That New Year sense of anticipation and excitement is currently palpable in the UCD Smurfit Admissions Office. This is because the recruitment cycle for the 2012 MBA class is officially underway! There is a tremendous energy and buzz within the office as the Admissions Team connects with many uniquely qualified and diverse candidates who have an interest in undertaking the full-time or part-time MBA (Executive MBA) programmes this fall.
I have had various opportunities to meet with prospective candidates at events such as our first ‘Taste of an MBA’ breakfast lecture which took place on Wednesday, February 1st, the Career Zoo Jobs and Postgraduate Fair in Dublin’s Mansion House, various Universities and Institutes of Technology around Ireland in addition to the Masterbeurs Career and Postgraduate Fair in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Given the success of the aforementioned events and, in particular, our ‘Taste of an MBA’ breakfast events, I very much look forward to our second and third lectures in this series which are scheduled to take place on Wednesday March 7th and Wednesday the 2nd May respectively. Next week the School will host our first Open Event of the 2012 calendar year at our Blackrock campus with a number of C.V. Review sessions scheduled to take place the following week. Finally, I look forward to meeting with candidates at the eFellows MBA Day which is due to take place in Munich on Saturday March 3rd. Details of these events and others can be found on http://www.smurfitschool.ie/events/.
Applications to each of our Scholarship competitions are also being submitted at this time as the deadlines for our GMAT, Regional and ‘Ideas for the Future’ Scholarships are fast approaching. For those of you who are currently working on perfecting your Scholarship application essays its time to focus on finalising those applications and collating the required documentation as March 15th is just but a few sleeps away!! Based on the applications received to date I am most excited about the diversity, experience and personal attributes of this years applicants and I look forward to connecting with those candidates who are currently in the process of preparing their applications for the forthcoming academic year.
– Gillian Durnin, MBA Admissions Manager
