Some people are just ahead of the pack.

For Oliver Thomas, summers off from Oxford University meant time spent in an office tower, working with CEOs and top executives as an investment banker or accountant. For Lisa B. Schwartz ’03, internships at the U.N. and the Supreme Court of the United States offered a chance to relax from the hectic pace of maintaining her 4.0 GPA.

Thomas, 23, started at Harvard Business School (HBS) this fall after graduating from Oxford University. Along with ten other students in this class, he comes to the prestigious B-School right out of college. For these students, Harvard Business School’s Early Career Initiative—which aims to attract students within three years of graduating college—was just the ticket.

But it remains to be seen whether the initiative, which has been underway for at least three years, is rewriting the rules of HBS admissions, or merely acknowledging those students who are exceptions to them.

“This could be driven by competition over unformed brainiacs with law schools and even Stanford Business School, which has always trended younger,” said Sanford Kreisberg, an independent admissions consultant who runs a much-followed thread on Business Week’s website about elite business school admissions called “ASKANDY.” “Ivy grads with nose-bleed GPAs and unclear career goals used to be hired for two years by investment banks and consulting shops during the boom. Now those kids, by default, go to law school, the haven of the unemployed and undecided. HBS may want some of that DNA.”

But Kreisberg questions the level of follow-through on the initiative.

“They have said this in the past, and results are slim,” he says.

Yet those “nose-bleed GPAs” appear to be alive and well across the river, some the results of the Early Career Initiative.

Both Thomas and Schwartz arrived at HBS this fall, each superstars in their own right. Schwartz, whose 4.0 GPA also earned her a spot Yale law school, will be concurrently pursuing her J.D. and M.B.A., while Thomas hopes to use his HBS experience to help his mother country, England, land the 2012 Olympic Games.

But Thomas says he doesn’t feel that one has to be a ‘super-star’ to come to HBS right out of college.

“I don’t think the word superstars is appropriate at all,” he says, “We are just people who have enjoyed opportunities and are enthusiastic about looking for ways in which to build ourselves and about experiencing different things and different people.”

Thomas says he decided to apply to HBS on a whim—he went to an admissions presentation in London “for future interest,” and when he found out about the early career initiative, he applied. In matriculating, he ditched his offers from an investment bank and Proctor and Gamble in favor of crossing the pond for B-School.

“I always thought that you had to be 25+ for the premier business schools,” says Thomas, “but I gathered from this presentation that that is not the case, and that a lot of people wait too long.”

With summer jobs at investment bank Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Anderson under his belt, Thomas applied—but, he says, “to be honest, I thought it was a massive outside shot that I would win myself a place.”

Thomas sees his summer experiences as having been key to his gaining admission.