Admissions Q&A
Cornell Reaches Out
A revamping of the admissions office means, among other things, finding more ways to connect with prospective students
Like every top B-school, Cornell's Johnson School certainly has its fair share of consultants and investment bankers, but director of admissions Randall Sawyer also has a soft spot for nontraditional candidates or those looking to make a career transition. In fact, as a 15-year public relations practitioner who only this year switched over to the admissions office, Sawyer fits that profile himself.
And while the Johnson School's reputation as "the friendly school" is well-deserved, says Sawyer, potential MBAs should note that "friendly" doesn't mean "easy." Standards are set high, in class and out, and Sawyer says he's not looking for ticket-punchers who attend classes and then go straight home without participating in any of the school's many groups and clubs. (The school's tight-knit culture, after all, is no accident.)
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| Randall Sawyer
Cornell University |
BusinessWeek.com reporter
Kerry Miller spoke to Sawyer about the changes to come in the Cornell admissions office and what he looks for in applications. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation.
You started out at Cornell as a public relations officer. How did you end up in the admissions office? That doesn't sound like a typical move.It definitely isn't a typical move. I started out and worked my way in politics for about 12 years, and then was here in PR at the Johnson School for two and a half years before becoming director of admissions on Mar. 1 of this year.
The Johnson School is taking a look at admissions from a new point of view. Over the last several years we've seen a decline in our domestic applications. We've never really had a strategic plan, so I'm in the process of writing the plan and taking a look at how we do what we do.
What kind of changes do you have planned?One thing is that we're going to have a few more touchpoints with students. In the past we've been light on that end, and I don't want students to feel like they hear from us once or twice over the course of the entire process. Of course, every school is interested in communicating with prospective students a lot. What's too much? What's too little? I'm not sure. I'm doing some focus groups to try and identify what that is. I want to find out what's the right amount.
Can you take me through the life cycle of an application at the Johnson School?When an application comes in, it's read by two people—a student and a staff member—who decide whether that applicant should come in for an interview. The student readers are second-year students who have gone through a rigorous selection process and read and evaluate applications based on the training program that my office runs.
We look for a number of things in applications—GPA, GMAT, career progression, extracurricular activities, team opportunities. The student makes one recommendation, and then one of my staff members will review that file and make another decision. They both may be "Yes, interview," they both may be, "No, decline."
And if that's the case, that's how we move forward with the file. If one says yes and one says no, then I have a group that sits together and we talk about that file and whether or not that student should be interviewed. Then if the decision is "Yes, interview," we've got an e-mail saying, "Hey, we'd like to invite you to an interview."
In the Johnson School, you can't get in without an interview. You could be interviewed either here on campus or in the state in which you live or by phone by one of my staff. We provide you that option. So by the time you get to an interview, two people have read your application.
When the students arrive, they're interviewed by either staff, faculty, or second-year students. Then a recommendation is made from that interviewer, and that file comes to my Admissions Committee, and we talk about that individual and a decision is made.
If it's a yes, and scholarship money is around, we will get in contact with them and say, "Congratulations. You've been offered [a spot], and we have a scholarship we'd like you to consider, as well." Then the student usually has between four and eight weeks to make his decision and deposit with us.
Are there any particular candidates who would be better off applying early?If you are an international student, we urge you to apply by Round Three, the Jan. 9 cutoff, because if you apply in Round Four, they're going to be squishing for time to make visas work and everything. You can do it. We can try it. But we do urge international students to apply by Round Three.
We also have what's known as a 12-month option program, TMO, and that starts Memorial Day Monday. We urge the TMOs to apply in the first three rounds. The one issue is that if you apply in Round Four for the two-year program or the TMO program, we do not make a scholarship offer to you.
Most U.S. business schools have shied away from the one-year MBA, saying there's no way to possibly pack everything in. How does Cornell do it?It is rigorous, and it moves very quickly, and we're able to do that because everyone in the 12-month option program already has a master's in mathematics or science. So because of that, we have a belief that you're already a good time manager, you're very quant-literate, and you're going to be bright.
Just to give you some statistics to compare, our incoming TMO class this year had 48 students. The median GMAT was 710, and the undergraduate average was 3.62. In our two-year program, the incoming class this year has 252 students with a 680 median GMAT and a 3.32 undergrad average. So those are really spectacular numbers.
Basically what's taught in the summer is the core course: statistics, marketing, operations strategy, and so forth. You have a three-hour class twice a day, so six hours in the classroom. It runs the full week, Monday through Friday, from Memorial Day Monday for about 10 weeks. Then you have a two-week break in August and you come back and merge into the second-year class, where you can take other electives that you're interested in.
We have a very high success rate in this program. In fact, of the 48 this summer, none dropped out and none failed. They have already adjusted to life here in the past couple of weeks and are part of our second-year class, and they'll be graduating in May.
In a nutshell, what kind of person would be a good fit at the Johnson School?We're looking for very bright, very articulate, very outgoing individuals who are going to be leaders once they get through here. Being a leader has a number of different aspects to it, but we want you to have a strong mental acuity. We want you to have a strong undergraduate background. And we want some career progression.
There are traditional career lines that you can follow and be a strong candidate, but there are also nontraditional lines, for example, AmeriCorps or Peace Corps. We had a number of Peace Corps applications this year: really great students, great candidates, but not coming from the traditional financial emphasis.
When someone with a not-for-profit or Peace Corps background sits in a room with someone who's been working at Goldman for a couple of years, that's a real interesting dialogue, because one is heavily entrenched and probably a business undergrad or a finance undergrad and has been on the Street for two or three years. Then you get this other person who's probably a liberal arts undergrad and has been working with a small community, and they're bringing two dynamically different yet engaging and interesting experiences to the table. We love that here at the Johnson School.
I want to see a person who's going to bring something to the table. I don't want to bring in an entire school of consultants or investment bankers or nontraditional backgrounds. I want to bring in a healthy mix of people, and I want business dynamics to be reflected here in who we bring into the class.
Above all, I do not want to bring in someone who will not be passionate about going to school here and will not succeed here. I would be doing a disservice to them, to bring in someone who academically will not meet the challenges put forth by our curriculum.
I don't want students coming in who are going to go to class, go home, and not be part of any of our clubs and groups. We want them to get involved and stay involved. I want to enable them to be wildly successful and reflect years later on what an extraordinary experience it was here academically as well as socially.
What advice do you have for career changers?We have so many career changers here at the Johnson School. They come in on the prospective student end, and they say, "I've been in IT for a number of years, and I want to switch over to investment banking." Well, good. Why? Talk to me about why you're unhappy about being in IT and why is investment banking going to be good for you, and how do you see yourself getting there?
Some people come in and say, "I'm an entrepreneur at heart, and I've had two businesses I started that failed. And I believe that I need the MBA to help me understand business and to go further." That's an interesting one. We've got a great entrepreneurship program here. In fact, several of our students start a business while they're here. That's really exciting. And you can tell from an application and from interacting with people if they have a passion for entrepreneurship or not. It shows pretty readily.
I had a not-for-profit last year that came in and said, "I'm tired of making not-for-profit wages. That's why I want to get my MBA, and be a career switcher." And that's fine too—I can understand that.
Do you have a minimum amount of work experience?We don't. We actually have a straight-through program, where students that graduate undergrad in May start in August. It's a pilot program we started a few years ago. This May we had five students graduate. Four got hired with very good jobs, and the fifth took a job at a little less pay in the nonprofit arena. This year I think we have nine—eight are Cornell undergrads, and one is an undergrad from McGill.
In the future, are you going to start doing more outreach to people coming straight from undergrad?When you look at who is coming straight from undergrad, they're exceptional students. They're scoring 720s and up on the GMAT. They're 3.8 or 9 and 4.0 undergrad. And they offer something a little bit different. So we're open to expanding it. I think the jury is still out, if you will, as to the success of the program in the sense of would they be better off working a couple of years and then heading out?
It's a little early to tell. But our Advisory Council is supportive and the Dean is supportive, and I'm supportive. So we will continue to assess how they're doing.
Are there any other programs or initiatives you have to reach out to specific groups of candidates?We have a strong veterans group here that has been long-established, and is very active. They reach out to prospective veterans that are looking to go to business school. Also, we were the first business school to establish the Office for Women & Minorities in Business. We just morphed that office last year into the Office for Diversity & Inclusion, and that works with a lot of under-represented minorities, women, underprivileged, first-generation MBAers.
We also have a program called Johnson Meets Business where we bring in interested students who are under-represented minorities, as well as any other group that wants to come to the Johnson School for a weekend and interact with our people. We've seen strong international interest in the Johnson School. We had exceptional applications from India and China this year.
Of the nearly 1,800 applications that we received, more than 300 were from India alone—very strong applicants, coming out of the top Indian schools with fantastic quant backgrounds, especially in math and the sciences. Their TOEFL scores were very strong. And when you look at our program overall for the two-year class, about 34% of our students are international, representing about 23 countries.
What advice do you have for students who don't think how they look on paper is reflective of their true abilities?I think the bottom line is that everybody's different, and we look through everything from everybody. There are no minimums. We look at everyone. Some people do better than others on the GMAT. That's not the only scale that we look at. I want to get to know you as a person because in the Johnson School we're building a community.
If it was just statistics, one of my people could put together a computer program and we'd type in all of your info and then spit out who should be here and who shouldn't. That's not it at all. We're entirely opposite of that. We look at the whole person.
A lot of students come in and they're concerned about their undergrad numbers because they, you know, like, "Well, I only had a 2.9 or 3.1 in undergrad. I don't think that's going to cut the mustard."
But we like to see upward progression. Not everyone acclimates to university that well, and so I take a look at that. By the third or fourth semester, if you did poorly in the first two or three, you usually start being able to understand your time management, you should start to move that needle upward and show that upward progression.
If you apply here with a 3.5 or 3.6 undergrad in liberal arts, and then I look at your Intro to Macro Economics and you had a D or a C, or Intro to Accounting taken pass/fail, then I'm going to get a little nervous about that. Then I'm going to check your quant aptitude to see if you did stronger there. Then I'll think, "Well, maybe you worked your way through that. It was just a tough class in college, but you've been working in the financial market for a long time."
Are there any stereotypes about Cornell that you'd like to disprove?You know, we're often referred to as a friendly school. Many people talk about how we're the friendly school, and I'd like to think that we're collegial.
We're a very outgoing and inclusive community here, and our students who go through it enjoy it. It's rare that we get someone who says, "I spent two years at the Johnson School, and I didn't like it," and we pride ourselves on that.
But I would also say that we're one of the more academically rigorous institutions out there, and while we may be collegial, friendly does not mean that we are easy, by any stretch of the imagination. Our standards are pretty high. We're a top 10 school, we have a great alumni network, and we're going to be selecting students that live up to that expectation.
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