Carlson MBA Admissions Blog

Admissions committee members will be seeking to understand your academic, professional and personal histories, your current professional position, personal activities and where you hope this degree will lead you as you develop into a leader through an MBA program.

Essays play a critically important role in defining who you were, who you are and who you want to be.

When writing your essays, keep in mind that the Admissions Committee wants the question they asked you to be answered. MBA Programs put a great deal of serious thought into formulating their essay questions and want to make sure that applicants supply the information that is being sought. A good way of doing this, ask someone to proof read your essays but leave the question off. Ask that person "what was this essay about?" If they provide an answer closely related to the question the essay is asking, bingo!

Always have someone proof ready our essays for typos or properly spelled but incorrect words. For example, a spell checker may not catch the word "their" when it should be "there" but a trusted proof reader may and have you correct that particular word.

Be careful if ever using the copy and paste function. In fact, I recommend you skip it. If applying to more than one MBA program, read the essays questions and answer them uniquely. Avoid copying and pasting an answer from one school's essay to another.

Adhere to word limits, be concise.

Use an optional essay if you feel you need to. Optional essays are often used as a wild card option for anyone that wants to address a particular liability within their application. Admission Committees will respect your right to use this essay as you take ownership of perhaps a bad grade in college or gap in your resume. It's a great way for example to say "For two years, 1997-1999, I was in Nicaragua serving in the Peace Corp." Use the optional essay if you feel it will strengthen you application.

-Patrick McCarthy
Associate Director of Admissions & Recruiting

Posted by green801 at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It can be expensive to pay for an MBA education and I'm going to talk to you about some of your options to cover the cost of this education. Keep in mind that the money you invest in your education now is going to help improve your financial situation in the future. The return on investment (ROI) for an MBA education from the Carlson School averages about 4-5 years. Remember, that will depend on a number of factors, including how much you learn from your negotiations class and the effort you put into working with career coaches as a current student.

As either a part-time or full-time MBA student (and U.S. citizen or Green Card holder) you would be eligible for US Federal Financial Aid (www.FAFSA.ed.gov). You need to reapply for this aid on a yearly basis as long as you are a current student. These awards tend to be more generous for students completing graduate work than they may have been when you were an undergrad.

If you are planning to pursue our part-time MBA program, you will want to talk with your employer to see if there are any tuition reimbursement options available to you. Unfortunately at the Carlson School we don't currently have scholarships or grants available to part-time MBA students. Often scholarship money won't cover the total cost of an MBA program and many students take out some form of loan to help pay for their education. For those planning to pursue the Carlson School's full-time MBA program, you'll be quitting your job and are likely to have no income (or measurable income) coming in for two academic years.

The Carlson School offers some scholarships to admitted candidates to the full-time MBA program. We make scholarship decisions at the time of admission. Feel free to check out the different scholarships and their descriptions on the website. The amount of scholarship money available for each award is different, but any 'free' money is worth it when you are going to school full-time. As with the part-time MBA program, if you are a member of any organizations, ask them if they offer scholarships for people returning to complete further education. It never hurts to ask if there is money available. Because full-time students quit their jobs when they return to school, many of our students have to take out loans to pay for their education.

There are some graduate and teaching assistantships available to full-time students, but they are mostly available in your second year of the program.

International students (anyone on a student or work visa while in the program) won't be eligible for the FAFSA loans. Sometimes getting a bank loan in the U.S. can be more difficult for an international student and you may need to have a U.S. citizen or Green Card holder co-sign a loan with you.

You may also want to check out the information the University of Minnesota has on the website regarding financial aid and paying for education (http://onestop.umn.edu/finances/financial_aid/index.html). Keep in mind that some of the information may pertain to an undergraduate audience, so be sure you are looking at the information regarding graduate and/or professional education. Don't forget, if you are still paying for your undergraduate education, (in the US at least) you can often defer repayment of those loans until after you've finished further education.

Good luck and I look forward to working with you over the next few months.

Courtney, the the team gardener ;)

Posted by green801 at 5:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Welcome to the Carlson School of Management's Admissions Blog. This blog will serve to inform you of relevant ...too formal. I've been told that this blog will be written in a manner less formal than a web page or official school letter. So let me begin again.

You found it! The new Carlson Admissions blog. If you found this blog, you probably know what a blog is and don't need to be told its purpose. So what's this blog about?
We, the Admissions team, will be writing blog posts regarding our recruiting activities, most commonly asked questions and perhaps other tidbits you may not know. So this is really a content driven
effort to address items relating to admissions and recruiting. We'll be self promoting too, i.e. our Twitter account, Facebook fan pages. Good stuff, I promise.

As this is an introduction, I should continue the theme and describe the "We" in the paragraph above. Who are the Admission people? What are they like? As one functioning unit, we work very well together. Operations makes up one group within the department, recruiting the other. Some serve in both capacities. So what you have here are people making sure that the admissions process runs smoothly, such as the online application, constant reporting, database development, and another focused on building and maintaining relationships with our MBA candidates, evaluating and voting on applications, planning and implementing recruitment events. And we have no silos here, meaning one team manages all 3 MBA options, Executive, Full-Time, Part-Time.

Individually, we have a down to earth, well rounded, academically diverse group of people making admissions decisions. One is a pretty good tennis player, another sings with her office door closed and is really quite good, one loves jazz and is surprisingly proficient at Dance Dance Revolution, another gardens and pridefully maintains herbs and tomatoes, one is an Olympic caliber swimmer and the tallest person in the office, another loves dogs and has decades of institutional knowledge, one makes awesome creme brulee french toast, another is short, short, short but full of life (literally) and one is head over heels in love with (html) style, colors and fonts.

When all is said and done, this group is very approachable and happy to speak to anyone that is interested in being a student in one of our MBA programs. You'll see differing styles from each of our contributors but all singularly focused on admitting the best students anywhere.

Welcome to the Carlson Admissions blog.

-Patrick McCarthy
mccar390@umn.edu

Posted by green801 at 4:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)