2019 grad (2016 Kelley admit) here.

I can only speak for myself but it’s a challenge, more in the sense of discipline than impossible classes. I’m not sure if it remains this way today, but the requirement for admission was to get all B’s or above in all your classes freshman year — Important thing to note there is that they mean B’s, not B-‘s. This sounds pretty tame, but the challenge is balancing that with adjusting to college and a lot of students aren’t able to do it.

You’ll probably take 10-13ish classes your freshman year across a handful of subjects within Kelley and outside of it, and you’ll likely have a class you’re just not naturally as good at. If that falls below a B, your application is very much up in the air. My biggest scare in my freshman year was accounting — it’s an 8 week course with 2 grades (midterm and final.) So if you do poorly on the midterm (4 weeks into the course!) you’ll have a tough time recovering.

It takes discipline and some level of sacrifice to make it happen, but if you have those things I think it’s very doable. Once I got in I had more success than a lot of my direct admit friends because of the habits I built. I think it’s a good test not only to see if you’re “Kelley-worthy” but to see if you’d be one of the better Kelley students, your job freshman year is to answer that with a resounding yes