Stanford: Selective But Not Standardized

(page 2 of 4)

Story Tools

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

What kinds of things are you doing to promote diversity?

Diversity is such a loaded term. It comes with a whole set of meanings, depending on who hears that word. When we talk about diversity, we're talking about diversity of thought, viewpoint, perspective. It's not simply things you would check off on the application. It refers to really understanding, for an academic community, how important it is that you have different points of view brought to bear in a classroom, in a study group, in a team meeting, in any particular problem. When you look at diversity that way, the most important thing is to have a curriculum and an experience (BusinessWeek.com, 10/29/2007) that really values the input of every single student no matter where in the world he or she is from, no matter what kinds of experiences he or she has had before business school, no matter what his or her aspirations are after business school. This relates to culture. But having a curriculum, experience, and academic core that respects and relies on each voice in the classroom [is critical]. For academic communities, conformity equals death. You don't thrive in an academic community when everyone has the same point of view.

How do you make sure that you have this diversity?

The most effective recruiting we can do is to have our students and alumni talk to other people about the program at Stanford or have our alumni serve as role models whom other people want to emulate. That comes down to focusing on the quality of the experience. In life, there are goals and byproducts. The goal for us is to deliver an experience that really leverages diversity. I think it's the best academic experience in the world. The byproduct of that is that you're able to attract a stronger pool of candidates and interest a broader set of people in the program and then when they come in, they're happy. If you look at where we travel around the world, we work hard to ensure that people get the messages about Stanford directly from us. They don't fall victim to half truths about what Stanford is looking for and who is the ideal candidate.

What can applicants do to stand out?

There's a real danger when people set out with the goal of standing out. What they often do is say, "Okay, I've got to talk about experiences that no one else has had or share really dramatic things that have happened to me or exotic places I've visited." What happens is that everyone else who's applying with the same goal will take the same action. People who set out with an objective of standing out usually end up looking much more like other applicants. The best way to stand out is to focus on your unique application, making it as strong as it can be, making sure that you're telling a story that only you can tell. That does not mean that you have to have done something exotic or traveled to someplace ridiculous or had some horrible experience in your past. It does mean that you have thought carefully about the experiences that you have had and more importantly what you've learned from those experiences. I think it's the insight that you've taken away from the experiences—more than the experiences themselves—that really make a candidate stand out. My predecessor always said, "Most MBAs at Stanford have excelled by doing ordinary things extraordinarily well." I think that holds true today.

Do you weigh certain parts of the application more than others?

My life would be a lot easier if we did. We do not. We look at every applicant and every application holistically. We read everything cover to cover. There is no formula. We try to understand not only what this applicant has done but also how he or she is going about making that impact, what's motivated him or her to achieve the things that we see in the application. We look at everything—the academic record, work experience, standardized test results, recommendations, interviews, everything, to try and get a sense of the person. No one has nailed this process of human assessment. No one really has one process or one system that is the best for understanding a person. We try to get data from a lot of different sources and analyze it.

What is the process that a typical application goes through?

We don't go into that only because it would take far too long to explain. But broadly, you can say that once an application comes in, it is sent out for review. We read every file cover to cover and then we make decisions at the end of the round. Beyond that, it gets really hard to explain because there are a lot of nuances.