The mbaMission Podcast

Ep 56 | How the Yale SOM Prepares Grads for Post-MBA Careers

• mbaMission • Season 2 • Episode 56

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The Yale School of Management prepares MBA graduates for a broad range of careers. In our latest episode of the mbaMission podcast we welcome back Laurel Grodman and Bruce DelMonico, Assistant Deans of Admissions at the Yale SOM. Laurel and Bruce discuss the ways in which the SOM prepares students for diverse post-MBA careers, and why firms value having SOM graduates on their teams. They also discuss the Yale SOM Silver Scholars program, which provides a unique opportunity to talented undergraduate students who are interested in beginning an MBA program directly after college graduation.

00:00 Career outcomes at the Yale SOM
01:45 Yale SOM Deferred MBA option
04:36 How selective is the Yale SOM Silver Scholars program
10:03 The current MBA job market 
12:24 Career path trends at the SOM
16:18 Hidden gems of the Yale SOM curriculum 
20:43 SOM integrated curriculum 

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one of the beautiful things about being at S Soom is you can do all of the tried andrue MBA career pathing and in consulting or banking or whatever it might be even if you are in one of these less represented areas the school's really good at working with that what should your school be known for academically that it isn't known for so instead of teaching by functionally discreet silos teaching finance or marketing we teach by stakeholder perspectives over the years there have been so many articles about like Saturday Night Live is over and I think about that in the same way about the NBA sometimes like every couple years there's an article about the MBA being over right the firms always want S Soom graduates on their teams because SOM graduates are the ones who can see the big

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picture the Silver Scholars program yale's deferred admissions program is unique in that it enables exceptional college seniors to start their MBA immediately after graduating rather than waiting to begin their studies like most other deferred programs yale Silver Scholars complete a firstear curriculum right away and then spend the next year in a full-time internship before returning to the S Soom for their third year to finish the program we'll be chatting about this program plus career outcomes for Yale S Soom graduates and those industries where Yale has a significant presence and we're very lucky to have with us today Bruce Del Monaco and Laurel Grodman assistant deans of admission here to share their experience with us thank you again for being here as we've noted we have a bit of a pot puri today uh grabag of a bunch of different topics still related um and of course related to business school so let's start with the silver scholars program um just give us the the the basics of it how big is the program um are the averages the same as the normal program some basic facts around it yeah I can kick that off sure yeah so Silver Scholars program is our early career program it's meant for undergrads or also you know people who might be in a one-year graduate program after undergrad to be able to keep the trajectory of their education going and enter business school immediately so the way it's structured is you join your first year MBA course and go through the core curriculum immediately after graduating from school then you take a pause of one to five years to gain professional experience and people really do take the whole gamut some take one year and do an internship or a series of internships others take a longer kind of period and really get immersed in a career path and then whatever that period is you come back at the end of it and you complete your final year of the MBA program your elective courses and it's really designed for people who are kind of ready to sustain the momentum of their undergrad experience they're still in student mode but they know why this makes sense for them they know that they want to enter sort of an an MBA kind of pathway and they just want to hit the ground running and so it um the program is probably more than 20 or 25 years old even at this point um it was one of the very first early career programs and still remains one of the only ones that you can enter immediately after under grad versus having kind of a deferral period so it's unique in that regard and so the cohort these days is probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 or so students per class but there's no set number that could kind of grow or contract depending on on the pool and again it tends to be people who have obviously not had professional experience so when we talk about evaluating an MBA candidates's professional experience we have to look at that slightly differently for a silver scholar candidate and we're thinking about sort of different applied experiences it could be internships it could be part-time work that someone has done during their undergraduate studies but it could also be extracurricular leadership volunteer leadership any number of things in which someone is engaging outside of their academic work so we kind of expand that definition to get a sense of professional potential um but these tend to be extremely motivated extremely high caliber candidates and are really kind of superstars on their respective campuses um you know doing really well academically um but also again showing that potential that a full-time traditional NBA candidate would have a had a little bit more runway to demonstrate can you share any data with us is is the silver scholar program more selective as selective relative to the general pool um you know numbers of of how big is the class you know is the are the GMAT or GRE averages higher or lower those types of things i it's definitely more selective just in that you know while while we don't have a set number of candidates that we're looking for it's also not going to be 50 members of the class right we're trying to keep it relatively small and in part it's so that we could provide the necessary support for those students there is a dedicated member of our career development team who works with our silver scholar candidates so we want to be able to provide that high quality experience so with that it is more selective than sort of the general population but it's also it's just a type of candidate I think who's who's attracted to that in terms of academic stats I'd say probably on the whole this is a really strong academically cohort in in part because that's the main sort of momentum that they've got going heading into this and again we're using different parts of the application to get at professional potential but that's a little bit more on spec versus you know on the other side of that we are looking for people who have done really well academically are ready to apply that you know to yet another degree consecutive to their undergrad so probably on the whole slightly stronger you know academically do you want to learn more about your target business schools check out OnTrack by MBA Mission where we have in-depth modules on all the top business schools covering everything from what makes them unique to how to tackle the application essays and short answers and so much more you can also practice for interview and video questions all done on your schedule on demand we appreciate your dedication to our podcast and we want to offer you 30% off any OnTrack subscription use the code MBAM pod to get 30% off any ONTRA subscription check it out at ontra.mbammission.com i would imagine there's a premium on maturity you've got people coming right out of college yeah how do you how do you gauge the maturity of an individual at at that point in their lives that's a really good question and how do you gauge it in the limited tools we have within the application process so I guess a couple things come to mind um you know the letters of recommendation we actually ask for a slightly different kind of set from this population we ask for one academic and one sort of professional or applied setting so getting a sense from those recommenders again in those two different settings can give us some perspective on how that person shows up in school and outside of school so that I'd say is is pretty important um you know we talked about the video questions a little bit earlier get not to impose more pressure on this than need be but we are looking to get some sense of how someone articulates themselves on their feet and do they carry themselves in a way that is you know they don't need to be the parallel of a 30-year-old coming into the classroom but is is someone able to kind of hold their own and thinking about the MBA classroom as a really interactive setting um and you know cues throughout you know as part of the experience of writing an essay you know what what thoughts are going on inside this candidate's head what kind of experiences are they bringing to bear we're adjusting we understand that these are candidates who have not had full-time professional experience we're not expecting the exact same thing but we're still looking for someone who will be recruiting alongside our full-time MBA you know direct applicants and right participating in that classroom and so we're we're teasing it out and actually the one last thing I'll mention is it is a slightly different interview process so our um our non-scolar applicants are by and large interviewed by secondyear MBA students all of the silver scholar interviews are conducted by members of the silver scholar admissions committee it gives us an opportunity to standardize a little bit more ask a little bit more kind of direct questions about how this really unique program fits into their career plans and and so we keep that a little bit more kind of uh guardrail I guess if if you will for this population so if I join the silver scholar program I go out there I get an internship I absolutely love my career takes off there's a risk I don't come back like is is that is that an outcome that happens i don't think that's ever happened people everyone comes back sometimes as Laura said sometimes they you know it's one to five years sometimes they take a little longer but everybody eventually comes back it's amazing over the 20 plus years that this has been in existence maybe there's one person once years and years and years ago but I don't I'm not sure if that's even it's definitely a rarity i think once people are in they want to finish up that that degree and plus I mean being at part of the idea of the structure of this is that by the time you're entering your elective courses you have had that professional experience and you can tailor what you're studying from there with a little bit more of an informed perspective of what your interests are what your gaps are and so people are eager to to come back to school and and have the opportunity to do that before they're out in the in the real world again i look I it sounds superficial but I often say to applicants you know the one thing you can't undervalue is that for most people this is the last break they're going to take professionally in their lives like it's be very rare that you're going to get two years off so I imagine if you've got you know one year and then you've got you know two or three four years of of working hard maybe you're looking for that last that last year I guess evidence yeah no ready for that one more year before before going back full time so there's a there's a story emerging it's being written up in the Wall Street Journal these about the tough uh hiring environment on campus is this is this is this a story about MBAs being hyper selective and or or struggling to adapt to kind of changing industries or is this just a tough across the board job job market yeah I think um and obviously feel free to to weigh in as well i think um it might be a little bit of both i think uh we you know Yale MBAs have always been very choosy about what where they wanted to end up and what kind of career and what kind of impact they wanted have wanted to have i think that it has been a a more challenging market this past year the economy has been a little un unsettled you know especially for us and a lot of top business schools you know consulting was a major um you know major destination for graduates uh you know consulting and investment banking and they were they consulting pulled back uh in terms of their their hiring so I think there was um so that that piece of it um I think you know when you look at I think there are a lot of very dire uh articles being written and even when you look at the sort of the the the the statistics that are reported and the the placement you know we talked to our career development office and it's the thing the thing they remind us that that's that's those are the numbers 3 months out and there are so many people who that's not how many people get a job it's but get that job within that window and so I think part of it is you know matching the opportunity unities to what our graduates want to do this past year took a little longer than it has in the past and they got there but it look it it took a little more work it took a little more time and I think that's probably what you're seeing it's funny we're talking today around the time of Saturday Night Live's 50th anniversary and over the years there have been so many articles about like Saturday Night Live is over right and and I think about that in the same way about the NBA sometimes like every couple years there's an article about the NBA being over right i'm like it's it's it's highly unlikely to be over you know there there have been other tough tough times in in the in the hiring world after the financial crisis after the tech bust right um it happens every couple years i don't know if you remember this a number of years ago I kicked off reader training with a series of headlines about some of them were about the death of the NBA and some of them were about the 1929 stock market crash and it made the team guess which was which and it was really really tough and we're still here so yeah that's great um so are there any have there been any any nice growth areas that people have pivoted towards um you know I feel like there's increasing maybe healthcare hiring in certain schools and the like yeah I think that's right i think um you know I think consulting has been as high as your 50% of our placement that's kind of eased down i think it actually finance has has come back it was below 20% for a little bit i think it's close to a quarter so that's actually been an area a little bit of growth i think you're right healthcare um I feel like sustainability has always been very very strong and very popular um so there's a I think that's one of the interesting things about being at Yale for uh specifically is you know there's that strength in the more traditional areas that you see but then there's that diversity under when you look under the hood the diversity of outcomes and people doing different things uh you know tech has been I think probably another area that's been a little more challenging or if not challenging it's been manifests itself differently so it's not been as much of sort of sort of Google Microsoft Apple as maybe some smaller more nimble startups um where that have been the destinations for those going into tech i think something like tech too is one of these slippery areas i mean something like employment reports are helpful because it gives you something to grab on to but so many companies sort of defy categorization i mean who's in a job today that isn't a tech company in some way shape or form i think it you know it's not this sort of discrete entity even something like Amazon is is technically retail e-commerce but obviously it's we would think of that as a tech company so I think our students are doing a lot of sort of tech oriented work but you could be doing that in healthcare or you could be doing that in you know you could be working even in in asset management right but with a highly kind of quantbent to it and so it's it's kind of and that's what I mean for camps looking at the employment reports obviously you want to look at both you We break them out by both industry and by function so you can see where people are in terms of like the kinds of organizations but then what they're doing and that that doesn't that tracks but doesn't always match i guess what's sort of the inverse of that is that sometimes functionally things don't line up with ind industry so you could be working at a finance job at Amazon you've been working M&A going the same way that you know like are you really working in tech that way you know are yes you're working for maybe a tech company maybe a consumer company and you're working in kind of a typical M&A capacity what um I mean is there is there any there's no like desired target or any desired like field that anyone you know that the school wants anyone to go into right it's all it's all open season um I think that's one of the things that that again is kind of in the DNA of the school we've always when the school started we had outcomes and people going into areas that looked nothing like what traditional MBA candidates were at the time and I do think you know one of the beautiful things about being at S Soom is you can do all of the tried andrue kind of MBA career pathing in consulting or banking or whatever it might be but it's always been a place that's been very used to working with students who want to do a wide variety of things like we have a long long tail is sometimes what I like to say so even if you are in one of these less represented areas the school's really good at working with that and it's you know it's one thing to line up and and get the job from the from the company that comes to campus which by the way looks different now than it even did 5 years ago and there's so much virtual recruiting now but you know established kind of school relationships that's valuable and and obviously it's beneficial to be able to secure a job that way but it's going to serve you all your life to figure out how to get the job that you want even if it's not the one that 20 other people in your class are doing and how to navigate that job search and that's where I feel like SOM really prepares you not just for job one but for job two three and four down the line right so one question I love I love asking admissions officers is what is your as we talk about you know professional specializations moving towards academic specializations what is what what is your as I and as I say I love asking and stumble over my own question but what should your school be known for academically that it isn't known for what's a pocket of strength that you think you know hey I wish more people thought Yale and did word association with this area I got one finance for sure I don't think people think of Yale as a finance school um but we have amazing faculty members many of whom we recruited from uh a school out west Midwestish I I guess and you know my my non-MBA work in admissions is around our masters in asset management program we have huge strength in that area not just due to the extraordinary faculty that we have um doing cutting edge research in the space but just to our industry connections as well we have a connection to our Yale investments office which literally created the model for endowment management that most nonprofits and and schools utilize to this day we have expertise in in machine learning and behavioral finance and I think it that's it's sometimes not what we're known for necessarily but it's like a hidden gem within the school how how deep that program is i don't know if other things come to mind for you i mean I could probably rattle off you know a half dozen other things one thing that I would one other area I would point out is marketing i think that's an area where we have some of the top faculty and it's really incredibly strong department but it's not something we're normally thought of as a you know school you go to for the center for customer insights yeah I think that's one of the one of the signature experiences a lot of students have who are interested in this area ycci as we as we call it they have what they what they call their discovery projects and companies will partner with faculty on sort of live projects um live consulting projects and um and then faculty will will bring in students to work on them with them and they'll actually doing work for companies for Google for for sort of PNG for any number of other companies um and you get real world experience doing this and I think it's been often been I think you did the the inaugural one when you were a student um I was the OG It wasn't called anything at the time it was like "Hey Ravi Dar can I do a project with you?" And so we So we're talking about what are there any other gems you guys want to talk about we got marketing we got We got finance mention I want to mention entrepreneurship i was going to mention not because we have an enormous number of entrepreneurs coming through the program though I wish we did because I think we have the great infrastructure for it but that's an area that I think over the last decade the school's really invested a lot in we have our you know the the leader of the faculty leader of the entrepreneurship program Kyle Jensen who is a su successful entrepreneur himself and then has you know gone on to teaching he's really put together a very robust array of coursework that ranges everything from I want to start a business while I'm at S Soom and get this off the ground all the way to the other end of the spectrum which is more like I want to bring more entrepreneurial thinking to my classic day job you know postNBA so all of that is in place we have really sort of innovative ways of connecting across the university so we have our SCI center for innovative thinking at Yale sci City is the acronym and that's like the entrepreneurial hub for the entire university so Kyle likes to say you never want to start a business with five MBAs you need you know someone who's doing the business end of things you need an engineer or a designer or you know a lawyer whatever it might be that you have to kind of put together to get something off the ground and Yale has all those things they're just in different pockets of the university so this serves as a hub for bringing people together and gives them mentorship and thoughts on how to raise capital and things like that so I think that's sort of like a another hidden gem of S Soom yeah no that's the one I would have pointed out as well and Kyle's fantastic great he's he's helped us with our application actually we've gotten better at evaluating entrepreneurial experience through we've partnered with him to figure out what questions to ask entrepreneurs and and get good answers to understand sort of the scale and scope of someone's someone's uh venture experience right so in terms of educational model we're talking about like niches and specific aspects that are hidden gems what are we like what's the what's the headline for for the ALS soom to a to a new applicant in terms of what it offers academically yeah I would I mean I would I would I would point to the integrated curriculum and the the way we teach uh the core and the way we teach you to think i think that's really the thing that has the most durability um and the just to to make sure people understand so the way we teach the the integrated curriculum is um by by stakeholder perspective so instead of teaching by functionally discreet silos teaching finance or marketing um we we teach by stakeholder perspective so we would teach by the the the customer or the the competitor or uh the state and society is one of them and I think what this does um it allows our students or you know enables our students to think more more broadly and to make connections across disciplines and we found that that's actually kind of the superpower for our graduates we hear you know our career development office not surprisingly what you know regularly surveys employers on on how students are doing what what the outcomes were and we hear clearly you know and consistently hear especially from consulting firms where this is kind of what you're doing that the firms always want S Soom graduates on their teams because S1 graduates are the ones who can see the big picture who can piece things together and kind of break down those kind of different different sort of discrete silos and kind of and and and and pull together um lots of information and kind of synthesize things in a way that other other um team members can't so I think that integrated curriculum leads to really good outcomes and both immediately afterwards especially in consulting but farther you know you know throughout their uh our graduates uh careers as we found in more immediate terms I think it really helps in a summer internship because you know your typical MBA summer internship you're thrown this big messy problem that no one has time to do in their day job right and it it usually doesn't have a clear pathway to finding an answer it's kind of like a rock case in a way and I remember from my time in the career development office getting that feedback from employers that like wow these S Soom students really know how to hit the ground running on day one and they know who to speak to and what questions to ask and you know that's your opportunity to demonstrate yourself in a really short amount of time for potentially a full-time opportunity but I think you're set up again to kind of tackle these big unstructured problems through the curriculum this has been great guys thank you so much for uh for joining us i think applicants are going to benefit immensely from uh from from this they're going to learn a great deal about the school i love talking about the hidden gems because I think so often schools get stereotyped and it's really wonderful to hear about the spikes that uh that applicants don't don't uh don't think about immediately so thanks for sharing all that thanks so much for having us if you want to be one of our success stories sign up for a free consultation with a member of our full-time MBA admissions team since we've worked with tens of thousands of applicants over the past two decades we can give you our honest opinion on your chances and help you put together your very best application that is not a sales call but rather your first session with one of us for free we can give you a profile evaluation answer specific questions about the process review your resume talk about your school choices and so much more sign up at mbammission.com/cconult we look forward to working with