Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business
Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business is ranked 16th among the best B-schools in the U.S. by Poets&Quants.
17. Carnegie Mellon University
Tepper School of Business
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Admissions: 412-268-2272
Email: mba-admissions@andrew.cmu.edu
Website: http://www.tepper.cmu.edu
Apply Online: http://tepper.cmu.edu/mba/admissions/apply-online/index.aspx
Admission Deadlines for Class of 2014:
Round One: 10/1/11
Round Two: 1/3/12
Round Three: 3/5/12
Round Four: 4/23/12
The school will roll out a new curriculum in the fall of 2012 to impose more training in leadership and writing, and to teach core subject areas such as finance, marketing, and operations in a more integrated fashion. These changes come along with the appointment of a new dean who has pledged to raise the school’s rather timid profile in recent years. Dean Bob Dammon, who had been on the school’s faculty since 1984, has pledged to lead a more aggressive effort to publicize and market the school’s strengths, raise more money to house Tepper in a larger facility, and increase the size of its relatively small MBA program by 50% to 300 students.
For a business school that has produced nine Nobel Prize winner, Tepper has been surprisingly circumspect in tooting its horn. As Dammon told The Wall Street Journal shortly after his appointment as dean in May of 2011, “We don’t talk about it much to the external marketplace, and I am going to change that. If we are going to be recognized for the quality of the program, we need to make sure the outside world knows about us. And if we want to move up in the rankings, that’s also a necessity. I want to be as visible as I possibly can.”
The new curriculum includes a BaseCamp exercise during orientation that immediately teaches students how the key disciplines of business come together in an integrated manner. Before, the core curriculum began with a solid foundation in what Tepper described as the three fundamental scientific disciplines – economics, behavioral sciences, and quantitative methods. This approach is why the school sees itself as a smaller and more intimate academic cousin to Chicago Booth and MIT Sloan, though those rivals have far greater resources, stature and prestige among the major MBA players. What Dammon is hoping to correct is the notion that Tepper is merely a quant school overflowing with engineering types with high IQ but relatively low EQ.
As one recent Tepper graduate put it, “the ’quant’ reputation of the school can be a double-edged sword. Two-thirds of the student class will come from an engineering background, so you cannot draw upon the varied business experiences of others, as this is probably their first exposure to business education, culture, and corporate environment. This can also lead employers to look at Tepper as a pool of students to fill the more technical or back office support roles in their businesses. Additionally, there is a learning curve for interpersonal soft skills for those from more technical backgrounds. So even though students are very bright, they may not appear to be as polished as their peers from competing business schools.”
In any case, the flexibility of the second year curriculum—virtually all elective courses—will continue to offer students the opportunity to further integrate what they’ve learned, to explore the areas in which their career interests lie, and to gain additional breadth across management areas. The school offers more than 120 electives in various areas.
