Selections Interview with Judy Johnson, Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid, Thunderbird, the American Graduate School of International Management

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Selections: Who is the ideal applicant? What qualities and characteristics do you look for? How do you gauge them?
Johnson: We are looking for applicants with multicultural sophistication. People who have previous exposure to cultural differences and enough real-world experience to understand how those cultural differences make a difference in how you do business.

Selections: How do you gauge that?
Johnson: In our application procedure, we ask them to detail a lot of what they have done previously and we look at their academic experiences. We have a résumé format that is fairly detailed. In our essay lineup, we ask them for specific cross-cultural exposures. What [the exposures] were, what they learned from them, and [as a result of] those exposures, what they would identify as the value they would bring to the Thunderbird community.

Selections: What role does the GMAT play in the admissions process? What does a GMAT score tell you about an applicant?
Johnson: Personally, I happen to feel that the GMAT score and the subscores are very telling. I would hate to make an admissions decision without them.

Number one, when you take the GMAT scores and look at them along with other the other information that the Educational Testing Service provides, you know averages from different countries and so on and so forth. I use that. The GMAT score shows where the person is in the entire realm of test takers. But it also shows where they are in comparison to people who have similar educational backgrounds. And there is a difference.

The quantitative part is the least interesting to me because everyone has to reach a certain level in their quantitative scores to be able to do the course work at any business school. So, either they are there, or they are not. What we look at very, very carefully are the AWA and the Verbal. Because essentially, my goal in admissions is to bring in a group of people who will add value to one another, and if they can’t communicate, if they can’t develop thoughts, if they can’t present an argument, then that capacity is limited. I use the GMAT to assess those abilities.

Selections: What role does the interview play?
Johnson: We don’t require an interview of everybody. We do some spot interviewing, and it is primarily telephone interviewing. Of all the students we enter in a year, we probably talk personally to one-third to 50 percent of them. Of that group that we talk to, two-thirds of them come to campus and visit. When they come to campus, I always have brief chats with them. The other one-third is oftentimes a telephone interview. What I will do is e-mail a person and say I would like to chat with them briefly, and we will arrange a telephone time. Now, you know and I know that you assume you’re talking to the person you are supposed to be talking to. In our application we have several questions we use to gather information as to whether our applicants have talked with alums. So oftentimes, the people I really want to talk to are those who indicate they haven’t had a contact with a member of the Thunderbird community.

Sometimes I just won’t feel really comfortable after I’ve read an application, and I will call the alum to get their input. We talk a lot about this whole interview process. In any entering class, we have students coming from 40 countries, and in our continuing student enrollment, we have students from 80 countries. So the logistics of setting up an interview process with applicants coming from so many different places—and we are entering students three times a year—has escaped us thus far. I work very closely with our alumni. I have a core group of alums. They are all people who worked for the admissions office on our hospitality program during the 12 years I’ve been here. That is the reason I like that hospitality program—because it gives us a chance to do a training and then those alums go out, they are fairly current with the Thunderbird of today, and they are on a first-name basis with me and me with them. And we talk back and forth a lot on prospective students.

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