Vanderbilt: A Small School with Big Ambitions

Admissions director John Roeder describes what Owen has to offer and what it's doing to connect graduates and employers

John Roeder
Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management

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John Roeder has been part of the admissions team at Vanderbilt's Owen School Management (Owen Full-Time MBA Profile) since 2003—meaning he's witnessed roughly one-sixth of the program's lifetime.

Founded in 1969, Owen is much younger than most top schools. Still, it has progressed rapidly, rising from humble beginnings to BusinessWeek's top 30 ranking in just a few decades. These days, it shows no signs of stopping. In the few years after Roeder arrived, Owen has seen a jump in selectivity, and the introduction of a health-care MBA that boasts former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as a teacher. That's not to say the small Southern business school doesn't have its work cut out for it, though, especially as it stares down a cut-throat job market and a crisis on Wall Street—a favorite Vanderbilt job destination.

In a conversation with BusinessWeek's Anne VanderMey, Roeder talks about the enduring value of an Owen MBA and life in Nashville, and offers a few tips about getting in. An edited portion of their conversation follows.

When you started as Owen's admissions director three years ago, you were pretty pro-active about adding ways for prospective students to virtually connect with the campus—online chats and that sort of thing. How has that push been going and what's come out of it?

Actually, on the admissions side, we have backed off from doing anything along the lines of online outreach and blogs. Our students kind of ran with that and took it on their own. There's a club here at Owen called the Owen Bloggers. It's a site that the students have created where they talk about their experiences here at Owen on a regular basis, about classes, about life in Nashville, about whatever it may be. This is absolutely outside the sphere of influence of admissions or the administration. They're free to do what they want and say what they want. It's a real honest picture into the life of an MBA student as they go through the program. There are alums that are actually on there blogging as well.

So, there's really no use in having the admissions version of that, the one that we've edited, which many schools have out there. I think as a prospective student you can tell if those sorts of things are being edited or policed. So we've backed off on providing that directly out of admissions because we think that the students themselves can provide a much more direct and honest opinion. Many of our prospective students are able to interact with current students through OwenBloggers.com.

Speaking of getting to know the school, I've never really thought of Nashville as a college town. What's it like as a campus?

We're located just about a mile south of downtown Nashville. Vanderbilt University as a whole is a big part of the Nashville community, especially the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which serves a good portion of the Southeast. Right now as far as the city goes, a lot of the economic development is focused in health care, as well as the automotive and entertainment industries. There's entertainment here well beyond just the country music experience.

I think the students who come really do take advantage of being in Nashville while they're here. We typically have 70 different project-related courses where you can take what you're learning in the classroom and apply it to an actual company or organization that's here in the Nashville area. You work as a team of Owen students for course credit and you're typically presenting back to C-level employees at the end of the semester or module, and really making a difference within their organization. You also have the ability to step into a different industry. A number of the projects are nonprofit organizations that could never afford to hire full-time MBAs or external consultants. Students have the ability to make an impact in that sense.

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