Queen's B-School: Handpicked Team Players

MBA Director Scott Carson explains recent changes at the No. 1-ranked Canadian program, and why it's looking for team players

Scott Carson
Queen's University

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Queen's University, located in picturesque Kingston, Ontario, became the first in Canada to offer a business degree in 1919. By 1963, the Queen's School of Business (Queen's Full-Time MBA Profile) was its own entity. Today, Queen's offers an undergraduate BBA, a one-year full-time MBA, and an executive MBA. In 2008, Queen's ranked first among BusinessWeek's top international business schools.

But what crowns Queen's as business school royalty is its student body, according to MBA Director Scott Carson. For almost two years, Carson has watched the students he helped handpick come into the program as strangers and watch them leave as dear friends. Carson's favorite story about Queen's camaraderie has to do with a student who, after competing in an on-campus case competition, lost track of his dress pants on his way to his car. Nobody had seen the pants, and the student gave up his search. Two days later after a particularly heavy snowfall, a fellow student tripped in the snow—over a pair of frozen pants. She had heard of a pants-less colleague, so she sent them to the dry-cleaner and express-mailed the pants to the student's home in Montreal. "Most people would think, 'What MBA students would ever do that?' But that's fairly characteristic of how students are treated here," Carson says.

In an interview with BusinessWeek's Mandy Oaklander, Carson reveals what Queen's is changing to increase its presence in the business world, what it isn't changing to get its graduates jobs, and what both mean for Queen's students. An edited portion of the conversation follows.

What do you look for in an applicant?

Our program is really quite unique. We're very team-based, so for the first two-thirds of the program, the students are placed in teams of six or seven, and half of all of their work and grades are team-based. We have a group of human resource professionals who act as team facilitators, so the facilitator can be called upon to help the team work through any issues that arise. We do not allow any movement out of the team; to leave the team is to leave the program. All of the team members have to function together and resolve problems together. So the number one thing we look for in prospective students is their ability to function in a team environment. We try to recruit students and generate graduates who aren't the stereotypical image of an MBA student—the kind who think it's all about them and who want to be the CEO the third week on the job. It's very much about "us" and the team. We are very conscious in the admissions process of who is going to work well in that kind of environment.

How many applications did you receive this year?

We do them in stages. This year we had roughly 5,000 inquiries about the program, and I'm not sure about the final number of completed applications—about several hundred. We're expanding the program from 75 students to about 115. It's a very small program, but it's very elite. We're very particular in our selection process. We'd have students with a GMAT of 780 who assume they're going to be admitted, and we won't admit them if we don't feel they're a good fit.

Why are you expanding the program?

We think that there are certain strategic advantages to being just a little bit larger: the ability to attract more recruiters to the school, to provide a larger audience, to obtain more outside speakers, to expand our footprint, and to generate more graduates. We feel that [at this new size] we can continue to provide a significant face-to-face personalized experience for the students. We wouldn't want to get any larger than 115.

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