Top Of Stanford’s Class: What It Takes To Be An Arjay Miller Scholar

Arjay Miller, former Stanford dean from 1969 to 1979, geets a graduating MBA and Arjay Miller Scholar

As a group, the Arjay Miller Scholars are a varied bunch who have gone to to work in a fairly diverse range of jobs. Poets&Quants analyzed the profiles of the 40 scholars to come up with some surprising findings (It wasn’t always possible to get up-to-date information on every employer of the top 40 because a few of them hadn’t yet updated their LInkedIn profiles or failed to respond to inquiries.)

The most popular undergraduate school of the top 40: Harvard, which granted college degrees to a half dozen of the Arjay Miller Scholars. Stanford, Dartmouth and UPenn were next, represented by three from each of those highly selective schools. Yale and Northwestern each claimed two scholars as well.

U.S. universities clearly dominated, with only seven of the top 40 having undergraduate degrees from outside the U.S.–and surprisingly only one from China, Peking University, and none from India. Indeed, nearly half of the scholars–18 of them–got their undergraduate degrees from the original eight Ivy League schools. Just five came from public universities in the U.S.: UC-Berkeley, the University of Virginia, UNC at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at Austin, and Indiana University.

BIG MAINSTREAM MBA RECRUITERS ARE GETTING FEW ARJAY MILLER SCHOLARS

The big mainstream recruiters of MBAs weren’t very successful at landing many of Stanford’s most academically accomplished grads. Although seven of the top 40 had worked for McKinsey & Co. before entering the MBA program, only one of them ended up employed by the firm after getting his Stanford MBA–and he was a returning McKinseyite who even spent his summer internship at the firm.

Bain & Co., listed as a pre-MBA employer by five of the top MBAs, also only managed to get one Stanford MBA, also a return trip to Bain Capital. Goldman Sachs, listed on the resumes of three of the 40, also managed to get one former employee back. Boston Consulting Group, where a half dozen of the top 40 gained work experience, got a single Arjay Miller Scholar to return. Morgan Stanley, where a pair of the top graduating MBAs had worked, came up empty.

So where did they go to work? Six of the 40 founded their own companies. Amazon and Google were the only companies to get two of the smartest MBAs in the class. Most of them went into venture capital, private equity and investment management firms, ranging from Accel Partners and Blue Sage Capital to Golden Gate Capital and TPG Capital.

SOME SCHOLARS ARE STILL UNDECIDED ABOUT THEIR FUTURES

At least three of the scholars–Gregory Bybee, Brian Stults and Lu Ni–were still deciding what to do. Bybee says he was deciding between two opportunities: a head of product role at an EdTech startup or a head of marketing role at an enterprise technology startup. Stults says he spent the summer conducting independent research on asset management and trading strategies, exploring the idea of starting a company in that space. But for a variety of reasons, he against going that route for now. Li now works with a Chinese animation company as assistant to the chairman, doing strategy, finance and project planning work, though she may return to McKinsey where she worked before going to Stanford.

(See following page for our table of all of this year’s Arjay Miller Scholars and their work and educational backgrounds)

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