Finding a 'Fit' at Chicago

Chicago admissions director Rose Martinelli recently discussed what makes a "best-fit" business school. Here's a transcript

Related Items

• Finding the Best Fit at Berkeley

Rose Martinelli
University of Chicago

Story Tools

• post a comment
• e-mail this story
• print this story
• order a reprint
• digg this
• save to del.icio.us

BusinessWeek recently hosted its third online MBA Expo, an information-gathering session for potential business school applicants. BusinessWeek.com Business Schools Editor Phil Mintz explored the Expo's theme of finding a "best-fit" business school with several admissions directors from top business schools and a private admissions consultant. Here's an edited transcript of BusinessWeek's discussion with Rose Martinelli, the associate Dean for student recruitment and admissions at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business.

When a student applies to the University of Chicago, how do you go about determining whether the student is a good fit for the school and vice versa?
Well, let's start out from the student perspective. I think when you're looking at trying to develop fit and match, you need to understand yourself first. You need to step back and do a self-assessment, and I think always stepping back and looking at the timeline between your undergraduate years and your current experience now, and going back and looking at the highlights and lowlights and understanding who you are, what your value systems are, what your goals are. Once you've done that and kind of figured out who you are and what you're looking for, [the goal] is to create a set of institutions based on a variety of characteristics that seem to match your needs, whether it be a large school or a small school, one in the city or not in the city, a core curriculum that's rigid or one that's more flexible, concentrations or general management, size of school or resources.

There are so many different metrics, and no one school has all the answers for one individual person. So knowing what your needs are at the onset helps you to select the right set of schools to apply to. Hence when we're reading your application, we're much more likely to understand that you've gone through the process of narrowing down a set of schools that make sense for you.

So I think that fit and match element has become incredibly important in the evaluation process, and for me when I read an application, it's very clear when a) a student has skipped over the time of self-assessment or self-reflection and b) when they really haven't looked at the right institutions or selected a narrow group of institutions that they know fit their needs and make sense for them.

You list a number of characteristics of a school. Are there three or four really top characteristics that a person should look at when first determining the fit for a school?
I think there are a couple of things that are really important. While we all say we are MBA programs, the way we deliver the content and the actual content may be quite different program to program. You have one-year programs or accelerated programs, you have the full two-year experience with the internship.

The first thing you need to understand is what type of program [you] need. If you're a career changer, perhaps a two-year program makes better sense than trying to do an accelerated program. Second, if you are a person with a lot of experience already, [you need to know] how flexible is the core curriculum in terms of providing you opportunities to either waive or take courses at different levels within that core curriculum? So that's also tremendously important.

You have to think about the teaching as well. Some schools focus on teaching, other schools not so much on teaching. Some folks deal with very rigid styles of approach. Other schools are very flexible. So, do you want to craft your own plan or do you want to apply to a program where you actually follow the plan? That's a pretty important juxtaposition that one needs to look at fairly early in the selection points for schools.