Episode Transcript
[00:00:16] Speaker A: Welcome to the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. I'm Graham Richmond, and this is your Wiretaps for Monday, April 13, 2026. I'm joined by Alex Brown from Cornwall, England. How are things, Alex?
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Very good, thank you, Graham.
[00:00:29] Speaker A: So are we close to, like, wildflower sightings in Cornwall? I know that region of the UK is famous for that. Or is where we have another month or something.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's beautiful this time of year in Cornwall. Spring is coming, and I love. Spring is for sure the best time of the year for me. Yeah, absolutely. Fantastic.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Excellent. All right, well, this week we've got a great show. We're gonna talk about the 2026 NBA rankings from U.S. news and World Report. I know you love to talk about rankings, so we'll get into that. We also have real humans, alumni profiles from folks working at Carney, Amazon, and a coffee startup, not to mention our usual group of candidates to discuss. So first up, though, Alex, is there anything going on right now? Are there deadlines?
I know it's kind of welcome weekend season, but is there still some round three deadlines available to people?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah, there's plenty of deadlines this upcoming week. Broadcast, Yale, Marshall, Stern, Kelly, Washington Olin, and Marilyn Smith all have deadlines amongst the schools that we cover. And decisions are still rolling out with Marshall and Washington Olin releasing decisions this upcoming week and interview invites coming out for round, you know, for this round three. So Wharton Fuqua and LBs are scheduled to release, and we should expect to see, you know, programs like Harvard. Either they released last week and it's, you know, and we recorded a little bit earlier in the week or, or, or, or this upcoming week because.
Well, actually, no, I shouldn't talk about Harvard because it didn't have a round three deadline. Sorry about that.
[00:02:06] Speaker A: Oh, that's right.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have their. Their deferred deadline.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: But not round three. But my point is the likes of Booth and, and, and. And Ross and so on and so forth, that release, interview invites in publish when they're happening, I imagine they will have happened or will happen imminently after the show airs.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah. So still lots to come, I guess. One thing I wanted to mention is, again, we're doing our big. We have a bunch of events in May to look forward to. Right. So we have our May 11th MBA fair in Atlanta. I think there are like 27 schools joining us, and it's going to be a blast. You can just go to clearadmit.com events if you want to sign up for that. And we also have a bunch of virtual events, events in May. And I was looking at the list for that and I'm really excited. We've got Berkeley, Wharton, Chicago, Booth, mit, Yale, Columbia, Duke, nyu, many more schools joining us for those events. And those are in late May and those are again, Virtual noon Eastern, May 19, 20, 26 and 27. So, yeah, head over to the website and sign up. I'm hoping to maybe meet some of our listeners in Atlanta if they come to the fair that we're doing. As we said last week, it's so rare to have all these schools in one place. And I've also been hearing from the schools that are that a lot of them have alumni that are going to join us as well. So that'll be kind of cool, too, to just, you know, have I love it when you get, you know, a school rep and a couple of alums at a table talking to prospective candidates. It's such a great opportunity for perspectives to, you know, just learn about a program and stuff. So cannot wait for all that next month.
Alex, we want to talk about the U.S. news rankings this week. So they came out last week and, you know, I mean, the big news, I guess, that you see in the headlines is that Steve Stanford is back in the number one spot.
Wharton was up at the top last year, if memory serves, maybe tied with Stanford, but in any event, Stanford is alone at the top this year.
The top of this ranking is pretty familiar. You've got Stanford and Wharton and Booth Kellogg, HBS, etc. There's not a lot of movement, but there are some interesting things happening. I just wondered, just a starting point here, what was your first reaction when you saw these rankings?
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Well, I like to see Stanford at the top, actually.
Just, just I'm actually doing some work for Stanford right now. So I imagine that's exactly why they now rank number one in U.S. news MBA rankings. But, but, you know, to me, clearly Stanford and Harvard are the top two programs and Wharton just behind them.
You know, we've studied this lots of years, how people make decisions, et cetera, et cetera. So it's unequivocal that they're top three programs. So a ranking needs to include, you know, at least two of those three in the top two, which they do here with US News, Stanford and Wharton leading the way.
Wharton was number one last year on its own, but is number two this year, Stanford going up. It does puzzle me why US News no longer likes Harvard. I mean, over the last, you know, three or Four years. They've sort of bounced between fourth, sixth, fifth, whatever it might be, which to me is ridiculous.
Harvard is clearly should be right up at the top with those other two schools. But that said, if you look at the sort of the top 16 that they list on the US news, those are the top 16 programs in the United States, in my mind. And again, I don't think they've got the order correct, completely correct, or the tiering. We're much more focused on tiers.
And as we talked about before we came on the show, I think you noted that Stern is in the top 10. Yeah, I'm just checking that now, if you're correct.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Yeah. You know what? Why don't I do this while people are. While you're looking around? What I'm going to do is let me read out the top 10, just because I should have done that at the top here. But as we said, Stanford's number one alone.
Then we have Panet to Wharton. Number three is Chicago. Booth. There's a tie at four with Kellogg and Harvard.
And then number six is mit.
Number seven in a tie are New York University, Stern and Columbia. And then number nine is Tuck, and number 10 is Berkeley, Haas.
So that's kind of the top 10. And I guess I can give the 16. Right. We've got Yale after that at 11, tied with Darden Ross at 13, Duke at 14, Cornell at 15. And then there's a tie at 16 between Carnegie Mellon and Vanderbilt. Owen. So that's kind of the top 16.
But yeah, you were going to say something about how Stern is. Yeah, Stern's at number seven, tied with Columbia, which is a really impressive showing. And they've done well in this ranking over the last few years. They were six last year, seven year before that. Right. So pretty good.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, I think Stern benefits from being in New York City, of course, so there's a bias there because that's the leading, you know, business capital of the United States. Right. So it's in their back garden. Now, where would we ordinarily think of? Stern is probably just outside the top 10, but nevertheless their seventh, tied with Columbia. I mean, obviously Colombia. We typically think of Colombia in a tier above Stern and so forth.
The other thing, and I neglected to mention is obviously UCLA Anderson is not in that top 16. I said the top 16 looks correct, but yeah, I would put Anderson at the edge of that top 16 and so forth. And in this ranking, as you. As you pointed out, Tepper and Owen are tied for that spot. That's A really good result for Owen, by the way. Yeah.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Congratulations.
[00:08:14] Speaker B: So congratulations to Owen, who were a sponsor of this.
[00:08:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's right. Yeah.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: So it's nice. I don't think that current sponsor, but it's really good that they've. They've managed to perform really well, and they've done a nice, steady climb up the U.S. news rankings. Right. They've gone from, you know, you know, in the 20s or whatever. So. So to gradually climb, that's. I think that's better than shifting quickly, because if you shift quickly, you can shift out probably just as quickly. Yeah, but. But, yeah, overall, I think, you know, if you look at the schools that they have listed in this 25, these are the, you know, the top 25. Just some of the order is a little bit questionable.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah. And I wanted to call out a couple of, you know, big winners and some folks that have lost ground. Right. So we could see, you know, UNC moved up quite a bit. I just was looking for the exact kind of movement here, but I believe they went from 28 to 21. So nice jump we don't see. You know, that's a nice.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: Nice jump there, but they should be at 21 plus.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: Right. So why were they at 28 is the bigger question.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. And then the other school that's been kind of making waves and, you know, we kind of see moving up is University of Texas at Dallas Jindal. They were 31 last year, and they're 23rd this year. And this is not the first time I've seen them on one of these lists. So they're clearly making waves and, you know, trying to move themselves into that top 25 bracket.
We did unfortunately see some declines over at Emory and Georgetown. I guess emory had been 17, and they fell to 23rd. McDonough. I don't have it here in front of me, but they fell out of the top 25. I want to say they're around 31 now, and they were higher up last
[00:10:02] Speaker B: year, and they are higher up than that. That's ridiculous, by the way.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah. So there's some strange movement sometimes that you see. I think rankings amplify small statistical changes into, like, big headline moves. Right. So, I don't know. I guess one thing I was going to ask you is, like, do you think applicants overreact to some of these small movements? Like, do you think that there are people out there saying, oh, I shouldn't apply here now, or, I've got to apply here now? Like, oh, look, Stern's number Seven got to apply there now they're on my list. And Yale fell out of the top 10. They've moved from 10 to 11. Do these things have too much of an impact on the candidate? Poor. Do you think applicants are smarter than that?
[00:10:42] Speaker B: I think applicants are a bit smarter than that, but I think it's applicants that are first looking at their MBA journey and starting to come up with that first set of schools to explore. I think that's when the rankings have most significant influence. But obviously when you're applying to business school, it's not a purchase decision you make in a couple of hours or in a day. It's a. It's a three or four or five month journey before you actually apply. And I think through that time in that research, you get to recognize that actually any sort of movement in a ranking is probably not that significant in the grand scheme of things. And I'll just add to a point of Texas, Dallas maybe.
We're seeing a bit of positive movement across Texas based programs, the leading Texas based programs. Why is that? Because I think the business landscape in Texas relative to other states in the United States is probably on a positive trajectory and so forth. So that might have an influence there.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And I did a podcast like several episodes ago with the dean at SMU Cox, and hearing him talk about Dallas and Yall street and all the things happening there. I definitely think you're right, seeing some geographical kind of influence taking place with some of these. Yeah. And I would say to your earlier point, yeah, I agree. What we see on Decision Wire is that applicants don't just follow rankings blindly. They're comparing. They look at things, I think, in a tiered way, as we often suggest. And they're comparing fit and geography and career goals, not just rank order.
Yeah. And that's good, right? I think rankings are fun, they generate headlines, but they're certainly, you know, not like the final decision driver as we see. We'll get into a bunch of candidates this week who have decisions to make and it's not purely rankings driven as we'll get into with some of these candidates that you picked for this week. But anything else on the rankings though?
[00:12:49] Speaker B: No, I think that's a good. A good survey overview of.
Yeah, very good.
[00:12:55] Speaker A: So obviously alongside FT US News is one of the big rankings that we look at, obviously American schools only. I don't know why. They could probably get a few more clicks if they just made us ranking for international programs as well. But they haven't done that for some reason. So I Guess it's the name of the publication that maybe is costing that.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: But anyway, U.S. news.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. So I want to talk a little bit about some candidates, sorry, some graduates of business schools. So we have Eddie Obi, who is a Vanderbilt Owen grad from the class of 24. This is part of our Real Human series and she is a senior, senior vendor manager at Amazon. She's 31, originally from Lagos, Nigeria and had studied pharmacy as an undergrad and then went on to work in the pharmaceutical industry doing kind of regulatory affairs.
Had I think four years total of experience before going to Owen where she focused on strategy and operations and analytics. In terms of her studies, she's been at Amazon for a couple of years now and we asked her if she had any advice that she wished she'd been given during her MBA and she said this is good, I think it's a really good piece of advice. She said, I wish someone had told me to prioritize joining clubs and engaging in extracurriculars, even when the pressure of recruiting makes it tempting to step back. The MBA is a once in a lifetime opportunity to network and the clubs and activities are where much of that networking happens organically. The relationships built in those spaces often prove more enduring than those formed in formal recruiting settings. So good advice. I mean obviously she landed on her feet at Amazon, but I guess she's just wanting to make sure people know to spend time in those clubs and there are a lot of them. Right. You remember that at Wharton. I mean there's so many clubs and conferences and all these things happening.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I think club activity is a huge part of the whole MBA experience. It's also where you will tend to meet folks with like minded aspirations and like minded sort of passions and interests. Otherwise why would they have joined that club? Right, so, so I think from that perspective you get that alignment and you've got a vehicle to really hang out with folks that are quite similar in their interests and so forth. So yeah, it's got to be a very good thing.
[00:15:22] Speaker A: Yeah.
So anyway, I want to thank, obviously, you know, I love all these alums who take part in this series but you know, such great advice. I want to now turn to Mercedes. She's 29 from Valencia, Spain and she did her MBA at ESE.
She's now an associate at Kearney doing consulting. She was an industrial engineering major in college.
She went to Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain and she also I guess had a Master's in finance before going to esa. So a lot of different Skill sets merging there. She had worked at Deloitte prior to business school, but also at Amazon. So she had a couple of really big time employers on her resume. But she still decided to head off to business school. And she's been with Carney now for I guess not quite a year at this point. And we asked her what's one thing you would absolutely do again as part of the job search? And she says, I would focus very early on securing a strong internship as it is ultimately the first and most important step toward landing a full time internship post MBA role. I would prioritize understanding the recruiting timelines, preparing properly and being intentional about that first opportunity. The internship is not just a summer experience. It often defines your post MBA trajectory. So I would center my energy on that from the beginning.
And then we also asked her is there anything she would change or do differently as part of her job search? And she said I would probably start reflecting even earlier on what I truly wanted to do long term rather than focusing initially on what seemed like the natural next step based on my background. The MBA is a unique opportunity to explore and I would encourage future students to take more time upfront for that self reflection. So what do you think of those comments from Mercedes, who's now in strategy consulting at Carney?
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Did she say where she did her internship?
[00:17:12] Speaker A: You know what, I bet she did, but I don't, I don't have it here in my notes, but I'm sure the article will definitely have that information in it.
[00:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean my point is, I mean she's obviously making a really strong point in terms of. And I think it probably matters more if you're pivoting careers and so on and so forth, but that wherever you do that internship is going to have a huge influence on your trajectory in that second year coming back and your career placement post mba.
And we talk about this a lot, right? The value of the two year mba.
A big piece of that value is that internal internship experience that you have between those two years.
So it's really important. Yeah.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: And I just went and dug it up. So she did two internships during her mba. The first was in strategy consulting at Kearney where she landed. So hence she knows that that's an important step if you want. And then she also did a second internship. Some of these schools provide like a second window and she did her second one in venture capital at Big Sur Ventures. So yeah. So she had a couple of different experiences.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: I love these articles and I really cannot. I know you listen to A podcast you're not going to run to our website right now, but definitely read these real humans. They're fascinating. Just to see how people got their jobs, how they got the most out of business school, and obviously what kind of advice they have.
Before we move on to our candidates, there's one more that I wanted to profile, and it's this guy named Samuel who went to Texas McCombs. He graduated in 25, and unlike most of the alums that we profile, this guy started his own company.
And the company is called Cold Cycle Coffee. He just recently launched it while he was in the MBA program.
He's 35. He's actually originally from Austin, Texas, which is kind of funny. A lot of people who go to UT Austin are not from there, so this is kind of a cool thing. He went to Rice for undergrad, was a mechanical engineer. He had a lot of different experiences before business school, most notably as an engineer at Samsung and a bunch of other kind of technical jobs. But he's been running Cold Cycle Coffee now for two years, he says. So I'm guessing he started it while in business school. And he had. It's kind of a long interview with him on the site and I saw he was posting on LinkedIn about being featured on ClearAdmit. But this I thought was really interesting. We asked him, were there any surprises regarding your current employer's recruiting process? And obviously in his case, his current employer is himself. But he talked about something really interesting in response to this question. He said, the biggest surprise in starting your own company is when you remember where you were the month before.
Growing rapidly. I've been dreaming two to three months in advance and sometimes disappointed when I'm not exactly where I wanted to be. But looking two to three months backwards more often reminds me that I'm making progress that I've been working for. So I thought that was a great idea. I mean, maybe it's resonating with me as an entrepreneur, but this idea that you're always looking forward to trying to get to the next milestone, but sometimes when you look in the rear view, you realize how far you've come. And I thought that was such a great point that he made.
[00:20:15] Speaker B: I think he's brilliant. Yeah, yeah. And, yeah, reflect. Having a bit of time for reflection and seeing that progress is a great way then to look forward and saying, all right, what's the next milestone? As you said, and so on and so forth. But yeah, taking that time, reflecting and showing that and.
And that progress, then obviously along the way, what you've learned even if some of the progress hasn't been a straight line up. Right.
So as we know in the entrepreneurial world, things can go zigzaggy all over the place until you actually hit the rhythm of where, you know, more of a steady state. So. Yeah, no, Very good. Do you know what this cold cycle coffee business is? I mean, I know it's related to. To coffee, but I'm quite curious.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: So it's actually pretty fascinating. So you know that there's been this whole trend towards what we call cold brew. So especially, you know, people drinking iced coffee basically. And essentially they've made a machine.
It's a coffee machine. Right. That has a patented technology and can brew up to 2 gallons of cold brew in just 30 minutes. So it's kind of, I think it's, you know, they're probably selling this to coffee shops is my guess.
Or, you know, because I don't need, you know, I don't know who needs 2 gallons in their home necessarily. But it's. Yeah. So there's something, it's a tech, it's a tech innovation within the kind of brewing space with.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Have you drunk a cold coffee except a coffee that you forgot about and came back and drank?
[00:21:42] Speaker A: I have had a nice coffee, but. Yeah, but it's not, you know, I think these are better when like this whole cold brew stuff is supposed to be much better. But I've never. Yeah, I'm not a big coffee. I'm more of a tea person, you know, but I haven't.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:55] Speaker A: Anyway.
Yeah, so check out cold cycle coffee. But anyway, they have really, really cool to hear these stories about alums who are out there.
Obviously if you want to write to Alex and I and you know, complain about the show or send your accolades, just write to infoearadmit.com and use the subject line wiretaps. Other than that, Alex, we got three decision wire dilemmas to work through today. So are you ready to talk about those?
[00:22:18] Speaker B: Let's kick on.
[00:22:19] Speaker A: All right, so this is wiretaps candidate number one.
So our first candidate. These are all decision wire entries this week that we're pulling from. And so this person applied to Indiana Kelley, UCLA, UT Austin and Washington Foster. And it looks like they ran the table. They ended up with $70,000 in scholarship from Indiana Kelley. They didn't get any scholarship from ucla but they were accepted. And then they say that they've got about. It looks like maybe 40k from Foster and 40k from McCombs. I'm a little confused here because Some of the calculations are per year and some are. Looks like total. But anyway they're. They've gotten into all their schools and what they tell us is that they're. They have a project management background in the tech industry, but they've also worked in healthcare and public safety. They're dream school was UCLA to break into the entertainment and media industry but they didn't get any scholarship there and that feels impossible. They said goal post grad is marketing and tech, but they're open to other industries and they're wondering is it crazy to go to McCombs with 40k per year over say Foster or Kelly with about 15 to 20k a year? So what do you think of this, Alex?
[00:23:34] Speaker B: I mean, again, it's a little bit of a puzzle looking at the math of their different scholarships, but their dream school is Anderson. So on one level you'd say all right, you need to take out some loans to make this work and go to Anderson. And Anderson will provide them more access to their opportunities. Despite what U.S. news ranks them as, in my mind they're in a tier above certainly maybe one tier above the schools that this has opportunities. And McCombs actually we do see quite a lot of cross applications with McCombs and Anderson.
So McCombs I would say is probably the next, you know, the. In the next tier. And then I'd put Kelly and Foster in. In the following tier. In terms of how I would think about them overall. I mean, Cali is still a very, very good program as, as well as Foster but. But slightly behind I would say McCombs. But what sort of muddies the decision a little bit is their geographic goals in the long run. They want to be in Washington.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Yes. I didn't say that. Yeah, they're from, I think they're from there originally. Right. So they said.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: And they want to be back there. So to me that really elevates Foster to the fore. They say they don't. They wouldn't mind an MBA experience in Texas but you know, is that the smartest thing to do if you want to develop your career in Texas? I think if they wanted to be in Texas in the short and in the longer term, I think McCombs would obviously be a great option for them.
But simply because that doesn't seem to be the case, I would argue that it's either Anderson or Foster.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah, this is tricky. And by the way, I didn't share but they had a 3.19 on the GRE and a 3.7 GPA just in case people are curious what it takes to get into some of these programs. But I think it is interesting in that, yeah, Anderson is clearly the sort of top ranked program they got into, but there's no money.
I don't know if they've tried to ask about whether they could get any money there. What I'm kind of not connecting the dots on with them is they're like, I'm interested in, I wanted to go to UCLA to break into entertainment media. And then they're like, my post grad goal is marketing and tech. So I was thinking, well, okay, if it's marketing at Netflix or at a tech company that's in also media entertainment, okay. But I was a little confused about that. So I do wonder if they really want to be in media and entertainment, then UCLA is hard to beat and being in la.
And you're right, they talked about wanting to land ultimately in Washington State, where they're from, or potentially California. So that elevates both Foster and UCLA in the mix here. McCombs is a fantastic school and I think if they were just saying they want to work in marketing and tech, taking that nice scholarship from McCombs would make a lot of sense. But yeah, the fact that they're saying they don't want to live in Texas and in fact I think they said their short term, five year kind of plan is to live either in California or New York City and then in the long term Washington State or maybe California. So yeah, that's where these things are tricky.
But yeah, Foster with that scholarship, which they're not really clear about exactly how much scholarship it is, but it looks like it's 15 to 20 per year.
15 to 20,000 per year. Foster's looking pretty attractive, especially if they're going to settle in the Seattle area or something.
So yeah, tricky, but hopefully they'll figure it out. I don't know if we've muddied the waters or helped them with this discussion.
[00:27:15] Speaker B: We've certainly not given them any concrete advice, but that's the nature of the show.
[00:27:20] Speaker A: All right, well, I want to thank them for sharing their profile. Let's move on and talk about wiretaps. Candidate number two.
So our second candidate this week, again, a decision wire candidate who applied to business school with a 73% GPA. They're from Accra in Ghana. So that's 73 out of 100, you know, which is the way the grading system works there. They did not take a test. They applied to Cornell, Emory, Indiana, Michigan, Stern, unc, Darden, And Vanderbilt, and they got into several schools. They got into emory with an $85,000 scholarship. They got into Indiana, Kelley offering them 50,000, Darden with no dollars, and then Vanderbilt, Owen, which has offered them $112,000. I believe that's after a little bit of negotiation.
This person wants to work in investment banking, and they say Darden was my top choice and I got accepted from the wait list. But without scholarship, it's difficult to justify the price now that I have an increased scholarship from Owen and possibly from Emory as well. So it sounds like they're trying to negotiate that 85k that they already have at Emory upwards. They said they're leaning towards Emory given that they have good placement for investment banking, even though it's not at the level of Darden. And they also did point out to us that as an international student, you know, they want to get their F1 visa and they're worried about scholarship. And does scholarship help in that? And so there's a number of factors here. But what do you think they should do, Alex?
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Yeah, to me, it's a decision between Darden and Emory.
And again, I recognize that U.S. news has put Vanderbilt, Owen above Emory in the rankings. But changes in rankings in one year doesn't suddenly make a program more attractive. It's going to be about what each of these programs can provide to the careers and the opportunities the candidates are seeking. And I certainly think that Emory provides a little bit more access to investment banking at this stage than Owen.
Than Owen. Does it be great if I could get corrected on that? But I think that is definitely the case, much as Darden provides more access to investment banking than Emory.
So that is the challenge. Right. Darden would be the best opportunity. It would provide them more access to New York City, more access to the larger bulge bracket banks, etc. Etc. Whereas Amory is probably going to give them more access regionally in the Atlanta area, sort of middle market banks and so on and so forth.
So if they could make Darden work in the long run, it might actually pay off.
But I recognize, especially as international students, the importance of scholarship. So Emory will provide them access to investment banking and they'll get a great scholarship. And as you point out, in terms of the VISA interview, maybe it helps with the VISA process to show the amount of money that the school is providing you and so forth. So I would say again, you could create a strong argument for either of these, for these two programs. But in my mind, I think Amory probably fits this candidate best.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Yeah, hard to ignore pretty substantial scholarship. And as you point out, one of the things you have to demonstrate in that Visa interview is your ability to pay. And so if for some reason, and sometimes it can be challenging to get loans when you're international.
In any event, I think it is tricky because Darden obviously very, very good with invest investment banking placement, but Emory's up and coming in this domain. And we had some nice comments on this post from a number of people in the community, including one of our favorite posters.
And I think it does seem like Emory will place folks into Atlanta and then New York City. And so, yeah, I think it's possible. So if they're not comfortable taking on all that debt and feel like the fastest path to the state of via Emory, then that's probably a good choice for them.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: I absolutely agree. Yeah.
[00:31:38] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. I want to thank them for sharing their profile and their kind of decisions. Let's move on and talk about wiretaps. Candidate number three.
So our final candidate today, again, a decision, wire entry. This person applied to just two schools.
They were Chicago Booth and NYU Stern. They have a GMAT score of 7, 705 located in Brazil, and they can't decide. And they told us that, you know, they got admitted to both of these programs, and they're struggling with this final decision because they said they're a Latin American international student. They've got five years of experience in finance as a financial advisor, but no investment banking background. And that's their goal, is to pivot into investment banking in New York City after business school. And they were kind of curious if we had any thoughts.
And, you know, this is interesting because, Alex, you know, you could argue that both Booth and Stern are really good schools for finance.
Both place ample numbers of grads into, you know, banking jobs.
And, you know, but Stern's in New York, right? And Booth is in Chicago, and this person wants to be in New York. Like, what do you make of this? It's an interesting dilemma.
[00:32:47] Speaker B: Yeah. I think this one is really difficult to decide in the long run. I think Booth, you know, with its reputation, and obviously it's renowned for its finance, just as Stern is. But in the long run, Booth might be the best option, especially coming back to Latin America.
I would look at the alumni networks of both of these programs to see how well developed they are in that particular region as a potential variable to make that final decision.
They're pivoting into investment banking. So what does that really mean? Does it mean that actually Stern would provide them the best Opportunity to maybe do more intense networking directly into New York City as they're navigating their MBA program.
But then you've got to think about the cost of. Of living in New York City is probably going to be higher than Chicago. So when they're in Chicago, they could spend more money on jet airplanes to get to New York or whatever it might be.
I don't think there's an obvious answer here, but you've got to respect Booth in terms of being M7 and so on and so forth. And I think Booth tilts if you can think long run, but in the more intermediate short run, it's hard to beat being in New York City if you want to pivot into investment banking.
[00:34:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And our commenter that always comments on these decision Wire posts, this anonymous poster that we've had for years, I want to read what they wrote because I think it's perfect. They said that they agree that basically personal preference on program.
If your goal is investment banking in New York City, then these are both great programs. It comes down to some extent to personal preference.
They then went on to say Booth places two thirds of their investment bankers into New York City.
Also said you could attempt to negotiate something from Stern. Given the Booth offer and the higher overall cost of attendance for Stern as an international, you may have to go the investment banking route for sponsorship anyway, but Booth would have more finance career optionality and historically has had better prestige in Latin America. That was what our anonymous poster shared, and I thought that was pretty good.
I think what they're trying to say is if you want to work in private equity or other kind of finance fields, that Booth will have an edge. And again, maybe that network in Latin America comes into play too.
So, yeah, it's an interesting dilemma, for sure.
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I completely agree. We can't decide this one either.
[00:35:28] Speaker A: It's terrible.
In any event, thanks for picking these out, Alex. That brings us to the end of this episode, but we'll record another one next week. So stay tuned everybody, and please remember to rate and review the show wherever you listen.
[00:35:41] Speaker B: Very good. Stay safe, everyone. Take care,
[00:35:51] Speaker A: Sam.
