Meet The MBA Class Of 2022
Maria |
May 11, 2022

This is the time of year when MBA students from schools and institutions all across the world are graduating – finishing their MBA journey after years of preparation and study –  and heading out into the world to do the “big things” that they set out to get an MBA for.  

Poets & Quants profiles the ‘best and brightest’ graduates each year based on a nomination process from schools and then an internal selection process with input from Deans and Faculty.  

On this week’s episode of Business Casual, John, Maria, and Caroline review this year’s list (100 Best & Brightest MBAs: Class of 2022), pick their favorites, and highlight their stories! 

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.270] – John

Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co host Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich Vila. This is the time of the year for a lot of joyous celebration. It’s a time when people graduate from college and universities all over the world. And of course, we are looking at who is coming out of the business schools today. And we do an annual feature. I think it’s one of the fun things that we do every single year. Very compelling, and we call it the best and brightest of well, in this case, 2022. So what we do is we go out to the top business schools in this year. We went out to 75 different business schools and asked them to nominate graduates who are representative of the class as a whole and were among the very best that they’re graduating. 73 of the schools responded with nominations. All told, over 230 students were nominated. We actually grade those profiles and statements from Deans and faculty members on the students to pick the top 100. And I think if anything, what the list always shows and the profiles that are pretty extensive on each graduate is just a wide variety and diversity of the MBA student population.

 

[00:01:49.130] – John

In this case, there were 56 women and 44 men chosen, so women outnumbered the men. In terms of the 100 best and brightest, 63 of the candidates were born in the US, with another 24 already holding advanced degrees. There are eight military veterans on the list. Mckinsey and Company again ranked as the largest hire of best and brightest talent. They employed six of the 100. Deloitte got five. Banning Company and BCG, each added in four. And then a wide range of companies got more than one. Accenture, Amazon, Apple, Credit Suisse, Johnson Johnson, Microsoft, Starbucks and Salesforce. And when you look at the profiles, one thing becomes very clear, the power of the MBA degree to help one transition from one career to another. There are people who gone from Apple to Amazon, from Ups to Deloitte, from Major League Baseball to Dick Sporting Goods to First Republic Bank to Goldman Sachs, people who have gone from PNG to Bain and Company. It’s really a fascinating look at the students. And also we ask them for their advice. This is, I think, a really cool part of the profile. We asked them for insights into why they think they got into the schools that they got into and what kind of gave them an edge.

 

[00:03:27.420] – John

And if you’re out there and you’re thinking about going to a business school program, you might want to just comb through these profiles and see what kind of advice they’re giving. Now, I’ve asked each of us to pick a few of the graduates that were featured and talk a little bit about them and kind of what they represent in one way or another. And Caroline, I think you picked obviously, you’re our international cohost, and you naturally picked three people from international schools. Why don’t you go through one of yours?

 

[00:04:04.140] – Caroline

Sure. Yes. So the first thing I’d like to highlight is a young woman from Saudi Arabia called Maram Albuqueri. She’s at Esade Business school in Spain. And she jumped out to me because she is a young mother with two children. I think she’s a single parent. She’s lived in eight countries already and she has two careers. So quite mind boggling how she manages to double so many things. So, in fact, she is corporate finance executive at Saudi Aramco, where she’s closed a $2 billion deal. Quite extraordinary achievement. PreMBA. I believe that she’s sponsored by Saudi Aramco, and they’re very good at picking the best and brightest from the country. So that’s a wonderful credential for her to have. And so she’ll go back and work at Saudi Aramco post MBA. So in addition to being a brilliant young professional and single mother of two, she’s also very passionate about football. So she became the chairwoman of Saudi Arabia’s first female football club, soccer to the American audience. But elsewhere in the world, we often refer to it as football. And she has at business school, she’s become the coach to the men’s soccer team. And her goal is to become a board member of the Saudi Arabia Football Federation.

 

[00:05:36.950] – Caroline

I thought she’s wonderful. She’s doing so much. I can’t quite imagine juggling being an MBA student with being a mother of two, as well as having been so active and on campus with football. And so I think she’s really someone to watch. I’m excited to see what she’ll do in the future.

 

[00:05:56.750] – John

And that’s an extraordinary story because as we know, women in Saudi Arabia have a very difficult time. And for her to break out of the pack and accomplish all that she has as a mom, no less, in a very elite MBA program is just astonishing to me. That’s such an inspiring story.

 

[00:06:19.130] – Caroline

Yes. She must be a remarkable person. So fascinating story. And as you say, someone who really stands out and has sort of broken the mold of what might have been expected of her otherwise.

 

[00:06:30.960] – John

Yeah, that’s fantastic. I stumbled across a guy at the Cornell school graduating this year, Brandon Carnell. He’s from Levittown, Pennsylvania. And what I like about him is I mentioned this earlier, is how people use the MBA to transition into whole new field. So he had been a consultant at Deloitte. He worked in the strategy and analytics part of the organization. And he’s using his MBA to go to Apple as a program manager. He interned at Apple during the summer, which obviously he got through Cornell. He was the President of the high tech club at the school. And you look at his involvement at the school, and it’s just remarkable. And it’s clear to me that he’s not only an exceptional young man, but more importantly, he’s made already at the school an incredible contribution. Besides being President of the high tech club. He was an interviewer in the Johnson admissions group. He was a Johnson board fellow. He was co vp of events at the Jewish Business Association. He was a big red tech strategy commercialization fellow. I don’t even know what that means, but it’s impressive. He was a mentor for strategic product and marketing immersion.

 

[00:07:48.810] – John

He was a teaching assistant on a course called Designing Data Products and a teaching assistant on a course called Business Strategy. And it just tells me, wow, this guy was actively involved in helping Johnson, the school, become the best community it possibly could be. And here he is going off to Apple, his sort of dream job. He said this opportunity to work at Apple fulfilled his dream in spades. And he’s so excited to start this summer. And I can only imagine that this guy has just such an incredible feature ahead of Future of Hatepin Maria, who stood out to you?

 

[00:08:29.450] – Maria

Yeah. Obviously, everyone was really impressive. But for me, Jen Burka at the Yale School of Management really stood out because she actually started or is in the process of starting and launching the school’s first real impact investing fund, which for me was really interesting because Yale is a school that we all associate with the social enterprise sector. And I know that they have done a lot with impact investing in terms of having clubs and events. But it was a little surprising to me, honestly, that they didn’t actually have a fund where people could get hands on practice and experience. And so I thought it really took a lot of initiative for her to try to develop the fund. And then the little article overview of her, it details all of the steps she had to go through to launch the fund. And so it’s really, you know, a lot of tenacity. This is not just a regular club because it actually involves real money. And so I was really impressed with the amount of tenacity that she has because I don’t think she’s going to be a beneficiary necessarily of the club because I think it’s going to start or really get going after she has left.

 

[00:09:33.070] – Maria

But I was really impressed with the amount of effort she put in to improve the lives of the forthcoming generations of Yale students.

 

[00:09:40.250] – John

Yeah, that sounds terrific. That really does. Carolyn, I know you have a couple of others as well.

 

[00:09:45.190] – Caroline

I do. So of course, I was very interested to see which fellow Brits were on the list. So I have picked out James Cochran Diet, who is at London Business School. So he’s someone else who has a lot of different things to his profile. Quite fascinating. So he’s a graduate from Durham, which is a top British University where he studied history and international relations. And then he went into the military. So he traveled to a lot of different places, had some very interesting responsibilities in the British Army. I thought it was quite fun to read that he commanded a division of 90 horse mounted ceremonial guards for the official celebrations for Her Majesty the Queen. So, you know, he must be a very safe pair of hands, right? Because they’re not going to take any chances with that. That’s a very important event. And so prior to joining Lbs, he also works at KPMG in the global cybersecurity team. Critical experience there and very Hot topic as well. And I’m sure that brings an interesting extra dimension to what he can share with his fellow classmates. Whilst he was at KPMG, his team set a Guinness World Record for a marathon learning initiative where they were teaching 1200 children about online safety.

 

[00:11:10.590] – Caroline

So having four kids myself, I appreciate his efforts to make sure that kids are safe online. And so he is an aspiring entrepreneur. So he’s been involved in a lot of entrepreneurial related activities and internships while he’s at Lbs. And he’s interested in clean tech. He’s currently working on a clean tech idea to help solve the UK’s plastic waste predicament. And he is leading the school’s military and business club, which is the largest MBA military club in Europe. So obviously the military candidates are often military students are often known for their leadership skills. If he’s leading the military club, you know that he’s really very highly regarded as a leader. He’s also a military reservist and continues to do that. So, for example, he is on the monitoring board at one’s Worthy of Prison, which is a big prison in the UK. And he led a project with the National Health Service during the Pandemic. And he helped to build the UK’s largest ICU hospital from scratch within less than two weeks or within two weeks. So quite extraordinary the number of things that he’s done. And I think it’s great to see someone like him at London Business School.

 

[00:12:27.310] – Caroline

I know that sometimes London Business School actually they struggle to get candidates from the UK because often the UK candidates are going abroad. And so I know that they are very pleased to get the top candidates from the UK who choose to study there, rather than going to other schools in the US or in Seattle and so on. And he talks as well his profile about how much he’s enjoyed being an ambassador for the city as a Londoner himself with his very international classmates. So I can see how he’s someone who would really stand out at London Business School and be very much appreciated as a classmate and also by the administration. I’ve always contributions to the school.

 

[00:13:12.720] – John

Well, you listen to those accomplishments already and you wonder if you’re near mortal like me, how could I ever get in? But I need to point out too that people we’re talking about are really incredibly extraordinary and that’s why they’ve been chosen not only by their schools in being nominated for this annual feature that we do, but then selected by us as one of the top 100 in the world. I am really very eager to see people who come from generally undergraduate majors where you might not expect them in this school. And there’s a woman, Lulu Carter, who is graduating from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, who was a history major in school, actually at Dartmouth College. But what I really like about her is that she has a passion for growing women’s professional sports and basically helping women and girls in the US gain greater access to professional sports. And she had been a consultant with a boutique in New Orleans, of all places called Trip Wise. And it’s a small growth consulting firm. She applied to Tuck. They accepted her. And what was interesting to me is how she kind of tailored her MBA experience to fulfill that passion to increase access to professional sports by women and girls.

 

[00:14:49.700] – John

First thing she did, in fact, was she participated in a first year project with Under Armor that was focused on high school female athletes. Then for her internship, she ended up at Major League Baseball, where she did a five year demographic analysis of baseball attendance, helped secure and interview the chief marketing officer of the MBA, who happens to be a woman for Tux Women in Business conference keynote. She also did a part time internship during her second year with the leading research and consulting agency in sport called Future Sport and Entertainment. And basically she literally talked her way into a job as a senior manager of strategy now at Dick’s Sporting Goods. So I find it really fascinating that this young professional has been able to kind of customize her MBA program at Dartmouth Tuck and tailored in a way to allow her to get a job where she can actually pursue her passion of increasing access to professional sports for women and girls. It’s a great story. Okay, now, Maria, who’s your next one?

 

[00:16:11.130] – Maria

My next one is Suhani Gelota from Stanford GSB, who I mean, talk about a slacker. In addition to getting her MBA at Stanford, she’s also getting a PhD at Stanford Medical School because really lazy. Before business school, she started a nonprofit in the slums of India. And one of the coolest things about her is that she actually won an award from Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, where they spoke about topics like slum governance. So I thought that she was just incredible because I think a lot of people in the applicant pool talk about social enterprise or they say things like, well, even though right now I work at a hedge fund, one of these days, if you let me into your business school, then I’m going to start then I’m going to have a change of heart and I’m going to start a nonprofit. But then you find people like this who have actually done so much. And so I love that she’s actually walking the talk because she’s going to continue to while she continues to get her PhD work on developing yet another social enterprise that is spinning out from her existing social enterprise.

 

[00:17:20.540] – Maria

And I think it’s also interesting to note that she was a Knight Hennessy Scholar, which, as if getting into Stanford business school isn’t difficult enough, a Knight Hennessy Scholar is essentially you get a full ride. It’s incredibly difficult to get. I don’t know how many they give each year. I believe Derek Bolton, who was the former head of admissions for Stanford, is now, or at least as of recently, he was leading the Night Hennessey selection process. And so just the fact that she was chosen for that is probably a pretty good indicator. So I think we’re going to see some amazing things from her, which we’ve already seen, but I think she’s going to continue to be someone who really does improve the world, change the world in a positive way.

 

[00:17:59.230] – John

Yeah, that’s really amazing. And another Royal connection. Caroline had a Royal connection, too, from London Business school.

 

[00:18:07.560] – Caroline

The Queen keeps on popping up.

 

[00:18:12.890] – John

Queen, you also picked someone from NUS, the National University where you spent some of your early career in Singapore?

 

[00:18:21.920] – Caroline

I did, yeah. I spent most of my time studying at INSEAD in Singapore. And then when I worked at in Seattle, part of my team was in Singapore. So we traveled there a lot. And actually, this young woman jumped out to me as well because she’s from Indonesia. And when I graduated from in Seattle, I went to work in Indonesia for a couple of years with the World Bank Group. So I have great affection for her country. And so this is Aileya Jati Safira. She’s at NUS National University of Singapore. She was working in private equity in Jakarta before the MBA, and that’s quite a male dominated industry. So for a young Muslim woman getting into PE, she’s already a mold breaker. She’s also married and has a child. And for young Muslim women, mobilizing your family to follow you off to business school outside of your home country is not always the easiest thing. So she’s definitely someone who knows how to make things happen. Right. And she’s become President of the NUS MBA Student Council. In fact, she’s the first woman President. She also runs a jewelry business on the side. And knowing Indonesia, they have so many wonderful handicrafts and such beautiful things that you can get there.

 

[00:19:44.610] – Caroline

So I’m delighted that she’s doing that. And she’s looking at expanding her sales internationally. I’m sure that she’s got a lot of potential there. She worked for her internship with an organization called Angels of Impact, which is a social impact investment firm supporting Indigenous women led community based enterprises across Asia. Pack. So very worthwhile endeavor. So again, someone who’s doing a lot of interesting things, very worthwhile things. I think it’s inspiring. How many of these young people are really looking to have a very positive impact and have already been doing that in their lives and continue to do that during their MBA, and that’s a key part of what they want to achieve post MBA. So again, I think she’s someone who says that her career goal is to establish events that employs young Indigenous talents from Indonesia. So someone who’s really looking to leverage her talents for the benefit of people who may not have the advantages that she has. So someone I very much admire and look forward to seeing how her career evolves.

 

[00:21:00.950] – John

That’s terrific. I wonder if, Caroline, you have three candidates that you talked about here, who he profiles in the top 100. How similar are these three to the people you tend to work with and help get into business school?

 

[00:21:16.990] – Caroline

Yeah, very similar, actually. And that’s one of the things that I love and I’m sure Maria loves about the work that we do is that you work with an incredibly diverse range of people who are doing extraordinary things and very different things. And so that is what I really love about my job and the fascinating stories that they have to tell and something that I really appreciate. But what I do compared to when I was admissions director, Lindsey, when you’re admissions director, we were working in the admissions office. You are getting through so many files. It’s a constant production line. You don’t have much time to spend on any individual candidates at all. How fascinating they are. You’ve just got to keep moving on and plowing through. And with the work that we do now, I get to really get to know these people quite well over several months, often. So that’s a really fun part of my job, is to get to spend a lot more time and understanding the incredible backgrounds and what makes them tick and helping them pull out the elements that can really make them stand out to business schools.

 

[00:22:23.750] – Caroline

And it’s very inspiring the things that people have achieved and often the challenges that they have overcome. So that’s a really fun part of my job.

 

[00:22:33.310] – John

Yeah. And I think that really comes through in these 100 profiles. If you want to know essentially who you’re going to be at school with, I think going through these profiles will give you a very good impression of who is going to be sitting next to you in the class, because there is a universal nature to these profiles in terms of the top MBA schools and the kind of people that they attract and what people do with their education once they graduate. Another would stand out to me was this woman. Her name is Annabelle Reeves, and I’m just going to say he’s graduating from Southern Methodist University, the Cox School of Business with an MBA. A school. It’s not the top 25, but she’s actually using your MBA to move from First Republic Bank, where she was a credit analyst to Goldman Sachs in their private wealth management organization. And this is a person who majored in psychology at UT Austin. So another sort of unlikely undergraduate major with a business career and then an MBA and moving into Goldman Sachs, one of the Premier investment banking firms in the world and a really cool job.

 

[00:23:57.120] – John

And I’m sure she would not have been able to do that without the MBA. And I think that just speaks to the power of the MBA to transform one’s life and to help them achieve their dream. Now, Maria, I think you have one final candidate to highlight. Who is it going to be?

 

[00:24:13.380] – Maria

Yeah. One more person who caught my eye was Chikezi Anatchu from Arizona State’s, WP Carey School of Business. And I think the reason that he jumped out to me was because, first of all, he had already gone to school to be a lawyer. Now, oftentimes when people are lawyers and they try to make the jump to an MBA program, it can be somewhat challenging. But I like that he sort of gives hope to people that as long as you have a really well thought out reason for getting the MBA, that it can indeed be a great switch. And then another reason I wanted to highlight him is that he will be going to McKinsey as an associate after business school. And I think we spoke in on this podcast before about how it’s not necessarily the school that makes the person, it’s the person that makes the school or in this case, the person who gets the job offer. And so even though Arizona State is not necessarily this posh school, that is sort of the most famous one for sending people to elite jobs like this, I think this is just further evidence that as long as you not get out of the park during that case interview and as long as you do well during the interview process, you don’t have to go to a top three, top five, even top ten school to get some of these very coveted postmba positions.

 

[00:25:31.070] – Maria

This guy is yet more living proof of that adage. So Congratulations, Tikezi. You’re really an inspiration.

 

[00:25:39.050] – John

Yeah, I love that story. And as I mentioned, the SMU Cox MBA, who’s going to Goldman Sachs. That’s another you might not have expected that, but this just tells you you don’t have to go to Harvard, Stanford and Wharton and Seattle London Business School to achieve your dream. There are a lot of other schools out there you can stand out and you can get pretty much whatever job you want if you are totally into it and deserving of it. All right. Well, look, take a look. I love this feature. This is one of my favorite things that we do every year. It’s the best and brightest of 2022. You can find it on the website. 100 incredible, compelling stories that are also inspiring people who got into these schools are graduating really at the top of their classes and going off to do wonderful things. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual our weekly podcast.

 

Meet The MBA Class Of 2022
Maria |
May 11, 2022

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Well hello everyone, this is John Byrne with Poets and Quants, welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Today we have a special guest, Heidi Hillis from Fortuna Admissions. She is based in Australia, is a senior expert coach for Fortuna, and has three degrees, all from Stanford, a BA in English literature, that’s my degree, an MA in Russian studies, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business. And we have Heidi here to discuss some really fascinating research. Here’s what Fortuna did. They dug into the last Two class profiles of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

That’s the class of ‘23 and the class of ‘24. They looked up all these folks on LinkedIn to identify a little bit more about their backgrounds, including their former employers and their places of undergraduate education to come up with an incredible analysis. Heidi, welcome.

[00:00:46] Heidi Hillis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:48] John Byrne: Heidi, what is, what are the big takeaways from your deep dive discovery?

[00:00:54] Heidi Hillis: It’s hard to know even where to start. I think there’s a quite a few interesting kind of trends that we’ve seen that have taken place over the years. We were mentioning before the call that traditionally there hadn’t been, 10 years ago, if you’d looked, you wouldn’t have seen so many tech companies represented, but now there’s a big presence of tech companies who are feeding a lot of these MBA programs in Stanford in particular.

I think that the thing that was really interesting was, looking, not just at where the companies that were feeding the students, the applicants to Stanford. When they were working there, when they were applying, but actually the paths that they took prior to their current job.

So how many people were working, if you look at McKinsey, for example, or Bain and BCG, those are obviously companies that feed a lot of applicants to the program, but we found 20%, which seemed to be normal of, the class came from consulting, but if you actually look into the numbers in their background, You would see that actually 37 percent of these two classes had worked at McKinsey sometime prior, or actually in consulting, so it was, it’s The kind of the patterns that are behind, what you would normally see in terms of what Stanford tells us.

So you get a sense of the paths that people have taken. And so that’s something that was really interesting to see.

[00:02:16] John Byrne: Absolutely. And of course, this is this analysis goes so far beyond what any applicant would learn by simply looking at the class profile that the school up because, this level of detail is never available to people.

[00:02:33] Heidi Hillis: No, and yeah, for example, you could see that, Stanford will say that they have around, each year around 50 percent of applicants are international, which is a great statistic and gives you lots of hope if you are an international student. But when you dig into the numbers, you actually understand that.

75 percent of the people who get into Stanford actually went to a U. S. University. So even if you’re international, it does have does seem to have kind of an advantage of having been educated in the U. S. That seems to be something that they look for. However, I think. The concentration of universities in the U.

S. that are feeding to Stanford is something also that, if you’re looking at it, you might find a little bit dis, disconcerting. There’s a few programs that are really, obviously the top. Programs as you would expect places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the Ivies but if you look at the international universities very diverse from all over the world, really lots of people from different places, which is also really interesting.

[00:03:38] John Byrne: Yeah I tell you, one of the things that struck me in the data is how consistent it is. 10 years ago, we did the same exercise at Stanford and a bunch of other. Schools from Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and talk and a few others and back 10 years ago, we found that 25. 2 percent of the class of 2013 were from Ivy League colleges.

And the Ivy League 8 schools, not including Stanford. And if you included Stanford, it would have been 32. 6%. So now, let’s move forward to your data. And in 23, 30. 7 percent went to Ivy League schools, even above the 25. 2. And in 24, 27. 9 percent went to Ivy League schools. So it looks like Stanford has gotten even a little bit more elitist than it was.

Yeah,

[00:04:41] Heidi Hillis: It’s, it is it’s what the data says, right? Obviously, this is a sample. We have 80 percent of the two classes. So we don’t know where those other people went. And that might skew the data a little bit in another direction. But it is, if you look at there’s 15 schools, that include the Ivy’s and then you have UC Berkeley and obviously Stanford that really are contributing, 49 percent of the class of 23, 47. 3 percent of the class of 24. So that is a pretty heavy concentration and But, if you actually look into the data, you see a lot of people also, each of these is actually an individual story.

You see a lot of people who come from other schools as well. So it’s not like you have to give up hope if you come from a different school. I see a lot of individual stories that, from the whole range of U. S. schools that really are feeding into Stanford. So I think what the data doesn’t also tell you, unfortunately, is how many of these Of people from these backgrounds are actually applying.

So

[00:05:39] John Byrne: good point.

[00:05:40] Heidi Hillis: It’s it’s hard to know. And sometimes I think people this is. A path that a lot of people who go to these schools plan to take from the very beginning. So I would see, it would be interesting to know that I don’t know that we will ever find that out. But, um, that’s something to keep in mind as well.

[00:05:56] John Byrne: Yeah. And that’s a fair point. Because how reflective are these results of the applicant pool reflective of an elitist attitude probably a combination of if I had to guess, but, it is what it is, and these institutions obviously are great filters, so you come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and you go to Harvard or Stanford or Penn, and you pass through a fine filter, and it makes you less of a admissions risk than if you went to, frankly, the University of Kentucky and worked for a company that no one knows of.

That’s just the reality of elite MBA admissions, right?

[00:06:40] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. And so you will see that the people who are not going, you’ll see a lot of the people who you would, the profiles that you would expect, the Harvard undergrad that then goes to Goldman that then was working at a PE firm.

That’s a really typical profile that you’ll see. But you’ll also see some really, unique and interesting ones, which I think, Okay. Helps you understand that if you don’t have that path, you also have a real chance at these schools, and maybe even more of a chance, again, not knowing, how many of those Goldman P.

E. Harvard grads are applying. So I’m thinking of the guy that I saw who he went to UPenn undergrad, studied engineering, started out a kind of pretty typical path working in private equity, but then made a big pivot to work for go to Poland where he was working in a real estate investment firm and the head coach of the Polish lacrosse team.

So you have really interesting profiles like that, that you can see that. aren’t necessarily taking that typical path. And sometimes that really does help you stand out.

[00:07:42] John Byrne: True. Maria, what surprised you most about the data?

[00:07:48] Maria Wich-Vila: Wow. I think we already covered, the, one of the biggest ones was the number, the percentage of people who would had some sort of either their undergraduate or graduate education within the United States.

Intuitively, I had felt that was true. And sometimes when I try to, give some honest, tough love to applicants from certain countries, and they’ll say, oh, but Maria, I think you’re being a little too pessimistic. After all, X percent of the applicants at these schools are international, and Y percent are from a certain geography internationally.

I’ll say yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all Solely from that area. A lot of them are, do have significant international educational experiences. I think another, speaking of the international piece the percentage of people who had significant international work experience as well was something else that really jumped out at me.

Because it would signal to me that Stanford really does value this global perspective both within probably its domestic applicants and also its international applicants. So I thought that was also a really interesting piece of data that jumped out at me.

[00:08:52] John Byrne: Now remind me what percentage was that?

[00:08:56] Heidi Hillis: People who are international

[00:08:58] John Byrne: who have had international work experience.

[00:09:01] Heidi Hillis: I think it was 30%.

[00:09:02] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty

[00:09:04] John Byrne: impressive.

[00:09:04] Caroline Diarte Edwards: 30%, which I was thrilled to see. As well as coming from in Seattle and Europe. Obviously the international schools put a heavy emphasis on international experience and I hadn’t fully appreciated that. A school like Stanford would also.

really value that to the same extent. And it’s great to see that candidates are making the effort to get outside of the U. S. and get international experience because I think you gain so much from that exposure. And you bring more to the classroom if you’ve got that experience. I know that both Maria and Heidi.

I’ve worked outside of the home countries as well. Pre MBA and I think that you just have so much more to contribute to the whole experience. And it was great to see that 30%.

[00:09:50] John Byrne: What else struck you, Caroline?

[00:09:53] Caroline Diarte Edwards: We talked about the concentration of academic institutions, and I was also surprised about the concentration in employers.

So while there is a very long list of employers where the students have worked pre MBA when you dig into the career paths that they’ve taken there is some interesting concentration. Heidi had noted that the reports that There are 26 companies that account for nearly one third of the class in terms of where they were working right before Stanford.

But when you look at their whole career history, those same 26 companies represent over 60 percent of the class. So that is, yeah, that’s quite extraordinary that so many of the class have experience of working at quite a short list of companies.

[00:10:46] Heidi Hillis: I think that’s reflective of, if you really think about it, you have a lot of these companies.

You’re talking about the Goldmans and the Morgan Stanley and McKinsey that have really large programs that recruit out of undergrad that are really training grounds for. A lot of people that then on to do, work in industry or go on to work for in finance in particular, a lot of people starting out at some of these bulge bracket banks and then going into.

Private equity or smaller firms. So the diversity within finance in terms of where they were working prior to MBA is quite large compared to consulting because there just aren’t as many consulting firms, but a lot of people in financing, a lot of different firms, but they, a lot of them really do start out in these training programs, these analyst programs that are so big and popular.

[00:11:34] John Byrne: Yeah, true. And looking back, I did this exercise as well. The feeder companies to Stanford 10 years ago in the class of 2023, 22. 8 percent from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and your data, 22. 5 percent work there. Incredible consistency over a 10 year period. When you look at the top six employers 10 years ago, they were McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JP.

Morgan Chase. They accounted alone for 34 percent of all the students in the class of 20, 2013 at Stanford. In your data for 23 and 24 they account for 29. 8%, just a few percentage points less. So remarkable consistency. And I think you’re right, Heidi, this is a function of the fact that these firms bring in a lot of people who are analysts and actually expect them after 3 to 5 years to go to a top MBA school.

So there’s a good number of them in the applicant pool to choose from and let’s face it, they’re terrific candidates.

[00:12:46] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. I think another pool of really terrific candidates that you see, and I don’t know what the 2013 data was saying, but is the US military, which is really, I think, again, something that I felt having worked with lots of military candidates myself, understand that, Yeah, intuitively, I would have expected, but to see it in the data is actually really interesting.

You just see Stanford in particular, I think, is really looking for leadership potential, and it’s so hard to show that as an analyst, as a consultant, but as in the military, these people have such incredible leadership experience that it really helps them to stand out.

[00:13:23] John Byrne: Yeah. And let’s tell people what the data shows.

How many out of us military academies,

[00:13:28] Heidi Hillis: In all in total, we had, 20 over the two years. So that’s in the two classes that we found. So that’s, a pretty large number. And they come from all the different academies, right? So you’ll find them from different, not academies, in the army, navy and the marines.

So you’ll see that. And you also see quite a few, in the data we’ll, we see a lot from the Israeli military as well, but that’s actually a little bit difficult to because every Israeli does go into the military. So it’s they have that in their background. Any Israeli candidate would have Israeli military background as well, but again, that’s.

Place that people can really highlight their leadership. So you had eight people from who had been, who were Israeli and obviously had military experience where they were able to demonstrate significant impact and leadership prior to MBA.

[00:14:18] John Byrne: Yeah. In fact, 10 years ago, roughly 2%. of the class went to either West Point or the U.

S. Naval Academy. Good number of people actually from the military. Maria, any other observations?

[00:14:34] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, I was also surprised at the fact that within those top employers And when we look at the tech companies, it was Google and Facebook and Meta with a pretty large showing. Google was actually the fourth largest employer after the MBBs and, but then, I was expecting there to be an equal distribution amongst those famous large cap technology companies.

So I, I would have expected even representation amongst Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. And yet. Apple and Amazon only had one or two people each versus Google at 25. So I thought that was really fascinating and it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s a function of maybe Google and Meta might give their younger talent more opportunities to lead impactful projects, perhaps.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe Apple and Amazon perhaps are more hierarchical. And maybe don’t give their younger talent so many opportunities, but I was really surprised by that. I would have expected a much more even distribution amongst the those famous those famous tech companies.

[00:15:40] John Byrne: Yeah. You’re right. And I crunched the numbers on the percentages and Google took three and a half percent of the two classes and that’s better than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase. Facebook had 2. 7 percent and Microsoft at 1. 5, and I was shocked at Amazon because, Amazon is widely known as the largest single recruiter of MBAs in the past five years.

At one point, they were recruiting a thousand MBAs a year, but in, in one sense, maybe Amazon quite doesn’t really have the prestige. For Stanford MBAs who might rather work elsewhere, I think that might be is, you look at the employment reports at a lot of the other schools and Amazon is number one at a number of schools and very low percentage of people from Amazon going to Stanford.

We don’t know, of course, how many. Leaving Stanford and going back to Amazon, but it can’t be that many.

[00:16:41] Heidi Hillis: I wonder if there’s something about just a proximity effect here. You have the plate, like the meta and Google just being so close to Stanford, maybe it just, attracts more people applying because they.

They’re almost on campus and maybe, just being Amazon all over the world and different places could be not attracting as many. I don’t know.

[00:17:03] John Byrne: Yeah, true. The other thing, the analysis shows, and this is what you also gather from the more public class profile is really the remarkable diversity of talent that a school like Stanford can attract year after year.

It is, it blows you away, really. The quality and the diversity of people despite the concentration of undergraduate degree holders or company employers, it’s it’s really mind boggling, isn’t it?

[00:17:33] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, they come from everywhere and really interesting paths and even the people I think that, have those kind of typical paths, you see a lot of diversity within them as well.

So I think, even if you’re coming from a Goldman or a McKinsey having lived in another country or gone to done a fellowship abroad or running a non profit on the side. These things are actually what helped them to stand out. But you do see some really interesting, I think, profiles, too, of people who’ve just done, you get a sense of what it would be like to be in the Stanford classroom.

People from really unique and different backgrounds. People who come from all different countries and lawyers, doctors people who have run, nonprofits in developing countries people running large programs for places like Heineken or Amazon too. But, it’s a real diversity of backgrounds.

[00:18:27] John Byrne: Now, Heidi, I wonder if one is an applicant. Is this discouraging to read and here’s why if I’m not from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and if I didn’t work for McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google am I at a disadvantage and should I even try? Some people look at the data and come away with that conclusion.

[00:18:52] Heidi Hillis: I think it’s a reality check for a lot of people. I think it’s just, it’s really, it just helps people understand, what it, the difficulty of this, why it’s so competitive, but I think that there is, again, behind the kind of the percentages, you do look at these individual profiles and I would get, I would actually take a lot of hope from it if I were looking, as an applicant, because especially if you are.

Maybe a little bit more of a big fish or small fish in a bigger pond or big fish in a smaller pond you go to Rice or you go to Purdue or, and you do really well, those are the people who, they’re definitely looking for that diversity of background as well as the international.

I think that’s really neat. think that, instead of looking at the data and saying, why not, why I shouldn’t even apply, it’s why not me look at these other profiles of people who have taken really unique paths that that do get in. So I think it is actually a Kind of a mix of both, it is a reality check for a lot of people, but it’s actually, there is so much diversity in the data as well.

I think also one thing that we haven’t really covered is about is just the prevalence of social impact in, that’s really taken hold of the class. I don’t, again, going back to your 2013 analysis, I’m not sure how easy it was to tell that, but a lot of you can see reflected in the both the types of organizations people are working for, but also their titles and the kinds of work that they’re doing that that there’s a huge 40 percent of the class of the two classes had some kind of social impact in their background.

Whether that’s, running their own nonprofit on the side or volunteering or. Running trans transformational kind of programs within companies that are, either in finance or consulting or in industry. That’s a big trend. I think that people can take heart from as well.

So if you’re working if you feel like you’re in an organization where you’re not getting the leadership that you. can use to highlight your potential for Stanford, that’s definitely a place you can go is working for in volunteer capacity for a non profit or on the board of a of some kind of foundation.

Those are the kinds of places that you can highlight your potential

[00:21:00] John Byrne: true. And I know we have a overrepresented part of every applicant pool at an elite business school are software engineers from India. And I wonder in your analysis, how many of them did you find from like the IITs?

[00:21:18] Heidi Hillis: That’s a good question. The IITs, it was again, it was one of these you have about 50 percent of classes internet, so 25 percent of the class. was educated outside of the US. The IITs are going to be up there. Let’s see from India, 2. 1 percent of the class came from India. So probably, I don’t know offhand exactly how many of those were IITs, but

[00:21:43] John Byrne: I’ve had a lot of them.

[00:21:45] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, probably a lot of them. Although I think, that’s the other thing is that people who come, to work with me from India, they feel like if they haven’t gone to IIT, then that’s going to be a disadvantage. But I think, you’ll find that there are, there’s representation of other universities as well.

Definitely.

[00:22:00] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I was just looking at the list of undergrad institutions. And for example, you’ve got Osmania University from Hyderabad. So it is not, it’s not all IIT. Okay.

[00:22:12] John Byrne: Yeah, exactly. And Caroline, 1 of the things about the institutions that are really represented here and that I don’t really see unless I missed it.

I didn’t see a Cambridge or an Oxford. Two of the best five universities in the world. And I wonder if that’s just a function of fewer people in the applicant pool or what? What do you think that could be about?

[00:22:36] Caroline Diarte Edwards: I had a look through the uk Institutions and you have got cambridge in there.

I think I also noticed. Bristol university there are a few different universities. So i’m aston university, which is not it’s not on a par with Oxford or Cambridge. So I think that speaks to the point that Heidi made that you don’t have to have been to an elite school to get into Stanford.

Aston is a good solid university, nothing wrong with Aston, but it’s not it’s not one of the top UK universities. So there’s definitely some interesting variety in the educational backgrounds of the students going to Stanford. And

[00:23:16] John Byrne: then, yeah, it is if you’re a big fish in a small pond, like Afton, you’ll you could still stand out in the pool.

[00:23:26] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely. There’s a lot of really interesting background, you have look hard on blue and you have Miami University and some really smaller universities abroad. I think. Again, it’s really, if you look at that, it does give you hope because it’s really what you do afterwards and if you, obviously, if you come from one of these schools, you probably want to be in the top, 5 percent of the graduating class, you want to show that you have the GPA that can support an academic background that they feel comfortable that you’ll be able to compete academically, but, and maybe that’s what you’re Offset by the, the GMA or the scores, you don’t know, we don’t have those on here.

But, um, the path post university really becomes much more important in those cases. What you’ve done since then where you’ve, how you’ve risen from starting at a entry level position to, running a division or heading a country group or something like that.

[00:24:21] John Byrne: And as far as Cordon Bleu goes, every good business program needs a Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake, right?

You want to eat well at those NBA parties, don’t you?

[00:24:32] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely.

[00:24:35] John Byrne: Maria, I’m sure that was true at Harvard.

[00:24:38] Maria Wich-Vila: I wasn’t the one doing the cooking but I certainly, I was certainly a member of the wine and cuisine society where I happily participated in the eating and consuming a part of that.

But to, to the point that we were just recently talking about. regarding being a big fish in a small pond. Not only have I seen it personally with applicants that I’ve worked with who did not attend these elite universities, but even many years ago, I attended a, an admissions conference where Kirsten Moss, who was the former head of admissions at Stanford, she actually told stories about how they’ve accepted people who even attended community college.

But within the context of that community college, they had really moved mountains. And she said that one of the things that they look for is, Within the context and the opportunities that you’ve been given, how much impact have you had? So maybe you don’t have an opportunity to go to Yale or MIT or IIT for your undergraduate, but whatever opportunity you have been given, have you grabbed that opportunity and really made the most of it and really driven change?

So she specifically called out, I believe, I believe there were two students that year at the GSB who had both started their educations, their higher educations at community college. Anything is possible. It really is about finding the people who, wherever they go, they jump in and make an impact.

[00:25:55] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that to that point, I think it can almost be a more difficult if you’ve gone to Harvard and then worked at one of these, gone on one of these paths because we know that there’s, that’s an overrepresented pool in the applicant pool to stand out among those to have had that, that pedigree sometimes can be a disadvantage, right?

If you haven’t done as much as you should have with that, or if you started at that high level to show that level of progress over the course of your career is actually a little bit more difficult. Okay. And coming from a community college and rising to, a country level manager in some places is actually puts you at a significant advantage, I would say.

[00:26:31] Maria Wich-Vila: Because it’s hard for those people, it’s hard for those people to stand out, but also I think some of them go on autopilot, right? I think some people are on this kind of achievement, elite achievement treadmill, where they’re not even really thinking about what do I want to do with my life?

They’re always reaching for whatever that next, what’s the best college to go to? It’s Harvard Princeton. Yeah. Okay. Now that I’m here, what’s the best employer to work for? It’s McKinsey, Bain, BCG and without actually perhaps stopping to think about what is my passion? What impact do I want to make in the world?

And so I feel sometimes those autopilot candidates, I feel a little bit bad for them because they’re doing everything quote unquote and yet sometimes when you speak with them, that passion just isn’t there. And I do think that may ultimately harm them in the very, very elite business school.

Admissions because business schools want people who are passionate because at the end of the day, in order to do hard things, you’re going to need passion at some point to get you through those low periods. And so I think that’s something business schools look for. And I do think that sometimes these.

These kind of autopilot candidates might sometimes be at a disadvantage.

[00:27:29] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that, to that point look in the data, when you look at it, you see so many people who’ve gone to McKinsey, Bain, Weasley, or Goldman, but then there’s a, you see a lot of success for people who’ve actually pivoted.

So those pivots that are post The second or third job really do show you that, if you’re if you get a candidate who’s coming from, still at McKinsey, okay, that’s fine. They have to be the top 5 percent of McKinsey, like they have to be going to get so many McKinsey applicants that the only the, you can look at the data in a couple ways.

One is, oh, my God, they took 12 people from McKinsey and the others. Oh, my God, they only took 12 people from McKinsey, right? That’s So if you want to be one of those 12, you have to be the top 12 in the world, right? Whereas if you’ve gone to McKinsey and then done an externship at a health care startup and then moved on to be a product manager at for health at Google, that kind of a path is definitely showing a little bit more, maybe risk taking, maybe ability to follow your passions.

So I think that. When I see candidates who come to me, for example, and they’re like, not thinking about applying now, but maybe in a year or two, I say, look for an externship, maybe think about pivoting out of one of these places and looking for some operational experience.

And because you see in the data that works.

[00:28:42] Maria Wich-Vila: And they’re doing themselves a service not only in terms of enhancing their admissions chances, but even just in terms of determining, what do I want to do with my career? If I do eventually want to go into industry, what functional role do I want to have?

What industry do I want to work in? So it’s, it actually benefits them in the long term to do that as well, even if they don’t go to business school. I think those secondments and externships and second job, post consulting jobs are extremely valuable. Totally agree with you.

[00:29:06] Caroline Diarte Edwards: And I’m sure they also bring more to the classroom as well.

I would think that’s also why Stanford is selecting some of those candidates, because not only have they worked at McKinsey, but they’ve also led a non profit in Africa or worked in private equity or whatever it is. So they have much more breadth that they can bring to the classroom. And I think that It’s seen as a very valuable contribution

[00:29:29] John Byrne: in Heidi.

Did you see that? The majority of the candidates to examined actually did work in more than one place, right?

[00:29:37] Heidi Hillis: Yes, most of them did. There were very few that, you see working at one place. And I would say that those are people that would have really risen through the ranks.

Someone who’s worked at Walmart and become, started in, I don’t know, in one state, but then to become a regional manager and things like that really are going to onto a global role. The people who have stayed at one place really have shown significant career progression within that.

And then the other people I think you do see a lot of movement. The big. The most typical would be from investment banking to private equity and then you do find in finance, there’s a little bit less kind of movement into other industries. You see a lot of people staying within finance, but within finance.

Yeah. Yeah. The other industries, especially consulting or other, tech, people are really moving into other places and it’s becoming, it is a little bit difficult. We have these categories that we’ve talked about, for example, healthcare, but it’s hard to categorize some of these companies.

Are they healthcare? Are they tech? There’s a lot of overlap. And so everything’s a little bit of tech in something nowadays. So whether it’s finance and fintech or education and ed tech or health care and health tech, these are all merging and combining. It’s hard to categorize them.

[00:30:53] John Byrne: So looking at the data here I wonder if you’ve seen your old classmates in the sense that these new people are very much like the people you went to school with at Stanford. I

[00:31:05] Heidi Hillis: put this out and it’s really interesting to a lot of my classmates downloaded the report and read it. And a lot of them came back and said, oh, boy, I would never get in now.

It’s these people are super impressive. I think that you see a lot of. It’s just become more and more competitive. And I think that with more information and more people every year applying, it is becoming really difficult. I think that you do see a lot of, I am encouraged by the diversity part of it that you see still Stanford.

I feel like they do take risks on some really interesting profiles and candidates that maybe some other schools are less likely to do. And so that’s what does give me. A lot of hope when I get some kind of really nontraditional candidate who wants to, their dream school is Stanford. I feel like, I say all the time, there’s a 6 percent chance.

You’re going to get in, but there’s 100 percent chance. You won’t get in if you don’t apply. So you’ve got to, you got to give it a go. And that’s, the attitude that we take to it.

[00:32:04] John Byrne: Indeed. So for all of you out there read Heidi’s article on our site, it’s called who gets in and why exclusive research.

Into Stanford GSB and I’ll tell you one conclusion I have about this is that, man, if you really want to get into Stanford, you need a Sherpa, and and Heidi would be a great Sherpa for you because the, just the profiles of these folks, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished in their early lives is so remarkable that To compete against, in this pool for a spot in the class you need every possible advantage you can get.

And and having an expert guide you through this trip probably would be a really big advantage. So Heidi, thank you for sharing your insights with us and the research, the very cool research.

[00:33:01] Heidi Hillis: Thank you

[00:33:03] John Byrne: and for all of you out there. Good luck. And if you want to go to Stanford, you got to check out this report.

Okay. It will inspire you to up your game, even if you are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or wherever McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google, you want to look at this report and you want to really think about. What it will really take to get in. I think it will inspire you, motivate you to really put your best foot forward.

Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants.

Maria

New around here? I’m an HBS graduate and a proud member (and former Board Member) of AIGAC. I considered opening a high-end boutique admissions consulting firm, but I wanted to make high-quality admissions advice accessible to all, so I “scaled myself” by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!