The Director of MBA Admissions Shelly Wallace shared her enthusiasm about making the admissions process as transparent as possible. “There is no advantage to us in our selection process if people feel like they are in the dark,” she said.

　　Wallace herself graduated from the Kenan-Flagler MBA program in 1987 and pursued a career in advertising and marketing with several major consumer packaged goods companies. She later married and returned to North Carolina, and about 12 years ago she was offered the opportunity to come back to Kenan-Flagler as part of the admissions team. “It fit me to a tee, and I didn’t need to think very long about coming back to work in Chapel Hill,” she recounts. While she might not have imagined herself in her current role at the start of her career, that she is here now shows the power and flexibility of the MBA, she says.

　　In the interview that follows, Wallace takes the time to completely demystify the admissions process for prospective applicants to Kenan-Flagler, sharing candidly about what they can expect and how best to prepare.

　　Ask: What’s the single most exciting development, change or event happening at Kenan-Flagler in the year ahead?

　　Shelly Wallace: I think what I am most excited about is the quality of the students that we are bringing in. One thing I can say without a doubt is that in the 12 years I have been here, this has been an organization committed to continued improvement. Every year the bar goes up and we tackle new and bigger things, and all the while we are seeing the quality of our students improve. This year we welcomed a fabulous first-year class. We hit the GMAT median of 700 for the first time, which isn’t important in absolute terms, but it does reflect the strength of the pool we are attracting over all. We are just very proud of our class.

　　Ask: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?

　　SW: Absolutely. Now, this isn’t true of all applicants. Many people seek us out specifically because they have had an opportunity to work with alumni or know about our strengths in this area, but there are always people who I think are surprised to discover the depth of our finance program.

　　We are known as a good place for general management – but we actually have three different finance concentrations – corporate finance, investment management and real estate.

　　Of course, it is also very important for us to be industry relevant. Just having certain courses is not always enough to be sure that your students are as prepared as they need to be to make the contributions they want to in their career.

　　With this in mind we launched the finance professional development program, which is intended to be a bridge between the curriculum and marketplace requirements. Students participate in 14 sessions over a period of time. The topics of these sessions include things like QuickStart, tracking the markets, a finance career overview, best practices in Excel, interview prep. Now these are all things students are going to hear about and take courses that touch upon, but these professional development program sessions are about how to make the rubber meet the road. We want students to be able to say, “I understand these things technically, but now I have the experience of having rolled up my sleeves and touched it.”

　　We will have similar types of sessions for other areas, for instance the marketing team has a similar program and we have very extensive prep for students pursuing consulting. But the finance one is the one I want to bring most attention to for prospective applicants who may not know about it.

　　Ask: Walk us through the life of an application in your office from an operational standpoint. What happens between the time an applicant clicks “submit” and the time the committee offers a final decision (e.g. how many “reads” does it get, how long is each “read,” who reads it, does the committee convene to discuss it as a group, etc.).

　　SW: I am someone who really believes in trying to demystify the application process for prospective applicants. There is no advantage to us in our selection process if people feel like they are in the dark. We do try to be as open as we can be so that people can feel like they understand the process. There is a lot of work that you as an applicant go through to present yourself, and we want you to know how much we do with that work on the back end. We want you to know how that work is put to use.

　　We even did a video tour of the admissions office on YouTube. It’s a walk through where we introduce the team in an effort to show that there are real people behind the process. We get a lot of feedback from people who have seen it. They seem to like it, and it helps them feel more comfortable with the process.

　　People also seem to respect the process more when they know how diverse the admissions committee is. We have representatives from finance, administration, consulting, retail and more who are part of the admissions review team. I hope it will make people feel comfortable to know that there is enough perspective on this committee that we can recognize high performers from different backgrounds.

　　Before I launch into a description of the process, let me disclose one thing. We have just transitioned to an admissions software different from the one that we had been using for 11 years. This year has been a little bit of a learning process from the back end, and there have been a few bugs from the applicant end. So we do apologize to anyone who may have gotten an error message as part of our transition.

　　Back to how the process works. Once a person saves his or her application through our online system, we know about you and we have a team of people whose job it is to just help pull you through. Phil and Sharon are their names, and they will let you know what we’ve received and what’s missing.