MBA Insider: Admissions Q&A April 13, 2008, 9:19PM EST

Rochester's Intimate Program

Admissions Director Gregory MacDonald describes the admissions process for the university's Simon business school

Gregory MacDonald
University of Rochester

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Gregory MacDonald is the executive director of admissions and administration at the William E. Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester. Prior to joining Simon in July, 2005, MacDonald spent 15 years working in undergraduate enrollment, including six years in the undergraduate admissions office at Rochester.

MacDonald says that Simon is the perfect size to provide students with a highly personalized experience from the start of the admissions process through graduation day and beyond. He spoke with BusinessWeek.com reporter Kelly Bronk about the admissions process at Simon and how to avoid common mistakes that applicants make. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

How do application numbers look this year?

This is our third consecutive increase. This year—for fall of 2008 entry—was a significant increase over last year and we're very pleased that some of our efforts focused on increasing certain populations have yielded very nice results. We're also seeing a real strong surge in our specialized master's programs, and we don't plan to increase the size of the class significantly. We like our positioning as the smallest private in the top tier of MBA programs and we tend to grow on a limited scale. But obviously, the larger applicant pool has allowed us to become even more selective and have more control over the quality of the incoming class.

How many students are admitted into each class?

Right now we're targeting the first-year MBA class to be 185 students and we're targeting about 90 in our MS programs. Both of those targets look to be well within reach this year.

Are there any major changes to Simon's application process this year?

Yes, actually we're in the process of phasing in an alumni interview and making that a requirement. The interview has become a much more important part of the selection process in recent years and we've been putting a lot of our resources into training our alums worldwide on conducting interviews with our prospective students. So in addition to having an interview with a Simon admissions staff member, we're also getting feedback from our alums on our prospects and ultimately factoring that into our final decisions.

With such a large international applicant pool, how hard has it been to establish that international network?

Well, actually, we've become experts on time zones. We've had to be pretty open-minded about doing a lot of interviewing during off-peak hours, and luckily our prospective students have been very open-minded, sometimes doing interviews at 6 o'clock in the morning or 6 o'clock at night. We're doing these as face to face interviews as often as we possibly can, but sometimes, depending on the region of the world, it's just much more practical to do the over the telephone. It has been a logistic challenge, but actually it's quite gratifying. I think our alums are enjoying being reconnected with the school in a new way and in a very important way. That's not to say that alumni gatherings aren't important, but they tend to be more social. These are more like professional development networking opportunities that our alums are participating in, and everyone who has conducted some interviews, their first question is "How can I do more of these? When is the next round of interviews, when are they beginning? How can I adjust my work schedule to participate?" We're absolutely thrilled with the way that our alums are responding to this.