Stanford MBA Program

Some of you have asked what we'll do about the carbon emissions generated by students flying around the globe to fulfill their Global Experience Requirement.

We estimate that this requirement will generate up to 900 tons of CO2, which is about as much as 192 of the average world citizen would generate. In response, the Stanford GSB took a proactive approach and has partnered with TerraPass to offset the carbon emissions through project investments in wind power, methane capture, industrial efficiency, and more.

BTW, we also buy TerraPass offsets for Admit Weekend, making those events carbon-neutral.

Ciao,
--Rita

Several readers have asked if they may contact current students and faculty directly. The answer is no, please don't!

Faculty and students are incredibly busy. In addition, neither faculty nor students have the time to keep up with changing admission procedures or policies.

Questions about the MBA Program here at Stanford, or about the admission process are best and most accurately answered by counselors in the MBA Admissions Office. Call or email, we are friendly, easy to talk to, and happy to help you.

We have set up several programs to give you the opportunity to meet students via the GSB's on-campus outreach events . Class visits, in particular, are great ways to meet faculty as well.

Want to meet and talk to GSB alumni? Come and attend one of our worldwide information sessions.

We know it is easy to find contact information for our faculty and students but we ask that you honor our request and respect their incredibly busy schedules by refraining from contacting them directly.

Thank you!!
--Rita

Wu Yun Uei asks: How can I be sure that you received my GMAT score?

Yes, this process seems a bit mysterious, doesn't it?

When you take the GMAT (the same is true for the GRE and TOEFL), you will be asked which school(s) you want your scores sent to. The testing agency then sends the scores to us electronically.

It is the testing agency's responsibility to accurately distribute the scores, and you are not expected to track or follow up to make sure this happened.

Your responsibility is to accurately self-report your scores in the online application. If you took the test but don't yet know your scores, simply record zeros (after we upload the scores from the testing agency, our operations team matches them with your application).

In the rare case where we find a discrepancy between the self-reported score and the official score received from the testing agency, we will contact you for clarification.

You may also be interested to know that while we evaluate your application with your self-reported test scores, we do verify them for all admitted students.

I hope this helps,
--Rita

We ask Recommenders to submit their letters a few days earlier than the actual deadline to help prevent system slowdown on deadline day. However, this earlier date is a suggested deadline only!

I know some of you are still fine tuning your application and you have until 5pm (Pacific Time) on 22 October 2007 to submit your application.

If you have technical problems, contact Technical Support (use the link in the application). If you need last minute advice, call the MBA Admissions Office during regular business hours +1 650.723.2766

Best wishes to all of you!!
--Rita

First, congratulations to all of you who submitted your applications in Round 1!

Many of you have asked whether there is a relationship between the timing of your interview invitation and your chance of admission. You'll find the "what" and "why" of interviews on our website in Interviews and the Director's Corner, so I'll focus on the "when."

Please be assured that your likelihood of admission bears no relationship to when you receive your interview invitation; the timing of your invitation simply depends on when we review your file - and there is no pattern to application review.

Interviews for Round 1 applicants start as soon as possible after the application deadline - typically early November - and last through mid January. In fact, we began emailing Round 1 interview invitations yesterday.

We expect to send Round 1 interview invitations pretty regularly, every business day or so, through mid December. Even during Stanford's winter shutdown (24 December 2007 through 1 January 2008) we continue to read feverishly but tend to bundle invitations and send them every few days. (One reason for the bundling is that our building is unheated for the entire shutdown and we are thin-blooded Californians!)

We hope to send almost all interview invitations by 11 January, though some will go out later. We also may ask some of you to join the waitlist without an interview.

No matter when you receive your invitation to interview, you have the same chance of admission as any other candidate.

I hope this is helpful. Back to my files or 'flat friends'!

Derrick

During a recent staff meeting we reviewed our experiences hosting information sessions in an ongoing effort to perfect them. While we made a list of things to consider for improvements, we realized that you, our audience, are key to the experience and hence you can play a major role in making the info sessions better.

The goal of our information sessions, whether they take place in China, India, Turkey, or here on campus, is to give you an opportunity to meet us in person so you may share your questions and concerns. While we give you an overview of the Stanford MBA Program, we usually encourage you to interrupt and to ask questions. However, we have found that the typical patterns is for you to wait with your questions until after the session has ended. As a result, we end up answering the same questions over and over (serially).

A much better system would be for you to pose your questions during our presentations so that the answer can be appreciated by the entire audience. This would allow us to actually cover more topics during the sessions as we get the most commonly asked queries out of the way for everyone.

We look forward to trying this new approach starting with your next info session.

Ciao,
--Rita