~~ A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE~~
The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley is one of a handful of top MBA programs whose admissions team has a new leader beginning this season. In mid-August, Stephanie Fujii replaced outgoing Director of Admissions Peter Johnson, who had been with Haas for more than a decade.
Fujii generously made time to speak with us while getting the hang of her new role just as the first admissions round of the season heats up at Haas. Though newly minted Berkeley’s admissions director, Fujii is not new to admissions nor is she new to Haas. She has been a part of the Haas admissions team for the past five years, most recently as senior associate director. Before that she worked in the nonprofit sector in eldercare, after recieving an MBA of her own from Haas.
“It is exciting to be part of the process and to meet people on the road and help them understand what makes our program unique,” she says. Prior to business school she was in HR consulting and while a student at Berkeley she was a Haas Student Ambassador, which involved working closely with admissions to plan student events.
“This isn’t the career that I envisioned for myself when I went to business school, but I knew I was very interested in the nonprofit sector and I wanted to do something I was passionate about,” she says. “And I can tell you that I am very passionate about Haas.”
Our thanks to Fujii for taking time out of a very busy schedule to share a little about her background, what she’s most excited about in the year ahead at Haas and what her team is looking for as they meet with prospective MBA applicants.
Clear Admit: What’s the most difficult thing about filling Peter Johnson’s shoes?
Stephanie Fujii: If you look at how the program has evolved – both when he was a co-director with Jett Pihakis and when he was the sole director – we continue to do great things. The program was evolving and still is. We were very transparent about our process and we did a good job of communicating what is unique about our program. In terms of going into new markets, selecting the right applicants – there was a tremendous amount of work that the two of them did, so the legacy of excellence they created is foremost in my mind.
What our students and our alums went through in the process, that’s something that we want to continue to do well. Then, as an added challenge, there are a number of really exciting things that are going on for us within the program and within admissions. It’s exciting but it’s also the unknown.
I feel very lucky that we have such a strong team in place made up of people who have been with us for years. We will miss Pete. But we launched our strategic plan in the spring and the challenge now is to continue to make sure we are selecting candidates who fit with our program.
Our strategic plan included articulating a set of defining principles: question the status quo, confidence without attitude, students always and beyond yourself. We are really working those values into our admissions selection process. Because of our strategic plan and our stake in the sand that we have set, we have to really be able to continue sharpening our message as we are talking to prospective students. This is something we are continuing to work on and refine but it is also just an exciting time for us.
CA: What’s the single most exciting development, change or event happening at Haas in the year ahead?
SF: I think the most exciting thing for us right now is that we have just rejoined the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. The Consortium is an organization devoted to promoting diversity and inclusion in American business. It achieves this by awarding merit-based, full-tuition scholarships at its member schools each year to the best and brightest MBA applicants.
We had initially been a member of the Consortium in the early nineties and had to withdraw because of Proposition 209, which prohibits state-funded programs in California from giving preferential treatment on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin. (At the time, the Consortium awarded fellowships only to African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans.) But ever since then we have continued to have discussions with the Consortium because diversity in every area is very important to us.
We are a small class – about 240 students – so we want to make sure we have people within that number from a variety of backgrounds representing lots of different experiences. The Consortium expanded its mission a few years ago to include all U.S. citizens and permanent residents, and so we were able to reconsider rejoining. This is very exciting for us because it fits with our overall goal of enrolling as diverse a class as possible. And then, aside from just our excitement at rejoining, there’s been our presence at events and getting our Consortium alumni engaged in this process. It is very exciting for us to be able to be part of this again.
CA: What is the one area of your program that you wish applicants knew more about?
SF: I could answer this on several levels. I think that in terms of academics and curriculum, most people know we are a general management program, but we also have a number of specialty areas. People often associate us with a specific one, but they don’t realize what a wide array we have.
We also are doing a lot of promotion around BILD, which is our connecting theme that we launched this fall. It stands for Berkeley Innovative Leader Development. We have identified what we feel makes innovative leaders successful and are looking at the core and the curriculum to make sure that our students are going to develop these qualities while at Haas.
Finally, in terms of things that I wish applicants knew more about, an area that comes to mind is really the culture. This is something that is hard to learn about by just reading about it. You really have to come and experience our culture and our community and get a sense that when we talk about our defining principles they aren’t just words that we wrote on a board somewhere. It’s something that we very much are. And from an admissions standpoint, it’s very important to make sure we are selecting candidates who fit in with this culture.
CA: 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.).
SF: As soon as the applicant presses submit they get an immediate response from us, which is “Thank you for submitting your application.” Then we assemble each application making sure that all of the required pieces are available – that means the application, the letters or recommendation and now our applicants can provide copies of official transcripts when they submit their application.
Once all of the materials have been assembled and we identify that the application is complete, then they go out for first reads. All of our applications are assigned to readers based on the country of applicant, and every applicant is read by at least two members of our team. At that point the second reader decides whether to invite to interview, deny or waitlist. Whenever there is disagreement between two readers, an application will go to a third read. Though some applications will go to a third read even when there’s agreement, just to get one more point of view.
Applicants who are invited to interview will then interview, either with an alumni outside of the Bay Area or one of our current students on campus. We then review all applicants who have completed interviews, discuss them in committee and make a final decision of whether to admit, deny or waitlist.
Applicants who are sent to the waitlist will then have a chance to submit more materials if necessary. For our round one applicants who are waitlisted, we will review that list again after we release our round two decisions and so on throughout the process.
CA: How does your team approach the essay portion of the application specifically? What are you looking for as you read the essays? Are there common mistakes that applicants should try to avoid? One key thing they should keep in mind as they sit down to write them?
SF: So we are looking for a couple of things in the essays. The first is a clear and consistent story. We want people who understand and can tell us, “This is what I have accomplished so far, this is what I hope to accomplish after business school and this is what I want to get out of business school to accomplish those goals.” These things should all be part of that story of where you are headed, what you have to get there and what you need to get there.
The second thing we are looking for is authenticity. The essays are a really good opportunity to tell us who you are beyond your resume and transcripts. So be honest and share what you really care about, not what you think we want you to care about.
I think when you are trying to write something that you think the admissions committee wants to read it’s not necessarily coming from the heart, so it really falls flat. What we tell applicants is to have somebody who knows you well and who you trust to be brutally honest with you read through your essay and tell you if it captures who you are and what you want to achieve.
Read the full article: Admissions Director Q&A: Stephanie Fujii of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley