From Ross Admissions Director Blog:

Interview updates and happenings around the school

As promised, Wave 1 interview invitations went out yesterday. The next two waves of interview invitations will go out by end of day on Friday, February 3 and Friday, February 10. The first wave of Consortium interview invites will go out by end of day tomorrow, and the next set will go out with the second wave on February 3.

In case you missed one of my earlier posts explaining the wave process, here’s the deal: the wave in which you are invited to interview has no correlation to: (a) when you submitted your application; (b) the strength of your application; or, (c) the likelihood of your admission. We do it in waves so that we can smooth the interview load over a longer period of time. If we released them all on one date, we wouldn’t be able to do it until much later in the process, and the window of time for interviews to be conducted would be extremely limited. The wave process enables us to do more thorough and thoughtful reviews with a limited staff.

Regarding the interview day that’s being planned in collaboration with the Michigan Business Women student club – yes, it’s open to all interview invitees. The thing to note is that the agenda will be focused on the Michigan Ross experience from our women students’ perspectives, and the panelists will be members of the Michigan Business Women student club.

To give you a glimpse of what’s happening around the school, on Monday (Martin Luther King, Jr. day in the U.S.), the school hosted a lunch and lecture with former Washington, D.C. Mayor, Adrian Fenty, who led significant reforms in the DC public school system. He gave a frank talk about the challenges he faced in implementing changes that led to rising graduation rates and enrollment there. Also this week, the Dean held town halls with MBA1s. (She held sessions with MBA2s before the holidays). She was joined by associate deans and senior administrators to update students on some of the school’s current priorities: globalization, entrepreneurship, defining what the next generation of action-based learning will look like, and expanding our already-broad array of inter-disciplinary (i.e., cross-campus) initiatives. The Dean is planning to release a strategic plan for the school by late summer. You can read more about these and other initiatives on the Dean’s blog.

Tomorrow evening, I will be joining our MBA students for the second annualRevitalization and Business Conference in downtown Detroit. The conference will feature prominent industry and city leaders and entrepreneurial change agents who will share their perspectives on how business issues contribute to Detroit’s progress and transformation. Last spring, I met with the students who organized the inaugural conference and was struck by their commitment to not just make an impact “out there” or in emerging countries, but also in making an impact in and around our community, and they weren’t even Michigan-born and bred. Another way in which our students impact our community is by serving on the boards of local nonprofit organizations. During a conversation with one of our newly admitted students from New York last March, he commented that many schools had social impact initiatives, but few were as focused on the local community as Michigan Ross is. He told me that this was one of the deciding factors for him to join our community this fall.