With ten weeks to go before our May 1 application deadline, the stream of prospective students is picking up dramatically. Both the quality and quantity of applications have increased compared to last year. In fact, a dozen students have already received their acceptance letters for fall.
Lois, Debbie and I will continue to meet with candidates through February, March and April. Most years, about half of our applications arrive during the last two weeks before the deadline.
Between now and then, many prospective students will be sitting in on MBA classes, allowing them to get a taste of the educational experience at Richmond. They are also having productive conversations with our students and faculty members. My thanks go out to the professors and MBA students who have made candidates feel at home all semester long.
I was among several professors who toured Queally Hall this afternoon. The new wing of our building, scheduled to be finished just ten months from now, is coming along very nicely.
From inside the tower that will serve as our new front door, we were able to get a sense of how the new construction will mesh with the existing building that has served us so well for so long. The public spaces on the first floor will mean additional opportunities for students and faculty to gather for informal conversations before and after classes. We walked to the far end of the new wing, where the footprint of a 225-seat auditorium was easy to identify. Just outside that space, a small kitchen will allow for light refreshments to be served. Nearby, a rather large patio will be built, facing the lawn that separates us from the law school.
On the first and second floors, classrooms and conference spaces are taking shape. In keeping with our emphasis on small class sizes, many of the classrooms will seat no more than 24 students. There seems to be a nice mix of small and large classrooms, some with tiers and some left flat. Most are a very short walk from the central staircase that rings the tower. It was not hard to imagine the place filled with MBA students.
One of the best results of the International Residency in China last June was that one of our students, Tracy Scott, came back with an interest in studying at Tsinghua University on a full-time basis. Thanks to the hard work of my colleague, Tom Cosse (Associate Dean for International Programs) and many other staff members here at Richmond, Tracy is on her way to China this week.
She’ll spend a semester at Tsinghua as an exchange student. Her classmates will be drawn from leading business schools around the world. Tracy will be chroncling her experiences at her new blog, http://www.jiejieconsulting.com. I encourage you to bookmark her site and follow her over the next five months. We hope and expect that she will be the first of many Richmond MBA students spending a semester at Tsinghua.
With classes starting tomorrow, I am shocked and amazed that this will be my last semester in the MBA program. The past 1.5 years have gone far faster than I ever would have imagined. Not coming from a business background, I was certain that I would feel overwhelmed with my classes; fortunately, this never again crossed my mind after my first week of classes. Thanks to The Robins School of Business, I now feel competent in many facets of business and know that I can hold my own in any type of business setting. The faculty here are exceptional and clearly explain their subject matter, while maintaining an “open door policy” for any additional help if needed. In addition, they genuinely want to get to know their students, and I’ve found myself talking with many of them outside of the classroom about both school and life in general. My classmates have been equally engaging and I’m impressed by the caliber of class discussions where people feel encouraged to speak up even when they do not agree with the majority opinion. Being back in school during this unstable economic time has been very interesting, to say the least; it has allowed greater discussion (and opinions) in most all of my classes, including Business Ethics, Strategic Resource Management, and Board of Directors and Corporate Governance. It is scary to think that I am going to applying for jobs (in a new field no less) while the fate of our economy still hangs in limbo, and unemployment remains steady at over 10%, but I am fortunate that I chose to get my MBA when I did and know that it will serve me well as I look for jobs.
Congratulations to 2007 MBA graduate Danny Desriveaux (shown below) on the Montreal Alouettes’ Grey Cup victory.
