the one less traveled by… CORNELL

NOTE: You guys have been keeping us busy all weekend, but we’ve been keeping up with you, and as of right now, the crazy essay offers are still in effect! 

Happy New Year to all!

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Cornell is a Top 20 bschool that appears to be so far from the Top 10 that sometimes it seems it doesn’t exist. It hardly ever gets asked about, thus less focus on it from EssaySnark. This less interest from you Brave Supplicants is perhaps a mistake on your part? But Cornell came up recently in a conversation with a Brave Supplicant who’s interested in sales and trading. Believe it or not, Cornell is one of the few options — along with the likes of Columbia, Booth, Wharton, and MIT — that can get you into S&T. Since we haven’t done a “less traveled by” post for like, uh, over a year (oops), and since we like the Cornell Johnson MBA*, then we’ll christen the New Year with a shout-out to Ithaca.

Here’s what we know about this school:

• Cornell is in the Ivy League
• Johnson has strong ties to Wall Street/finance and they’re working hard to build their reputation.
• Johnson students are a little on the younger side.
• They’ve got a great community and they care about who they bring in (just like Tuck, Duke, Yale).
• Besides the finance and consulting guys, you’ll find significant real estate and some hospitality focus there, as they offer the BEST (or, in the case of hospitality, the ONLY) programs of those flavors as you can  find.
• Based on our purely anecdotal evidence, in recent years, Cornell has sent double the number of MBA grads to bulge-bracket IBs as either Duke, Tuck, Darden, or Ross.
• Cornell is in the (beautiful!) boonies of upstate New York – it’s rural up there in Ithaca, and it snows! Though not as much as at Dartmouth.
• Cornell has a very reasonable 27% acceptance rate in the full-time MBA program
• It is often much (MUCH!) easier for an applicant to get noticed by Cornell – this is both because they get fewer applications than any other Ivy League bschool, and because they’re lower ranking means they don’t attract huge numbers of candidates with GMAT scores in the nosebleed seats
• Average GMAT is under 700 (yay!), median GPA is a very reasonable 3.33
• The Johnson admissions people are really nice and would qualify for an “adcoms that we like” post, which we should probably revive again soon too

To summarize:

Cornell Johnson is a great school, and they’re working hard to improve and get up those rankings. They’re near identical to Duke in terms of their student stats on GMAT etc. They have an EXCELLENT brand name (as Cornell), even if “Johnson” doesn’t have quite the same street cred as some of their other East Coast neighbors do. They also have an accelerated MBA for those who’ve already got the standard core curriculum down.

If your GMAT/GPA puts you in more borderline territory for any of the Top 10 schools, and/or if you are feeling discouraged based on a poor outcome from Round 1, or you’re just looking to hedge your bets — or if you’re interested in going to Wall Street, or going into hospitality, or real estate, then you should DEFINITELY be considering Cornell.

The best news of all? The Round 3 deadline for Cornell Johnson is way out in the distance, on January 25th. (Despite the “3” in the name of that round, this is, in fact, still a very viable time to apply to Cornell.)

So you have plenty of opportunity to put together a strong showing for this school.

UPDATE 1/9/12: Cornell Johnson is getting a new Dean! Soumitra Dutta, a long-time professor on business and technology at INSEAD, will be taking over in July. Current dean Joseph Thomas will remain at the school and transition back to teaching.

*This is not to be confused with the Cornell Executive MBA programs, of which EssaySnark is less of a fan (even if it may be the same MBA degree on the diploma). Those Cornell EMBA  programs are perfectly appropriate for some people… but most Brave Supplicants reading this blahg are trying to go for the brass ring, in which case a standard Cornell two-year full-time (or the accelerated one-year track) are viable options that should be given serious consideration