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Admissions Straight Talk
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Admissions Straight Talk
How to Get Into Yale SOM 2025 [Episode 598]
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In this episode, Bruce DelMonico, Assistant Dean of Admissions at Yale School of Management, shares an overview of the Yale School of Management. The program offers a distinctive two-year, full-time MBA program emphasizing an interdisciplinary, integrated curriculum to prepare students for leadership in business and society. Bruce discusses how aspiring applicants can prepare for and approach the extensive application process, which includes a GMAT/GRE test score, written essays, a resume, a video component, a behavioral assessment, and an interview.
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brush up on some typical admissions or job interview types of questions. So successes, failures, some teamwork, challenges, those types of things. Those typical kind of behavioral areas. And then a little bit about why you want to get an MBA, what you want to do with it, those types of things. But really not any heavy preparation. It shouldn't hopefully be pretty straightforward. No trick questions. We're very consistently tell.
This is not going to determine outcome of your candidacy, so don't feel as though this is like your whole candidacy is riding on this. We use it as you say with a light touch.
Welcome to Admission Straight Talk, the podcast dedicated to graduate admissions and helping you approach the application process thoughtfully and successfully. Your host is Accepted's founder and world renowned admissions guru, Linda Abraham. At Accepted, our mission is to get you to that unforgettable moment when you read your acceptance email and shout Yes, I'm in! Confident you'll be attending the perfect program to help you launch the career of your dream.
Welcome to the 598th episode of the Mission Straight Talk. Thanks for tuning in. You are invited to take the free six question quiz at accepted.com/MBA and see how prepared you are to actually apply. You'll also get access to relevant other resources, both free and paid, that can help you develop your application strategy for acceptance. Just go to accepted.com/MBA, just like it sounds to take your quiz, access the framework and those other resources I mentioned.
It gives me great pleasure to have back on Admission Straight Talk, Bruce Delmonico, Assistant Dean of Admissions at Yale School of Management. He's been on the admissions team at Yale SOM since 2004, became the director in 2006 and the assistant dean in 2012. Bruce, welcome back to Admission Straight Talk. Thank you so much, Linda. It's great to be here. I always enjoy it. My pleasure. I do too.
All right, let's start with my usual basic overview of Yale SOM MBA program for listeners who may not be that familiar with it and focusing on its more distinctive elements. Sure, yeah, here at Yale, so the flagship MBA, it's a two-year full-time MBA. So some of the same things you've experienced at other programs, but I think some of the distinctive things, I would point out maybe three things that I think are particularly distinctive are integration to the larger Yale University.
our distinct, we think distinctively global posture and think our curriculum, or the way we actually teach the material that you learn is actually somewhat distinctive and we think prepares you particularly well to be a leader in the 21st century. So I think just to dig in just briefly, and you know, we, know, when you come to Yale, you know, you really come to the entire university. And so one of the things, one of the ways that's manifest to you actually can take as many electives as you want at.
the rest of the university. could take all of your electives outside of SOM. So really the university is open to you and that extends to the co-curricular opportunities, you're the alumni networks, those types of things. So think that's great. On the global front, we do have our global network for advanced management. Actually, as we're speaking, exams are happening, winding down, and then global network week is happening, which means our students are going to one the 30 different global network schools.
around the world that are a part of this network that we've developed and started. It's now taken on a life of its own, but it's among the very distinctive global opportunities that exist here at Yale. And then the curriculum, we might talk about this more, but we teach in a much more interdisciplinary, much more integrated, holistic way than other programs. We think that does uniquely prepare our students to be effective leaders for the 21st century and for business and society, which is our founding mission. We're gonna get that in a minute. But in terms of the global network,
Yes. So obviously during COVID people weren't traveling. But as I recall, part of the idea behind the Global Network was that students at Yale actually participated in, they didn't necessarily travel to the schools, but they were taking classes with students from other countries. And it is really, it is global. Is still true? Even if they don't physically go to the other schools, other campuses? That is true. think one of the core stones of it is the
the travel piece that because being part of that network. we have 30 schools on five continents. And so you can travel to, you know, coach university in Turkey, or you can go to, so it got a, or you can go to us or Redmond or, know, across the globe. But even in addition to the, that, that exposed the physical travel, there are virtual courses that are part of the global network. And so you're taking their opportunities to take virtual global network courses and
with students from the other global network schools. And so I think that's also a really unique opportunity. I think it does help train you very well. Obviously a lot of the work that's done now is not getting on a plane and flying somewhere, but it's actually being on Zoom like we are, kind of connecting virtually across time zones, across geographies. And so having that experience when you're a student, I think is very valuable. Absolutely. Now I noticed you mentioned this in your first answer that throughout the site, there's an emphasis
on the mission of Yale SOM, which is educating leaders for business and society. How has that mission manifested in the program and the curriculum and the classroom? Yeah, yeah, no, it's a great question. think in a lot of ways, really, I invoked it, you just asked about it. So the mission that really is the touchstone for the school. It's the founding mission to educate leaders for business and society. It's a kind of broad, ambitious multi-sector mission.
And it does, you know, we can talk about other aspects, but it really does inform the classroom experience. Our curriculum, we call it our integrated curriculum. And it does, you know, it teaches a lot of the same materials, but it goes beyond sort of business concepts into other disciplines. So you're going to learn not just kind of, you know, just kind of cashflow analysis and kind of weighted average cost of capital and those types of things, but you'll learn how sort of the law and medicine and the environment and.
psychology, sociology, all these other disciplines inform business. And so it's very integrated in that way. And material also is organized in a way that really has our students thinking across disciplines, across sectors. Can you give an example? Yeah, happy to. And so we teach, we actually have our own case writing team here and we teach what we call raw cases.
which are different than the cooked cases you get at other schools where the case rating team will distill down all the relevant information into the seven or 10 page document. Our raw cases are much messier. The idea is that we give the case rating team assembles all the materials and then gives those primary materials to the students because in the real world, that's what you're dealing with. not dealing with it. You don't have a case rating team that kind of does all that work for you. You have to do that work. So.
This is all preamble to say a lot of our the material the first year is taught by the raw case method. One of the raw cases as an example that we that the student study is on the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. And so that's someone we actually have a faculty member who has advised to advise to Norway on their sovereign wealth fund. And so that we have some first hand experience. But that's an example that I think is international. It's not. It's not a sort of white male US protagonist. It's international. It's multi sector. It's got elements of finance.
The fund, it's got the public sector, because it's a sovereign wealth fund. It's used for social purposes. Some of the funds, so it really is an example of a case that kind of spans the sectors, is global in nature. And it touches on a lot of the aspects of the school that I think are quite unique. All right. Now, we were talking about the integrated nature of the program, especially the core. Yeah. And that core culminates in a course called the executive. Can you discuss both the integrated nature of the core and specifically
the executive course. Yeah, no, happy to do that. And I gave a little more kind, I talked a little bit about some aspects of the, of the curriculum, but the, the short, the, the, kind of the heart of the first year core curriculum are what we call our integrated perspectives courses. And so again, that takes a lot of the material that you would learn at other schools, but organizes it differently. And so in organizing instead by discrete functions, which is how other schools tend to be organized, which I think made sense. You know what, you know,
50, 60 years ago when MBA graduates would go to large multinational corporations and work within a single function within that organization. But now obviously graduates have much different careers. And so the curriculum is meant to reflect that. So these organizational perspectives really, they organize the material according to stakeholders. So things like customer, employee, investor, Regulator. it's their state decided. And the executive is kind of like the capstone course.
So like the each individual course takes a different stakeholder perspective, there are about a dozen in total. And so one example I give is the customer class here is sort of like the marketing class, but it goes beyond that. instead of just teaching the four P's and kind of the marketing function, it incorporates the marketing function, but then adds, you know, HR, it adds operations, it adds technology. So the other disciplines that you would think of, there's psychology, sociology,
to understand the customer experience and how all parts of an organization need to work together to satisfy the customer experience. And so that's a stakeholder. And then those all ladder up into the executive, which is the cat zone. And then that's where you kind of think about all the different stakeholders together and then various trade-offs you need to make. So if you're doing something that satisfies the investor, what does that do to the employee? And how is the customer experience affected by what you do in the operations engine? So.
That's where you really think about it all together. Are you cutting costs, which will also damage the customer experience? Exactly. If you're, I don't know. Yeah. So, I think that's kind of where you've got to, it really all kind of comes together in the first year. Okay. That's very interesting. Let's get to the application part of things here. Okay. Yale has innovative and multifaceted application.
requiring a test score. Okay. So you're stuck with a test score, either GMAT or GRE. There are written components. There's a resume, a video, a behavioral assessment and an interview, which is by invitation only. Behavioral assessment is quite distinctive on the MBA scene. What is it? What's the format? What's the reason for it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to give a little kind of distant history. this, we go, this, this is over a decade. I can't even remember how far back it's, you know,
12, 15 years. This started with Tom Colditz, who was head of the leadership team at West Point, leadership department at West Point. He joined us and led our leadership development team here for a while. And when he came on board, he helped develop a test that ultimately was purchased by ETS and became the behavioral assessment.
When he was here, we actually worked with him to kind of develop it and pilot it. And then we've rolled it out since it's now been, you know, again, you know, half dozen years that we've fully been using it, but we've been piloting it for over a decade. The idea behind it, it's a non-cognitive assessment. So unlike the GMAT or the GRE, which are so cognitive assessments, this is non-cognitive. It's not meant to be an EQ test or soft skills test, which I think some people think it is.
It's meant to measure intra and interpersonal traits that are additive to our assessment of your academic preparation for the program. So it's again, not meant to measure soft skills. It's meant to measure your academic preparation. The idea is we bring in lots of fantastic candidates. And there's some people who based on their grades and scores perform.
better than you would expect. And some people basically are greatest forms who perform not as well as you would expect. This isn't a perfect science, but we're always trying to get better at it and do a better job within this prediction. And the behavioral assessment is meant to help us identify secondary and tertiary traits that will better kind of refine how we're looking at your academic preparation. And the thing we're really trying to do is we know that there are lots of really fantastic candidates who might have more modest academic profiles. And we want...
who we might want here at Yale for other reasons. They perform wonderfully in the workplace. They have great potential. We want to make sure, obviously, they get through the program in the short term. And so the behavioral assessment can give us more confidence that maybe someone with a more modest academic profile who has lots of other fantastic qualities, we can bring them into the program. So actually, we use it to expand the pool of candidates we can consider. The test itself is...
It's maybe takes maybe 20, 25 minutes to complete. It's a, about it's a forced choice test, which, which means what happens is you get a pair of statements that are meant to describe a person. They could be two positive, two negative. And you have to choose which one most is most like you. And then there are 130 pairs. So you go and it's adaptive. So no two people get the same one and you go through these statements. You're supposed to go quickly, obviously 130 pairs in 20, 25 minutes. You're not going to.
Don't need to think about it. You don't need to prepare for it. It's just, see this statement and this statement, which one's more like me, I choose that one and then keep going. And over that course of 130 builds a profile of you that we use to, again, to inform our assessment of your academic preparation for the program in a way that hopefully is expansive and allows us to be more, bring in more people to the program with more diverse backgrounds. I see. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. Sure.
going along with the assessment arena of admissions. What about GMAC's business writing assessment? Do you have any plans to require that? Are you requiring that? Cause I saw somewhere that you were, but I didn't see it on the website. Yeah, no, we're not requiring that. have to see. We don't have any firm plans now, but we'll do. actually, I'm going to actually be down in rest of next week. So I might ask about that and get a little more sense. I know that that's being developed and is out there. We don't have a requirement. we, we were,
comfortable with the things that we're currently requiring and the elements we currently are using to measure candidates preparation for the program, but certainly we're always looking at other things that might be helpful. So, but we're not requiring them. Great. Now I was going through Yale SOM's application guide, which is excellent. And listeners interested in applying to Yale, you definitely need to read it. We'll also link to it.
It seems that you have an optional information question and a background information question as well as a required essay with three options and a 500 word limit. Is the background information required? believe it is. it? Background information is not required. That's all optional information. Okay. But what's the difference between these three elements? What would you like to see them cover? You don't want them to duplicate each other, I'm sure.
Yeah, so obviously. So the required essay. So as you say, there are three prompts, you get to choose which of the three that most speak to you. And then there's that's the required essay. And you know, it's about sort of the biggest commitment you've made the greatest challenge you face and the most meaningful community you've been a part of. And we used to have the commitment essay was the single one we had for a number of years. And then we found that we, you know, we didn't want people to have to kind of conform to that prompt. And so that's why we added the the
community and the challenge and to allow people really to write about the thing that's most meaningful to them. So that's the required to say everybody writes at the five minute words. The option of information is really more if there's something a typical kind of optional, if there's something about your candidacy that you think is we should know about, but it's not captured anywhere else, that's your opportunity to provide the information there. And then the background information is something we've been building out for a number of years. We recognize that people are not applying in a vacuum, right? So everybody.
is informed, influenced by their experiences that they had growing up, the opportunities that were available to them, the challenges they were facing, and the specific circumstances of their upbringing and their educational backgrounds. And background information, it's optional, you don't have to fill it out, but it asks information about the context in which you've lived, more information about some of your familiar background, some of your own personal background, to help us understand
your circumstances so that we can have that in mind as we're making decisions because we know, again, when you think about a test score or academic performance, those, as I said, those don't exist in a vacuum. A single score can mean different things depending on the context in which someone has lived and worked and operated. So that's why we asked for that background information. For a lot of people, there's nothing to share, but for some people there is. And so that's where we invite people to share it they have anything to.
So with the optional information question typically be, you had a drop in grades due to illness or a family situation. Would that be typical of the optional information question? Yes, that can be, yes. That's true. employment or something like that. And we actually have a separate question specifically for gap in employment. We took that out because we know we want to make sure we're leveling the playing field because sometimes people would put it, sometimes they wouldn't. So we asked specifically for gaps of three months or more.
So that we're getting consistent information. So that's actually in the work experience section. There's a question for that. The optional information doesn't include that, although we do ask for it. yes, grades, other things, other circumstances that might explain academic performance or other professional pieces that, you know, other than those gaps. Yeah, that's where optional information would be helpful. All right. And then the video component, the video component for a long time now. And how is it valuable to you? And do you have any tips for it?
Yeah, so the video, the video questions are another post submission element. So like the behavioral assessment after you hit submit, then you will be sent links to the both the behavioral assessment and the video questions. And, you know, we have had those for a number of years. At core, use that to evaluate English language. So and that's actually when we introduced these years ago, we eliminated the English language.
test requirements so we don't require the TOEFL or the IELTS. And we felt that, know, much like the GMAT and the GRE, were generally good, but they were sometimes a little off. People would score well, but actually in reality didn't speak so well. People who had modest scores actually were fine. So we wanted a way to assess that directly in a way that actually was cheaper and easier and helped less of a burden for candidates. Although I know that they take, you we have to take that sometimes I take the IELTS for other schools, but for us, you know,
a this takes 20 to another 20 minutes or so 20 minutes of doing this as opposed to studying for and paying for the total IELTS seems like a good trade. But they are three questions that we are we have pre-recorded. have three tranches as we call them. They're with multiple questions and that are then randomly drawn. And so you will answer questions that is not meant to be trick questions a little bit, but to get to know you more. So it's about your MBA aspirations.
a behavioral question. And then there tends to be a question that kind of gets at some interest of yours, a little bit more of your personality. So it's a core English language, but we also want to get a sense of how you interact and speak extemporaneously in a little bit of that aspect of your personality. Yeah. is Yale's essence perspective when it comes to use of AI in the application process? And do you ever, like if you're watching a video, are you thinking this does not sound like the person in the essay? Yeah.
We do, I will say, and I think you asked also how to prepare for the video questions. apologize. I'll get back to that. I'll go back to that one. But okay. Yeah, we do actually for this year, we actually put out a statement on AI in the application. And so, and the basic thrust of it is, you could, should use AI. We're not, we don't prohibit it, but we think you should use it wisely. You should use it the same way you would a friend or a family member in terms of thinking about how to, how to brainstorm, how to.
you know, do get some rough organization or organizing your thoughts. It should be a way to, it should be writing your essay for you or answering questions for you, but it can be a tool you use and use it kind of wisely. We actually, interestingly with that, our statement on AI was developed in conjunction with AI. So we're kind of practicing what we preach. But in specifically in terms of the video questions and even for the interviews, we currently, we welcome people to campus to interview, but a lot of our interviews are still virtual over Zoom.
And in both contexts, sometimes we do see people who are reading, they're clearly like they've got prepared answers, whether it's AI or otherwise, whether AI based or otherwise. And our advice is definitely like, don't do that. We would rather have a less perfect but genuine answer than something that's scripted and mechanical. That's just not what we're trying to, you might not be able to connect with your interviewer or with the responses the same way if you're just kind of reading a response. So we feel as though, you know,
maybe an imperfect response that is you as opposed to something that you're reading is definitely preferable. All right, thank you. Let's go back to the question you correctly said I had asked you had not answered, which is how to prepare for the video component. Yes, yeah. I realized as I was speaking that I was answering a question I think I created as opposed to the one you actually asked. Yes, there really isn't much like the certainly the behavioral assessment. There's nothing to prepare because you're just answering questions about yourself.
Video questions are similar to that. think there is a little bit of, because we want to get a little bit of a sense of your reasons for getting the MBA and there is some behavioral questions on phone, you might want to think about, go back to your application, just kind of brush up on some typical admissions or job interview types of questions. So successes, failures, teamwork, challenges, those types of things. So it typical kind of behavioral areas. And then a little bit about why you want to get an MBA, what you want to do with it, types of things. But really not any heavy.
preparation. It shouldn't hopefully be pretty straightforward. No trick questions. And what I tend to say for both of these components, but certainly with the video question, we're very consistently tell candidates that this is not going to be, you know, this is not going to determine outcome of your candidacy. So don't, I know it can be a little bit stressful. I think it's gotten less stressful post pandemic because people are used to being on zoom when before we did this before the pandemic, that that interaction was maybe less more foreign, a little bit less comfortable, but
I think generation is used to being on camera. I think that's right. So I think this is less of a stressor than it used to be. But I think even so I would say, don't feel as though this is like your whole candidacy is riding on this. We use it as you say with a light touch. All right. And then the other question about the video component in terms of the format, do they have a few seconds to think about or organize their thoughts? Yes. Yeah. So the way it works is we will ask the question. These are prerecorded questions.
And then you have usually either 20 or 30 seconds or what we call think time to think about your response. then depending on the question, either 60 or 90 seconds to respond. So it's all very short, but you have a little bit of time. It's meant to approximate an interview. So it's not a perfect approximation because in live interview, you don't sit there for 20 seconds and think about your response. But in this format, it's helpful just to have a little bit of time just to gather your thoughts. live interview, can say. Let me think about that for a second. Yeah.
Just organize your thoughts. So yeah. So it's a little bit like that. Yeah, exactly. And speaking of the interview, what can applicants expect if they're lucky enough to be invited to interview the real injury, the lot, the in-person interview, like we're talking. Yeah, no. And that's a point too, actually, because as you mentioned earlier, the video questions are, you know, that's part of your initial submission. And so everybody does have a new questions. And then we do, as we're reviewing that applications, then we invite people to interview.
And so the interviews are separate from it's not the video questions are no replacement for the interview. And interviews are, you we've been, we're currently in our first round as we're speaking and we are, we're extending those invitations as we speak. When you're invited to interview, assuming you're invited to interview, these are, we have 30, these are 30 minute interviews. The interviewer has only seen your resume. They have not read your full application ideas for these to as independent as possible.
which when I do interviews, I remind people you can talk about things you talk about in your application. It's all new information to me. And they are actually they're we, admissions staff do do some, it's mostly trained second year students who conduct these interviews as well as some recent alumni who were themselves interviewers and then staff. But I think the second years are the primary, they do most of these interviews. The interviews themselves are, again, pretty,
Pretty straightforward, they're not meant to be trick questions. They're structured in nature. We ask the same questions in the same order we want because we know that that is important for the fairness and the predictive nature of the interviews. If it's unstructured, then it really has no predictive value at all. And again, the questions are not meant to be tricks, not meant to of trip you up. But again, preparing for them, think about why you want to get an MBA, what you hope to do with it. Maybe a little bit about why you help.
and how you hope to contribute to our community. And then some behavioral questions again, as I mentioned before, the video questions, thinking about any sort of out experiences you've had in terms of some teamwork and challenges you've faced, overcoming obstacles, successes, those types of things. It's good to have those examples ready, the typical examples you would want you to think about for a job interview or an MBA interview. Sure. Okay. Good advice. Thank you very much for that. What are some common mistakes you see that applicants make in their applications?
Yeah, I think that's a question. feel when we talk about that, I think we might talk about that a little bit in the application guide too. We actually did add some, I don't know if anyone will, this will be a bonus, but like we do some videos then and I'm in there where I think we do talk about some mistakes. And I think a couple that I would point out, one is that you might hear from others as
It's not an uncommon thing, but it's a really significant thing is we do sometimes see candidates who try to present a candidacy that they think we're looking for in whatever dimension. they think, this and this happens at the other schools too. this is the finance school or the marketing school or the tech school or the operations school. And so I'm going to be...
that candidate. I don't think that helps you from, you know, from a game theory perspective. I think if you're making yourself look more like everybody else who's applying, that's not the way to differentiate yourself, but the, at a more fundamental level, it's, having done this for 20 years, it's very clear that you will position yourself best when you talk about things that really matter to you, that you really kind of.
present your truest self. When you're trying to present yourself as someone who's not who you really are, it kind of falls flat. And so I think there are fewer people who are doing that now than when I started. I think people understand that that's not a winning formula, but I think there are still some people who try to present the version of themselves that they think we want to see. So that's one. And then one other thing I can, I would say, is we often
It sounds counterintuitive, but I do tell people, try to embrace your mistakes, which isn't necessarily to lead with your mistakes. know, and there's no such thing as a perfect candidate. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. If there's a weaker part of your profile, you know, obviously there's no such thing as one size fits all advice. I can't say exactly how to do, you know, in every situation, but I would think about if you have a weakness, of helping us understand that maybe the optional information section is a place for that.
Helping contextualize it, helping us get past it as opposed to ignoring it and then having us maybe make more of it than is truly there. Right. I was just having nothing to do with admissions. There's this wonderful gift that we all have as human beings and it's called the ability to change. Yeah. And so A, there's providing context, as you mentioned. B, they're showing that
that's not really you. Either the circumstances that contributed to the decline in grades or whatever bump in life you had, weakness, no longer exists or that you've shown how to deal with them. And that is the gift of change. So I think, you your point is very well taken that if there is a blemish, a weakness, whatever you want to call it, something you're not so proud of in your profile, you know, yeah, you're going to present everything that's great about you.
but own the mistake, own the whatever it is. And like you say, provide the context and show that it doesn't really represent you. There's other stuff out there that's a much better representation of you. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. So that I think you put it very well and the idea of kind of learning and growing. I nobody's, if you were a perfectly formed human being, wouldn't be coming to get an MBA, right? You'd already know it all, but you're doing this for a reason. You're trying to grow by doing this. so.
How have you done that up till now? think that's a great way to put it. Right, sounds good. All right, so people who, I don't know if we call them made a mistake or had a weakness, but they're reapplying to Yale. Yeah. They are trying to grow, they're trying to change, they're trying to change an outcome. What advice do you have for them? Yeah, and we have a good number of candidates who do that. I want to say, I don't know this is exactly right, if this is current information, but I think about 10 % of our applicants are reapplicants, so it's not an uncommon thing.
And that was, what is there, is there acceptance rate comparable or higher? you know? It's historically it's been comparable. So there's no stigma or bias against re-applicants. It's roughly comparable to first time applicants. And usually we actually, you know, we will invite people to seek feedback. And so we will give you feedback over the summer between your previous application and your subsequent application, or if you apply in the next year, sometimes you will wait more than one year. But we will give you feedback for you to work on. And I guess that's in the vein of kind of
kind of miss like learning and growing, know, that's a good sign. Regardless of what the outcome, if you take the feedback and try to work with it, that's always a good sign. And so, the, what I tend to tell re-applicants is think about your second application or third, we have people apply three times and sometimes the third time is the charm, but think about that as a continuation of your previous application.
In the sense that we're not necessarily going to look at them side by side or we're not necessarily going to go back and look at the previous one. But although we might refer to it if we need to. But you know there, I guess there are kind of two extremes. You can either just submit the same application and kind of hope that you're lucky you do. Your outcome is better this time or we have some people who do that. That seems like not quite the recipe for success. And then the other extreme. We have people who like.
are so radically different, you don't even recognize them. And they say before they wanted to go on private equity and now they wanna go in, start a nonprofit, you're like, what happened? And so I think you wanna think about the applications extension. It's not gonna be exactly the same as a previous one, but it can be an expansion of or a build out of the previous application. So can they assume that you're gonna look at the previous application therapy applicant?
Not, you know, it's interesting. We used to more consistently look at a previous application. Now we don't do it as consistently. We treat it as its own, but we will refer back at times. So I think you can assume that we might look at it. Okay. Not that we know that we're like that you're not don't like refer to your previous application as though we're kind of like it's a dialogue with the two applications. Yeah. Should be a new application. Okay.
And let's take a different group of people, not people applying this cycle, but people looking ahead to apply in fall 2025 or 2026. What advice would you give that group of applicants? So the people, again, people applying maybe a year from now or beyond. Exactly. They're working. I I think to the extent you're starting to think about the process, first of all, congratulations, because you're very early on the game. And I think that's always good. There are lots of different.
pieces of investment give for different aspects of the kind of the exploration process. But one of things I would think about is have conversations, do some research, talk to students, talk to alumni, family, friends, colleagues who've been to business school, whether the specific schools you're interested in or think you're interested in, in or more generally, it's helpful to know why they went, what they got out of it. You could start to learn about sort of the just
the maybe some specific aspects of the schools, just just having conversations about the NBA, what it can do, is always a good thing we have. And I know other schools do as well. We have student ambassadors who will talk about their experience and share what their what their life is like here at Yale, here in New Haven. And those are always helpful. If we have events, we have a virtual virtual event, so you don't have to go anywhere. If you want to come to campus, you can, but you don't have to. But there are lots of ways to engage. And so doing that research, I think, is can be very helpful.
Right. Okay, great. Great advice. What would you have liked me to ask you? gosh, I was pretty comprehensive. We touched on a lot of things. I'm trying to think if there's anything. I mean, I guess one thing I would say in the sort of maybe in the vein of the background information and kind of the context and the behavioral assessment trying to expand opportunity, we have done a number of things to try to be more expansive and to kind of open the doors here at Yale to a wider range. And one thing that we've
I guess two things we've done this year are increased our expanded fee waiver application fee waiver program to over 700 schools that have about 35 % or higher of Pell eligible students. So really kind of to open up that opportunity. And we actually just launched a new Aspire fellowship program. So scholarships for incoming students who have overcome significant challenges.
And that's, we're going to offer $5 million through that program. So we're really trying to do what we can to, as I think when we announced the Aspire, think one of the things I said, which I believe is, you know, talent is everywhere, but opportunity doesn't always match talent. And we're trying to close that gap as much as we can. So those are a couple of things we've been doing this current cycle to try to further those efforts. Great.
Well, Bruce, I to thank you so much for joining me today. Where can listeners and potential applicants learn more about Yale SOM's MBA program? Yeah, so I definitely on our website, yale.som.edu is great. You mentioned the application guide for those who are specifically interested in applying. We did put a lot of effort into that, so hopefully that's helpful. I would recommend that. And then obviously you can always email us at MBA.
dot admissions at yale.edu or have it engaged directly. Okay, great. Well, we're going to include links to the show notes at ximpp.com slash 598 to the sites that Bruce just mentioned, including the guide, as well as two related articles and show notes. Listen, thank you too for joining Bruce Delmonaco and me for our 598th episode. If you find the show worthwhile, I have a suggestion for you. Tell your MBA applicant friends. They'll thank you and so do I. Quick reminder, take our quiz at accepted.com/MBA
It's free and it will give you a chance to see if you have a solid approach to your MBA application. Plus it also links to additional resources. Take the quiz at accepted.com/MBA. Thanks again for coming. This is Admission Straight Talk produced by Accepted and I am your host, Linda Abraham. I'll talk to you again soon.