How to Get Accepted to MIT Sloan MBA

Admissions Straight Talk

29-11-2022 • 29 mins

Discover all you need to know about MIT Sloan's MBA program [Show Summary] MIT Sloan is one of the magic M7 MBA programs, and its Assistant Dean, Dawna Levenson, shares everything applicants aiming for acceptance should know.  Interview with Dawna Levenson, Assistant Dean at MIT Sloan School of Management [Show Notes] Welcome to the 498th episode of Admissions Straight Talk, Accepted's podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Are you ready to apply to your dream MBA programs? Are you competitive at your target schools? Accepted's MBA admissions quiz can give you a quick reality check. Just go to accepted.com/mbaquiz, complete the quiz, and you'll not only get an assessment, but also tips on how to improve your qualifications. Plus, it's all free.  It gives me great pleasure to have back on Admissions Straight Talk, Dawna Levenson, Assistant Dean at MIT Sloan School of Management. Dawna earned her bachelor's and master's in Management Science at MIT Sloan, became a partner at Accenture, and then returned to MIT Sloan in 2007 as Associate Director of Academic Programs. She moved into Admissions in 2012 and became Director of Admissions in 2013 and Assistant Dean in 2018.  Can you give us an overview of the MIT Sloan Full-Time MBA program for those listeners who aren't that familiar with it? [2:07] Absolutely. I think I would begin with class size. Our two-year MBA has a class size of roughly 410. You may have some friends who just graduated in the past year or so, and their class size was slightly bigger. That’s a result of the pandemic when there was a fair amount of uncertainty, and we actually grew the class size in 2020. However, it was never intended for that to be permanent, and so we have slowly worked our way back down. Fundamentally, the class that just matriculated, and moving forward, will be approximately 410.  We have a one-semester core and then three semesters to really shape the curriculum as you see fit based on your interests. As much as you as a student have flexibility in terms of your classes and shaping that, our faculty have a lot of flexibility, too, in terms of how they teach. Your classes will be a combination of traditional lectures and problem sets, as well as a lot of project-based classes. We have a subset of these project-based classes that are called our Action Learning labs, where you are either on a particular subject matter or focused on a certain geography and working as part of a team to solve a real problem for a real company and make recommendations to them at the end of the project. hbspt.cta.load(58291, '9bb31be0-3cf6-45f0-be3d-3791cc1bd9bd', {}); Are you seeing any trends in terms of hiring? Where do MIT Sloan MBA grads get jobs? [3:42] We just recently published our 2022-2023 employment report, so these numbers are right off of that. For students who graduated in 2022 seeking employment, 31.2% of them went into consulting, 22.6% went into finance, and 22.6% went into technology. An additional 6.8% went into pharma, healthcare, and biotech. It’s a good spread. What's a little misleading is some may have gone into consulting, but they’re focused on the tech industry. So, keep that in mind. Can you explain the optional core electives? [5:02] Our two-year MBA students spend their first semester taking core classes. You’re actually part of a cohort of somewhere between 65 and 70 students who you're taking all of your classes with. You're also assigned to be part of a core team of six or seven people where you're actually doing all of your work together. In addition to your core set of classes, you also have the option to take one additional elective. You can choose from marketing, finance, strategy, or operations for that additional elective. What are the core requirements? [5:48] They include microeconomics, DMD, which is data models and decisions, accounting, and communications.  What are the tracks and certificates that MIT Sloan offers?