University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler
Business School Admissions Interview
The University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School has achieved
a remarkable reputation for ingraining a strong sense of teamwork within its
graduates. The fact that incoming students are assigned to teams of 4 to 5
people as soon as they arrive on campus and these teams do not
disband until after the first year likely plays a part in this teambuilding
reputation. (This no-excuses-accepted approach to teamwork mimics the teams
employed in the workforce where one does not get the opportunity to
specifically choose his or her team members.)
Additionally, the school is bucking a recent trend by
requiring its applicants to have a minimum 2 years of post
undergrad full-time work experience. The faculty is lauded
for belonging to a wide variety of corporate advisory boards
to ensure their current knowledge base is extremely current
and relevant. UNC Kenan-Flagler faculty also consult, have started and run
their own companies and teach executives in Exec Ed and EMBA
Programs. All these things also contribute to the relevance
and currency of their business knowledge.
Below is our 4-page interview with Sherry Wallace, MBA
admissions director.
Describe
how the MBA program at Kenan-Flagler is evolving?
Our MBA
program is more than 50 years old and we have always been
driven by a commitment to work in teams as well as being
individually accountable. We have a lock-step curriculum
wherein the first year everyone will take the same classes.
This year we are departing a little from that, by keeping
the best of it, but adding some flexibility. The class of
2006 will be the first to enroll at a time when the second
half of the first year is more flexible than it has ever
been. In the first year, students will be able to choose a
subset of courses. All of these are part of the core, but
instead of having to take each and every one of them, the
students can pick and choose and customize that subset of
courses so that they can sooner pair their course work to
the career of their choice. We are not going to erode the
solid general management base that this program has been
built upon. We believe that we have answered the feedback
to allow students to customize their careers sooner.
What general advice would you like
applicants considering UNC Kenan-Flagler's MBA to know?
Each year we create a class of people
who are very different from each other. While there are
some things that are culturally specific to UNC, people are
coming into our program from very diverse backgrounds. This
contributes to a strong sense of community and learning from
each other and also a sense of responsibility to be
available to each other.
How would you describe the general
culture at Kenan-Flagler?
People
choose UNC because they find a fit here. That fit is
described to us in terms of the strong sense of community,
and the way things are done here, not just what
is done. There is a huge premium placed on leading,
motivating, and communicating. It is not enough to be just
individually accomplished. If you can't sell yourself to
others, if you can't earn trust from them as well, then you
are not going to be an effective leader ten years out. We
concentrate on finding people with raw material in
leadership potential as well as those who value working and
succeeding as a team.
We
encourage our students to get continuous feedback. UNC MBA
students participate in a 360-degree feedback survey that
they initiate prior to the start of school, and they use
this feedback gained from their former co-workers, peers,
supervisors and themselves as a baseline measure of their
management and leadership skills coming in to b-school.
Throughout the MBA Program, they will get feedback from
faculty and their teammates on their skills such as team
building, motivational, trust building and communication.
This feedback and benchmarking helps guide them to
activities and classes that will maximize their skill
development during their two years at UNC.
When do you encourage applicants to
apply?
We generally have four deadlines. Our
first deadline this year is October 28, which is our Early
Action deadline, December 2, is our first regular decision
deadline, the third is January 13, and the final decision is
March 5. Applicants should submit their packages as soon
as they are ready. Nothing is worse than receiving an
application from someone with an incomplete or rushed
package, so we like to encourage applicants to apply when
everything is in place for them. It is better to be in the
last deadline and have your package be good than to have an
incomplete or rushed package submitted for an earlier
deadline. For the early action deadline of October 28, one
can expect a decision on December 13, for the December 2
deadline decisions will be released on February 7, for the
January 13 deadline one can expect a decision on March 23,
and for the last deadline of March 5, a student can expect a
decision by May 16. We will continue to evaluate applicants
after the final deadline if there is space available in the
class.
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