rolled out this week.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I've been playing with it. I continue to play with it and ask questions every once in a while when something comes to me and I'm continually impressed. So it's been a lot of fun. On the event side, we continue to do events this month. We're now into the master's in management phase of this month's event. So this Wednesday, I'm going to sit down with admissions directors from Michigan Ross, Carnegie Mellon tepper, and Georgetown McDonough to talk about their one year master's in management programs that you start immediately out of college. You can sign up for that at bit ly mim 0225. And next week we're going to do the same, but with Chicago Booth, Emory, Indiana, Duke and London Business School. So should be fun. These are newer events for us, but we're having a lot of good conversations and. Yeah. So sign up if you can. The other thing, Alex, is we did another article about great business podcasts to listen to, or I should say great podcasts from business schools, which do tend to be about business, but yeah, so we covered podcast offerings from the likes of Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Vanderbilt, Foster, ucla and some other schools. So I feel like across these three articles, where we kind of did M7 top 16 and now maybe call it sort of top 20, we've done a lot of really good digging to identify the best podcasts that are out there, if you're interested in that kind of stuff. And these schools do produce very high quality shows. I mean, much different than us, right? I mean, we're on a shoestring budget, these schools. Some of them are very, very, very polished.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Did we feature our podcast at all in any of these? I think we did in the first one, right?
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Yeah, we did. Yeah, we did, we did, yeah. So other than that, we continue to pump out admissions advice, as always. And the good thing we did is we ran a post about what do you do after an interview? It's mostly about thank you letters, but also in the instance of, say, Harvard Business School, it's about how to write their post interview, reflection, essay. So you can check that out on the site. And Alex, I know Lauren on our team asked us to announce to listeners that we're looking for interview reports. And essentially, as most of our site users and community members know, we have this amazing archive that you built, Alex, way back when, that you set up, which is an archive of interview reports from people who've interviewed at top schools. So we have thousands of reports, like firsthand accounts of what it was like to interview at a school. And the only thing that Lauren on our team asked us to do is to tell everyone to pay it forward by submitting an interview report after you've interviewed. So if you use the archive, I mean, just do the right thing. Right. Share your report too, because those reports really add to the knowledge base that, you know, Many Moons, Galaxy, it was a wiki that you built and now it's a sort of database. But it's really cool.
[00:05:01] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it is one Of I think it's a really cool product that we have at Clinmid Mitt. But the interview archive is absolutely fantastic for interview preparation. And folks that are interviewing in round two, make sure you are using the interview archive to at least understand the questions that the schools that you're interviewing with is most likely to be asking and so forth. And yeah, once you've interviewed, it'd be great to get your contribution back into the interview archive. The interview archive is only as good as the interview reports that are added by the community.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: Right? Exactly. Yeah. So definitely encourage everyone to use it and pay it forward. So Alex, we're also continuing to run our Real Numbers series on the site and so I want to have a little fun as usual. We did two what the first one was about the percentage of women in leading MBA programs. And so there is an MBA program out there that has 59% women. And I wondered if you wanted to try to guess. It's not one of the programs that we talk about so much on the show, but it is a school that we cover on the site and that's been, I think, kind of, I would call it an up and comer.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd have to take a bit of a flyer on this. I mean, whether it's something like Foster or Simon or whatever it might be, because my first instinct would be Marshall because I know they were probably the first top school to break that 50%.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: Oh, they did, yeah.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: My next would be maybe Warton. I know they've done quite well in this, but. Yeah, you're gonna have to tell me.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: Yeah, so this is actually John Hopkins down in Baltimore, the Cary School. So they have 59%. And I want to take, I'm going to take a guess as to why that is. They tend to be very healthcare centric in the way that they run their mba. And I know there are a lot of women in medical school school and so I'm thinking they have a fair number of joint degree md, mba and so maybe that's driving that.
But in terms of other schools that did really well, like Duke, 51%, Kellogg, 50, there are a number of schools in that sort of 44 to 47% range. So you have Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, NYU, Columbia, they're all in that range. But anyway, you can look at that article, it just kind of goes through the numbers there.
[00:07:14] Speaker B: And kudos to which organization that really promotes women in Ed Forte. Yes. Which is close to my heart because of friends that have worked there and so on and so forth. So Absolutely fantastic.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Yeah, totally agree. The other one we did was we ran a tuition piece, real numbers of tuition for European business schools. So that one's a little tricky, right, because you have some European business schools that are one year and then you have others where it's two and some are somewhere in between.
And, you know, cost of living varies quite a bit from city to city. But just to give you a couple of interesting numbers, the tuition at London business school for two years is $147,000. INSEAD is more like 140,000, but their program is only 10 months long, so they're similarly priced but for a different time frame. Although the cost of living in Fontainebleau in the kind of countryside of France is far lower than the cost of living in London. And actually that 140 figure for INSEAD includes cost of living, like room and board and stuff, whereas the LBS figures just tuition. So, yeah, there's. There are differences there.
[00:08:22] Speaker B: So what you're telling me is we've got a great article that's measuring apples.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Against oranges a little bit. Totally, yeah. Now, one thing I did think was interesting though is schools like Imperial, Manchester and even ESMT and Berlin are quite inexpensive when you compare them to some of these other programs. Like, I think tuition total at ESMT is like $50,000. So. So there are, you know, I wouldn't call them barg because these are all good schools, but it's worth looking at these numbers, even if. Yeah, it's hard sometimes to compare apples to apples. But any event, yeah, look at the articles. It's fun. We have a lot of fun putting these out there every year, so.
[00:08:59] Speaker B: Good.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Last thing, Alex, before we talk about this week's candidates is I wanted to. We finally got the London Business School Career Report in. I know we've been talking about it for the last couple weeks because we wondered when it was coming. And so I'll give you the numbers on this and then be curious to hear your take. There were 502 students in the graduating class of 24 over at LBs, and all of them reported employment outcomes. So what I mean by that is that the Career Services team had 100% reporting rate, which, you know, we've been talking about. Most of these schools are not anywhere near there, so somehow LDS got everybody to at least tell them what they're up to. Within three months of graduation, 87% of those students looking for work had received an offer and 86% had accepted an offer. Those numbers are down slightly from 91 and 90% respectively, but still pretty darn close.
22 grads in the class reported that they were starting a new business or doing something self employment. And so that's down a little bit. They actually had 37 in the class last year doing that sort of thing. The mean salary reported by Grads was $116,000.
That's converted to US DOL. Last year it was a little bit higher. It was 120, so you know, a little bit lower this year. We've been seeing that at a lot of schools too in terms of the industries that people went into. They sent 42% into consulting, that's down a tick from 45, 26% into finance, that's unchanged. 21% into tech, also unchanged. 11% into diversified other sectors, which is sort of Fortune 500, you know, kind of other healthcare. Everything else they kind of lump together and that's 11%. And that's also unchanged from last year. In terms of where people landed geographically, 45% landed in the UK, that's down from 55%. 14% headed to Africa and the Middle east, that's up, that doubled. It was only 7% last year. They also sent 12% to Asia, which is unchanged 10% to North America. Also unchanged 9% to Europe, not counting the UK of course. That's up 1% from 8 last year. And they sent 8% to Latin America and the Caribbean, that's also up 1%. And they sent 2% to Oceania, which I don't have numbers on last year. So Alex, anything jump out at you with this?
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think relative to all the other career reports we've discussed, I mean obviously LBS faces similar headwinds that other programs have faced. But I think these numbers are really very good in terms of, you know, 100% reporting, 87% and 86% getting offers, taking offers and so forth.
And yeah, I mean, quite honestly, Graham, I think LBs, obviously their career office is doing a terrific job facing the sort of more challenging circumstances that all business schools are dealing with at this point.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. I mean I know a lot of people on that career team and it is a really well run ship. So I'm not surprised that they got 100% of their students to report because they really care about their students and spend a lot of time with them. So I think that was the number that really jumped out at me. I mean obviously the regular numbers are all pretty good. I mean they held pretty consistent. The other thing that jumped out at me though, and this is, I guess Been true for quite some time, but the Europe number is fairly low. Like, I mean, you know, they send a lot of people into the uk, but they're sending more people to Africa, Middle East, Asia and even North America than they are into a market like Europe. So that's kind of just interesting to me because we often talk about like the decision you make about where to go to school. You know, you got to figure out like, where are you, where do you want to land afterwards? And so, you know, I don't think.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Brexit was good for anything.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: No, clearly not.
[00:12:57] Speaker B: But yeah, and I don't think it was good for LBs, so.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: But in any event, they're obviously still sending people. And I also think some of the strength in the Middle east might be due to the fact that that campus and what is it, is it in, I want to say it's in, is it in Dubai or Abu Dhabi? I get all these.
Every school has a campus there now in somewhere in the Middle east. And I always get them mixed up. But in any event, so they have a footprint there too, which is probably helping. Yeah. Anyway, that's kind of the main kind of news and notes we can get into our candidates. Obviously if you want to reach out to Alex and I write to
[email protected] use the subject line wiretaps. But anything else? Before we talk about this week's candidates, let's kick on. All right, so this is WireTaps candidate number one.
Our first candidate has nine schools on the target list and those schools are Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgia Tech, Michigan, Washington, Foster and UCLA Anderson. Oh, and they also have Yale on the list. So those are the nine. They have been working as a senior IT business analyst before business school and they want to get into tech or maybe consumer goods after business school. So they mentioned a range of companies, you know, Amazon, Apple, even Nike, etc. So still figuring out because this is actually an early bird candidate who's not going to be applying right away. Their GPA in undergrad is a 3.56. They have three years of experience located in Brazil. They are only 23. It's going to be turning 23 this year. So pretty young candidate. They mentioned they're male, Latin American, come from a low income background, they went to a top university in their home country where they had a scholarship, they graduated with a business degree and were pretty active extracurricularly. They were their class representative, they were a guest speaker, did mentoring, won a hackathon, and they speak four different languages in Terms of the work, they started out as a business analyst at a top Fortune 500 company, but they recently pivoted into an IT role to add a technical business perspective. It sounds like within the same firm, they had started as an intern originally at this company, and they rose into this kind of senior role that they're in now in a mere three and a half years. It sounds like their next goal is to, you know, get another promotion, they say, and they'd love to work as a product manager or do product marketing at a tech company, but potentially open to CPG companies as well.
And they just said right now they're really focused on preparing for the gmat, which I guess they say they're going to take in 26, improving their career, and then working on personal projects to boost their profile. So it sounds like they're not probably applying until, I don't know, they don't apply until fall of 26 to start in 27. So this is someone who's pretty far out, Alex. But what do you make of their candidacy?
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Yeah, but honestly, I really like it because again, they're planning ahead and they're asking all the right questions on apply wire to sort of help set them up. So, you know, they realize that the test score is going to be important. So hopefully they've got lots of resources that can allow them to get their best, you know, test score result. Whether I think that's GMAT, could be the gre. But anyway, the point being, yeah, gmat, they can combine that profile with a very strong test score.
And they're also looking at getting engaged in a meaningful social project in terms of. That's how they, they've couched that. I think that's really important, especially if they can identify a meaningful social project about which they're truly passionate. I think that adding that to the dimension rather than just saying, you know what, I'm going to build homes, because that seems a popular thing to do if you're not passionate about building homes for, you know, under. On, you know, people that need, then, then I don't think it works as well. Right. So find something that they're truly passionate about that they can contribute and have a good level of impact on the social side. They continue on with their nice, you know, work experience, trajectory, et cetera. I think we have a very strong catalog. Graham.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. I mean, this is, we love, we say this over and over, but we love the early birds because they just seem, you know, like they have extra time to get every. To kind of get their ducks in a row.
I would say, you know, the GMAT is really a big factor here because their GPA is great, as you say, good activities, good work experience and they're bolstering all that stuff. But I really want to.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: And they've come far.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: So that's important.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that getting a decent score on the GMAT and it doesn't have to be out of the ballpark, but something that is near the averages or at the averages of the schools they're targeting would be important. And clearly the extent to which they excel on the test may shape the ultimate target score school list. Because right now they have nine schools on the list. They're probably not going to apply to all of them and they have a wide range of admissions difficulty on that list. So depending on how that test turns out, I think they might shape their targets accordingly. But yeah, there's a lot to like in this candidacy.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: All right, let's, let's move on and talk about WireTaps. Candidate number two.
So our second candidate this week has five schools on the target list and they're looking at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Wharton and Yale. This person's been working in law in the legal field. They're a restructuring associate. They're looking to pivot though. They want to get into consulting or investment banking, private equity. I mean they have a bunch of stuff listed here. But I think it's because basically they want to take their legal expertise and apply it on the kind of finance side. But sometimes that can be in a consulting role or maybe directly in a banking role. So they're still figuring that out. They have a 334 on the GRE which is a very high score. 3.5 GPA as an undergrad, 4 years of work experience. They are located in London and are looking to head to the USA or I guess stay in the USA after business school since they're going to attend business school in the US it looks like they mentioned that during undergrad they'd done a summer internship with Citibank and they had a return offer. They also worked at Morgan Stanley for a summer as well, again with a return offer. But they decided to do something different and get into the legal field. They were the president of the world's largest in person student investment Conference. I guess that was it. It looks like they maybe went to LSE because they say the LSE Alternative Investment Conference and I presume that's London School of Economics. They also do things like they're a Chess coach. They were president of an animal charity and they think that their angle for business school, as I said earlier, is to combine law and finance experience into this sort of coherent story and explain this transition purely over to the business side. But they say that they haven't 100% decided yet and I guess they're not applying now. They're probably applying in the fall, but they didn't specify. So what's your take here, Alex?
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Another outstanding candidate. I think maybe a little bit more developed than our first candidate at this point because obviously they've got that outstanding test score. Score right. To supplement, complement the, the remainder of their profile.
And yeah, I, I think if they tighten up their goal focus a little bit, I, you know, or maybe that's just a question of articulating it more effectively. Maybe in their mind they've got a really good, concrete, well developed plan for post MBA that would be good, maybe understanding a little bit more about their, their activities outside of work and just making sure it's very clear that their work experience, there's impact and growth there. But I've got to imagine that they're doing very well at work that'll be supported by strong wrecks and so forth. So, so yeah, a lot to like about this candidate. I love the fact that, you know, they, they teach chess or whatever that is. They've, they've organized one of the biggest conferences at LSE and so forth, yet they've got time for an animal welfare charity. So I like that sort of, you know, spectrum of sort of interests and hopefully again that's sort of continuing on now as they're working.
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. I think I'm going to go out on limb and guess that that 3.5 GPA is really a second class honors at LSE. And if that's the case, we have a London based, you know, kind of candidate who went to a great undergraduate institution, did well, great test score, interesting kind of legal work and not as common. And we know US schools love candidates from the UK and Europe more generally. It's not the biggest group that applies and so somewhat underrepresented potentially. So there's a lot to like here. I think they do need to flesh out their goals. Like they need to come into the admissions process with a specific plan, whether that's acquisitions consulting at a big consulting firm or actually doing acquisitions and restructuring at a bank or something, you know, so they need to really know what they want to do. But they can flesh that out in their essays and get to it. But yeah, I'M assuming again, they're probably applying. I mean, it's possible they're applying now or in round three this year, but they also might be there around one next year. But either way, pretty good candidate overall.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah, very good.
[00:22:29] Speaker A: All right, I want to thank them for submitting those details. Let's move on and talk about wiretaps. Candidate number three.
So our final candidate today comes from a decision wire entry that you've selected, Alex. And it's pretty straightforward. I mean, not the decision, but the kind of storyline is this person applied to Booth, Harvard, Kellogg, Stanford and Wharton. So they applied to a bunch of top schools and they came away with two offers. One is at Chicago Booth with $100,000 scholarship, and the other is at Kellogg with $110,000 scholarship. So they got into both Chicago schools with some big money. They're going to start school in the fall. They want to work in consulting, maybe entrepreneurship. Down the road. They're obviously looking, they say to target Bain, BCG or McKinsey. They did really well on the GMAT 735 that's on the Focus edition, so that's a very high score. 3.9 undergrad, GPA. They're from the west coast and they say that they are really struggling with this decision. After attending both admit days, everyone keeps saying you can't go wrong, but they see the merit to both schools. They just can't decide. They like the quantitative rigor and the maybe slightly better consulting or entrepreneurship access given from Booth, they're saying, because Booth is kind of more downtown, etc. In Chicago. But then they say Kellogg, though, is basically equivalent on their areas of interest, like consulting. And they also like the campus, the building better. And they're interested in improving software soft skills with the collaborative environment. So they felt they had slightly better connections with the current students and fellow admits there. So, Alex, what should they do?
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, quite honestly, I do think this is a case of wherever they go, it's going to be a great decision.
And they won't look back and wonder which is sometimes, you know, Elliot's good at this. He'll say, what's the regret in the decision? There'd be no regret wherever they choose to go. These are both top M7 programs. They're in the same tier, obviously they're in the same city or in the same geographic area and so forth.
And I think, you know, it sounds like from what they're articulating that personally they would prefer to go to Kellogg. And I think if that's the case, I think Kellogg is obviously a great decision for them. They're a little bit leaning on the side that they respect the rigor of boot and quite like that. But I do think if they want rigor, they can get it at Kellogg. But perhaps some of the decision might be based on what is their own profile and background. If they're coming from, let's say, a completely sort of liberal arts background and experience and whatever, and they really feel that the analytics rigor of Booth will set them up better then maybe. But if they're coming from a more traditional pre MBA background, I think they just go wherever their heart wants them to go. And I think it's Kellogg.
[00:25:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I could not agree more. Like, I was thinking that. Exactly. I'm like, well, what have they done pre business school? Because we don't know that they didn't share that. So it's sort of like if they're coming from a background or feel that their undergrad experience was fairly quantitative, then they probably would be fine going to Kellogg. You know, I mean, I. And also, as you say, I mean, it's not like Kellogg is not rigorous. I mean, that's kind joke here is that some of these schools get stereotyped. And because I think Kellogg is stereotyped as being sort of marketing and teamwork and leadership, and Booth may be more on the kind of numbers side of things, it sort of gets pulled to these extremes. I mean, both of these programs have excellent leadership development, excellent, you know, marketing departments, excellent finance departments. So I think if they felt a better fit at Kellogg with the people they met and their experience at the welcome event, that's kind of very. Yeah, that's very telling to me. So. Yeah. And as you say, no wrong answer. And I know people hate to hear that, but there is no wrong answer here. But I. I do feel like what they've said, I'm kind of hearing Kellogg from that.
[00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Very good.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: Yeah. All right, so thanks for picking these out. Want to wish them the best of luck wherever they land and. Yeah, let's do it all again next week, if you're willing, Alex.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Very good. Stay safe, everyone. This is our shortest show in history, I think. Very good.
