MBA Insider: Admissions Q&A February 19, 2008, 3:43PM EST

Wake Forest's Team Approach

The Babcock Graduate School's MBA program seeks students with work experience and a team attitude

Stacy Poindexter Owen
Wake Forest University

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"One for all, and all for one" is the attitude at the Babcock Graduate School of Management at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. That's the word from Stacy Poindexter Owen, Babcock's director of admissions.

There's plenty of highly talented go-it-alone types, Owen says, but Babcock is an intimate environment where academics and student activities depend on a communal atmosphere. Owen, who joined Babcock in 1999, has worked in operations, sales, and marketing positions for Burlington Industries' (ITXN) Burlington House division in Greensboro, N.C. She received her bachelor's degree in biology and a master's degree in management from North Carolina State University.

Owen spoke by phone with BusinessWeek.com reporter Derek Thompson about MBA applications at Babcock, as well as her office's emphasis on work experience and a team-player mentality. She also filled us in on Babcock's innovative new one-day admissions program (BusinessWeek.com, 2/14/08), called "Done in a Day."

Here's an edited transcript of their conversation:

How do application numbers look this year compared to past years?

We were down last year from the year before. And this year we are up. It's still pretty early. The heaviest application months are January through March. So we're going from the numbers from November and December, 2006. I would say at this point, we're up about 20%.

Babcock recently made work experience mandatory for applicants. Why?

We got to the point where we've made it a requirement: You have to have a minimum of 18 months work experience to apply. We focused on work experience before, but if we got a candidate we liked, we used to make exceptions. But now there are no exceptions. The feedback we have received from the students and faculty has been significant. The average amount of work experience among our second-year students who came in fall, 2006, was 3.3 years. This requirement brought the average up to four-and-a-half years. This is the highest it's ever been. Some schools are going the other way (BusinessWeek.com, 12/27/07). A lot of schools are saying there's nothing wrong with undergrads, but we're such a small program that everybody really has to bring something to the table to make this a good experience.

How has the work-experience requirement affected application numbers?

A lot of students used to apply without work experience, so we knew when we posted this to our Web site that it could hurt our application numbers. So that's one reason we're happy the numbers are up now. We started a new one-year program, an MA in management for liberal arts majors only, who matriculate to the program directly out of college. That's where we're trying to move the people with no work experience—to give them an overview of the skills set. The first class started in July, 2006, and graduated in 2007. They all got jobs and the average starting salary was about $48,000. Many have sent us updates on their work experience—they're already looking to come back in a few years.