The Final Round: Application Tips for Future Year Scholars

As I mentioned, I'm Katherine Roberts.
I'm the director of the Future Your Scholars program here at Darden.
I have been working at Darden for a little over 17
years, and I've been working with the Future Your Scholars program since
we launched this program 10 years ago.
So we are 10 years in the journey of deferred enrollment,
and it has been a blast. And as I mentioned, Merav is my
colleague. She is based in Charlottesville, Virginia, so she will meet with anyone
on grounds. I'm based in Birmingham, Alabama.
So there is that little fun detail.
Okay. So one of the questions we get frequently is
about how to stand out in the application process, what
is Darden looking for? And one of the
important things to think about when you're applying to MBA programs are
the different types of MBA programs out there.
There are a lot of really great MBA programs, but there are vast
differences between programs that are ranked closely together.
So my hope is that during this overview, you will walk
away with a strong understanding of UVA Darden's MBA program,
what differentiates it from other MBA programs, and
how it aligns with your strengths, your interests,
and your goals.
So the first three things I talk about when I talk about Darden's
differentiators are our education experience,
specifically the way we teach with both the case method and
our faculty. Our career support, which
is incredible and very
full, many resources to support you with your career search,
and then our culture and community.
And I'll break each of those down a little bit more in the following
slides. So I don't know how many of you are familiar with the case
method of instruction, but it is quite different from what most of us are
accustomed to from our undergraduate education.
Rather than a professor coming in and lecturing, you are getting the material
before class. You're researching the case on your own.
It's a business decision that you have to think
about as the decision-maker, as the CEO, as the
manager. What would you do if you were in this situation?
And so you'll think about it on your own.
You will go meet with your learning team that is assigned to you by the
school, and then you will come to class to
participate. When professors walk in, they'll ask you what the
decision is that needs to be made that day, and then the
hour-and-a-half class is a conversation between
you and your classmates about what the decision-maker should do.
So in the first year of the program,
you are in all case classes. So Darden is one of the few MBA
programs that is 100% case-based for its core
curriculum. Harvard Business School is the other MBA program in the United
States that is 100% case-based for its core curriculum.
Darden also has a core curriculum that extends across the entire first
year. Some MBA programs will only have one required
course. The rest is choose your own adventure.
Some MBA programs have one quarter is required.
The rest is choose your own adventure.
I love the one-year core at Darden because I think
it really creates a tight-knit community because
all of your classmates are doing the same thing every day.
You're all taking the same classes.
You're all studying the same cases, and so you have a lot to talk about when
you leave the classroom, even with people that aren't in your class because you
know they're doing the same thing.
The learning team is assigned to you by the school.
We use an algorithm that pulls data from your admissions
application, and it will put you on a learning team with classmates who
come from different industries, different functions, different
countries, different ethnicities.
A lot of different perspectives on your learning team, and you're
essentially taught to work together as
one collective brain, working together to think through what
you should do in each case. So you'll prepare for class with your learning team.
When you go to class,
you will be separated from your learning team. We do this intentionally.
We think that learning teams should be there to support you, but
we do not want you to feel like you are competing with the members of your learning
team for class participation points.
Our faculty members have a seating chart.
When they hover their mouse over your name, up pops your picture,
an audio recording of you pronouncing your name the way you like it to be
pronounced, and a copy of your resume.
So they will couch the questions that they ask and the people they call
on based on who's in the room. And so they
may know there is a student in the class that came from the company
that's being discussed that day and will have an informed perspective.
So they'll typically wait until the class gets stuck to spin around and call on
that
student to provide their perspective.
And so sitting in the classroom at Darden, you're always on the edge of your seat.
You never know who's going to speak next, who's going to get called
on, and you're constantly asking yourself, do I agree with
this person? Do I not agree, and why?
And learning how to think on your feet and make decisions with incomplete
information. I think so much of the Darden experience
is transformational because we teach through the case method and
because of the changes that will bring out in you going through that on a
daily basis. In addition to the
courses, you may or may not know that recruiting in an
MBA program starts immediately. You have one week to
adjust to being a student again, having returned from the workforce, and then
the companies are there. They're ready to talk to you.
They're ready to hear your pitch, your reasons for wanting to work for their
company. And so I'll talk about it in a minute, but we will do a
lot to prepare you to be ready to go as soon as you arrive
for recruiting in your MBA program.And a big piece of it is going
to be the student clubs, the way they support you in recruiting
events. But the student clubs are also there for you to let out a little bit
of steam with the social clubs, and then also some community service, as
well as student leadership.
Okay, in the second year, you've completed your core, you've gone off to
do your summer internship, and hopefully, you have a job offer.
So about 50% of our students return to Darden in the second year
knowing where they're going to be working full-time, and they are
finished with recruiting, and all they have to focus on in the second
year are the clubs and the classes.
About the other 50% maybe had a
summer internship that wasn't going to
roll into a full-time job offer. For example, the
NBA, they will give you summer internships.
They will not roll them into full-time offers.
But somebody might want to work in sports, so they're willing to do that summer
internship knowing that they will need to re-recruit in the second year.
Some students have an internship, and that industry or that
company just wasn't what they were thinking it was going to be, and so they
want to re-recruit to look for something else.
And then some students may have done something
entrepreneurial over the summer, and they're going to re-recruit in the
second year. So lots of reasons for recruiting in the second year.
And so a little bit of a difference in terms of the scheduling of what we see in
our students, in terms of how they spend their time.
I mentioned career support and how early recruiting starts.
We start working with our students in the spring before they matriculate.
We will ask you to work through an asynchronous course online
where you're asked a lot of questions about your strengths, your
interests, what you've learned about yourself to date, and then we provide
you with some thoughts around what sort of career paths might be great
fits for you. And then you're going to be asked to
meet with your career coach before you come to school.
And the career coach is going to make sure that your LinkedIn
profile is up to snuff, your resume is ready to
go to recruit for the industry you're recruiting for,
and that you have essentially a calendar that
tells you what companies are going to be on grounds on what
days, and will get you ready to meet with
them from day one. When you arrive at Darden,
you will be paired with a second-year student who is taking what we call a
career elective, a career coaching elective, and their job
is to help you with your summer internship.
And their grade is dependent on how good of a job
you think they do helping you get your job.
So quite the incentive to help you out, but
it's something they sign up for because they love giving back, and they want to
help students that are a year behind them doing what they just went through.
So that second-year coach is going to be incredibly helpful,
and then the student clubs are going to host so many
different meetings for you to come to learn about a specific
industry, to learn about the jobs that are out there, to learn
about what a day in the life at this firm looks like versus a day in the
life of that firm looks like. So,
you will definitely join some career clubs in your first year of the
program, and then hopefully stay involved in the second year to give back
to the first-years who are coming behind you.
At Darden, we offer every student a scholarship
for a worldwide experience. So you may use your
scholarship to study abroad. You may use your
scholarship to do a global consulting project, which is when you stay in
Charlottesville, but you meet with a startup or
nonprofit in a developing country and work on a
problem that they are hoping to solve, and then you can use your scholarship
money to fly over there at the end to present your suggestions.
And then lastly, what's most popular are our worldwide
courses. On this map, they are the orange dots, and that is when you
travel with about 30 of your classmates and one of your professors
to a different country to learn about what is of
interest in that economy at that time.
We also are offering a few in the United States this year, so maybe you're not from
the United States, and it would be neat for you to go to New York or San
Francisco. So I'm not exactly sure which cities we're traveling to this year, but
we will have those options as well.
Darden's culture and community is pretty unique.
We are located in Charlottesville, Virginia, and what that means is
that not many of your classmates are going to be from Charlottesville, Virginia.
And so everyone will have left their communities to
move to Virginia to start over, to make new
friends, and to invest in that community.
What you will not find at Darden is classmates who are
splitting their time between their friends and life in the big city and
their friends and life at Darden. And so you will be
spending your weekends with your classmates.
And so one of the questions to ask yourself when you're looking at MBA
programs is what kind of a lifestyle am I looking for?
Do I want that more immersive community where I feel like I know everyone really
well, or am I looking for a little bit of separation and an opportunity
to live and explore a new city? There's no right answer.
It's just personal preference, but it's important for everyone to know that
Darden's going to be a little bit more of a tight-knit, smaller community
vibe. We have about 350 students in every class,
and Darden is known for being incredibly collaborative,
incredibly supportive. The way to get ahead at Darden is to lift up
others around you.So I mentioned that
we have a number of different clubs and organizations, so lots of different
ways that you can get involved. Some of them might be through
student leadership. The Darden Student Government has, I think
it's about over 60 students who are part of it, and they really do
shape the culture at Darden and shape the Darden experience.
We change things every year based on what the
students provide feedback on the year before.
And then you'll likely be involved in whatever industry club is something that
you're interested in either going into, or maybe it's an industry that you are
coming from and want to give back to those who are interested in going into
it. We have affinity clubs. Most students are members of one or two of
those. We have general interest clubs like the
Cold Call Chorus, the dance club, things of that nature.
One of the most popular clubs is the Outdoors Club.
They plan a lot of hikes. They plan a snow skiing trip every year.
They plan white water rafting trips. They plan camping trips.
And then another really popular one is the Latin American Student
Association. They essentially cook a lot of meat
and invite their classmates to come join them to eat it.
So people enjoy being a part of the LASA club as well.
Now, we've talked a lot about Darden, so thanks for bearing with me
to learn a little bit about Darden's differentiators.
Hopefully, that was helpful in showing a little bit about how we differentiate
ourselves from other schools. But now I want to talk a little bit about the Future
Year Scholars program, which is a pathway to be
admitted to your MBA program before you even begin working
full-time. And so we are seeking fabulous
students who've done well in undergrad, who've been able to demonstrate their
leadership and the impact they've been able to make in their schools and
communities as undergraduate students, who have a plan
to work for a couple of years and then know that a few
years down the road, they are going to be interested in returning to get an MBA
to either level up their skill set, to maybe pivot to a different
industry or function, or to maybe start something
of their own.
Students who are admitted will be considered for a small
$40,000 scholarship when they are admitted.
But keep in mind, the bulk of our scholarship awards are
given at the time of matriculation.
For Future Year Scholars, it's harder for us to award money when we're telling
our
CFO that we don't know if these students are coming in two years,
three years, four years, or five years. They don't love us holding that money.
So the majority of the money is going to be when you're ready to come,
and at that time, we can look at what you've achieved over the last couple
of years and the impacts you've made, and you will be more competitive for
scholarship money with some experience under your
belt. You also are going to receive career support as a Future Year
Scholar. Every other month, we have a
meeting with our career team offering support for people in the deferral period,
and then the network can be incredibly helpful.
I've heard story after story of Future Year Scholars getting
interviews at great companies or maybe interviews
for roles that they don't have the required number of years
of experience for, all because they have Darden Future Year Scholars on their
resume. So by indicating to an employer that you've been
admitted to an MBA program, you're sending them a message that you are
serious about your career, you're serious about
learning and growing, that you're taking yourself seriously, and
I think many like to see that. To show you a little bit of the
statistics of what our class that we admitted last year looked
like, here are a few stats. These are just averages.
Please keep in mind that we have people below our averages and above
our averages, and we like to see a variety.
If you're thinking, "I need to have a business major to be
admitted to Darden," that's not true.
We have a variety of different majors.
We'd love to see more liberal arts majors in the pool in the future.
We accept people from all different backgrounds.
It takes all different perspectives to make up
a diverse discussion. So we want to see the psych majors, and the
sociology majors, and the English majors in the classroom.
They add a lot of value. So it makes sense that for
undergraduate students, the majority who are looking at MBAs are going to be
more from a business or engineering undergraduate focus, but we
like all kinds.
So in terms of the application, there is no fee.
So typically, an MBA application has about a $250
application fee. But for deferred enrollment, there is no fee, so that's a
nice perk and a reason to apply early.
We also at Darden, we offer test flexibility.
So,
we accept the GMAT or GRE, which is a requirement for the full-time MBA
program. But for the deferred enrollment program,
we're willing to accept your SAT or ACT.
They're not apples to apples. There's a stronger correlation
between a performance on a GMAT or GRE and your
performance in the MBA classroom than there is with your SAT or ACT.
But if you feel like your academic profile looks good with your
undergraduate GPA, you may not need to take a
standardized test for admission.
The only place that this might come to hurt you is
if you are interested in working in consulting down the road.
Consulting firms still use GMATs and GREs to weed out who
they interview for roles with them.
And then the other reason would be scholarship.
If
scholarship is important to you, a GMAT and GRE can really help
elevate your award.
If you went to a university where English was not the medium of
instruction, you're also required to take a TOEFL or an
IELTSWe will ask for your transcript.
Now, most students when they apply in the April round do not have their
official finished transcript, which is fine.
We will take your unofficial at this time.
Just know that you'll be required to submit your official transcript prior to
matriculation. We're going to ask for
your resume. Your resume should not be longer than one page.
Keep in mind it is not the place to list everything you've ever
done. If there are organizations that you've been a part of that were not
important to you, where you did not spend a lot of your time, go ahead
and take those off the resume. The resume, you're building the story
about what is important to you and where you are going.
So focus on your leadership, focus on the impact that you've made in
different clubs and organizations and at your university, and keep
it to one page with your university experience, summer
internships, and any clubs that were really important to
your time as an undergrad, or any work,
if you were working while you were an undergrad, be sure to include that as well.
And then we will ask for some short answer questions.
The one short answer question for this
year is around what you want your
community to know about you. I call this
question the personality question.
We ask for you to talk about things that are not on your resume,
and it's fun to see what students will come up with.
They may be talking about a hobby or an experience that really
changed how they see things or personality
traits. My biggest piece of advice is
show, don't tell. So rather than saying, "I'm
like this, this, and this," try to talk about a story
or give an example of a time you displayed those characteristics.
So rather than just telling us that you have those characteristics, show us through
an example that you have those characteristics.
We also ask a question around
a time where you made an impact in your community or you created
space for others in your community, where you brought people
together. That's an important aspect at Darden, and so we're looking
for students who have displayed that characteristic in their
time at their university. And then the last question is around your career
goals. We have no expectation that you are going to
know what you want to do with your MBA at this time.
Whatever you think you might want to do will likely change, and so
we are just looking for people who are thoughtful about
who they are and where they're going.
So when you think about what an MBA is about, yes,
we will teach you a lot about business, but it's really a degree in
leadership. And so if you can speak
to the leadership that you have
already displayed in your life thus far, and that
you are expecting to continue to grow as a leader, and
you see an MBA as part of that path to really level up your leadership
skills, it's a really great reason to talk about in an essay about
why you're interested in getting an MBA.
And some of you may already have really strong thoughts about
your career plans, and that's fine as well.
I'm less interested in what your career plans are post-MBA, but I am
interested in what your goals are for yourself immediately after school, pre-MBA.
So think about what you're hoping to accomplish before you get to an MBA.
We've had students in the past who thought, "I really want to make sure I've
supervised people before I go get my MBA," or, "I
want to work
until I know how I want to use my MBA."
What is your personal goal before you go back to school?
So I would encourage you to spend some time thinking about that.
And then we do ask for two letters of recommendation.
We use the GMAC common letter of recommendation, so you
can Google that and see what questions we're going to ask.
And then think about who in your network would do the best job
responding to those questions. Most Future Your Scholars
will submit one letter from a professor, one
letter from a summer internship.
My advice is to think about who has seen you in a
leadership role.
The questions on the letter of recommendation are oriented toward
give me an example of
how they compare to other people. What's a piece of constructive
feedback that you provided this person?
We ask about your leadership potential.
We ask about your strategic thinking, collaboration,
ability to work well with others. So typically, things
that will be observed in the workforce, that's what's being asked
about. So if you can think of maybe someone who's seen you working,
that can be a good choice. What you want to steer away from
is asking a professor who's only seen your tests and can
only speak to the grades you've made in their course.
We feel like we get a good feel for what type of a student you are from your
transcript. We're looking for the letter of recommendation to tell us
more about what it's like to work with you.
And then lastly, we will invite students to
interview. It's by invitation only,
and everyone who is admitted will have interviewed with
Darden. Our interviews at Darden take about 30
minutes. They are virtual over Zoom, and they will
be with a member of our admissions committee.
We're going to ask you to give us a brief overview of your
education and internships, and what we're trying
to understand in that overview is what's
motivated you to make the choices that you've made.
Why are you interested in banking, or why consulting, or why
tech? Or what are the experiences that you've had that
have piqued your interest in the areas that you are interested in?
So just trying to understand a little bit more about the why behind
your story. I think a good way to prepare for the Darden interview
is to go through your resume, and at every line, ask
yourself why. Why did I choose to go to this
university? What does that say about my decision-making skills?
Why have I chosen to get involved in these organizations?
What does that say about my values and the things that I care about?
Why did I choose this internship? What did I hope to learn from
it? Things of that nature. If you can do that, then you will be well
prepared for the Darden interview.
There will be two behavioral interview questions, and then questions
aroundWhy are you thinking an MBA is in your future?
What is it about Darden's MBA program that you feel differentiates
itself from other MBA programs? So now that you've been to this
presentation, you're going to ace that part of the interview.
And then we're going to ask you if you have any questions for
us. And so to prepare for the interview, another thing to do
would be to reach out to some of our student ambassadors that are on our website,
ask them about their Darden experience, why they chose to get an MBA.
That can help you feel better prepared for the interview at Darden.
A few things to know, there is no test score or
GPA that automatically gets you in or gets you out.
It is a holistic review. We're trying to understand who you are as
a full person, and so we're looking at a lot of different things.
And one of the things about going to business school or applying to business school
programs, whether it's now or in the future, is it really is the story of your
life. You get to practice your narrative and speaking
about what you're all about. And that can not only be helpful with applying to
business school, it also can be helpful to applying for jobs.
And we always encourage people to take a step back from their application, think
about it holistically. Where do they think they're really strong?
Where do they think they have weaker areas?
And is there anything that you can do in the remaining time to strengthen some of
the weaker areas?
We have deadlines in April and
July,
but there is no advantage to applying
earlier.
And we have a number of different ways to connect with us.
We have Friday chats and tours in the spring.
We have these overviews every month.
We have different ways to sign up for conversations with myself if you
have specific questions, and then also student ambassadors to speak to that are on
our website.