Chances at MBA (Stanford Law dropout, family business, 770 gmat)
Hi, I know you guys are probably tired of chances thread but I have a very unique situation that I couldn't really find past threads for. I graduated from a state school with 3.97 gpa in accounting and went straight into law school. I hated it so much that I dropped out after only a semester. Since then I joined the family business, factoring, and have worked there for the past 2 years. So do I have any chance at a M7 school with the non traditional work background and an asterisk of a law school dropout? Would the fact that I helped the business double its profit work in my favor or is that irrelevant and not even worth mentioning while applying? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
need some more details here - where is your college ranked, did you take the GMAT, how large is your family business? On the surface I'd say you don't have enough work experience and ideally you'd spend some time at a job outside of the family business.
College is unranked, already took it and got a 770, net profit for the business is around $500,000. So I should try to get a job somewhere else first? The thing is I don't think I would get as valuable of an experience or responsibility outside. My father has taken a step back and I am pretty much running the company at this point.
stats are obviously solid but tough to say how schools will react to dropping out of law school and no work exp besides family business (even though your accomplishments sound impressive). should probably let some of the experts give their thoughts Betsy Massar MBAApply
Frank Slaughtery Thank you! I have to laugh when you say I am an expert. I'm a little better than a guy in a bar on "chances." But I'll throw my opinion in.
Having said that, as someone who has seen a lot of applications, some wins and some losses, I think the OP might offer an interesting angle. Here are the pros: A young person running a company is interesting. Family businesses, big and small, have their own quirks, and there's a lot of opportunity to fall on your face. The stakes of taking over an ongoing operation are high. The OP is dealing with counterparties and risk, as well as client management. gmat score is great, really great.
Here are the neutrals: no-name school. (if I read the OP correctly) t would normally be a negative, but the high GPA might mitigate it. Guy-in-a-bar (as in, unsubstantiated) comment: admissions officers do not value accounting GPAs as much as they value other majors, such as STEM or even hard-core finance.
You will notice I didn't comment on dropping out of law school. It's not negative It happened. OP got in, tried it for a semester, and saw that it was not worth the investment. It's not a resume item, but something to put in the optional essay. Stanford Law is really cool, shows an ability to get into an elite program, which does influence other admissions officers. You put it in the title of this post so we would look, right? It works!
And sure, doubling profit is relevant in the world and in admissions. Sure -- you did something to change the business, and that shows smarts and leadership. If you are going to have 3 years at matriculation, you may be on the less-experienced side, but the depth of your work might balance that out.
So, what's the downside of applying?
So you dropped out of law school, because you realized it wasn't your thing. Cool. It happens. Glad you got out when you did and realized it so soon (rather than 10 years in).
And now you're just 2 years in, with your first full-time job as an adult.
How are you sure so soon that you want an MBA? Why are you in such a rush to go back now?
I see this so much here on the WSO forums (and with folks emailing me) - relatively recent college grads who have spent their whole lives in school, are barely out of school, and in a rush to go back to school, as if grad school will magically allow them to skip through early adulthood, like some sort of "cheat code" in a video game that gets you to skip levels in a video game.
The MBA is a rest stop. A sabbatical of sorts. Not some sort of panacea or destination, or a path to glory.
The destination is what you're doing now. Work. This is your life. As an adult, the life you build outside of your personal life (family, friends) is from the work you do in your job and your community.
Point is, you've taken a detour with the law thing. Work for a few years. Ground yourself. Sure, you can apply now if you want, but my hunch is that you are not ready to get the most out of b-school until you have more of a grounding as a working adult. And frankly your chances are probably stronger with a few more years, so that the law school dropout thing is more of a distant memory (and can show that it was an "early" life lesson - for which right now, it's not really a distant memory since it was only 2 years ago).
There's no rush. Maybe it's something all 20-somethings have to learn on their own, but it seems like y'all in some sort of imaginary mental race in your head, a race to hurry up, get it over with, a race against whom... for what? What are you in a rush to arrive to?
Not sure what led you to apply to law school - but if it was this sense of anxiety, this rush to do something and this "go, go, go" mentality without really doing your research on yourself (it's not about "law school" but about whether you were a fit for that kind of life, and that is research on you), what's to say that barely 2 years in, you suddenly know for sure you want an MBA now? You might be pretty sure, but give yourself a few years more to be extra damn sure. Perhaps that's the real lesson to be learned from your experience at Stanford law and the decision to apply, attend and then drop out.
Thanks for your responses. I left law school because after talking to older students and alumns I realized that the work is nothing like I imagined. You are pretty much just a glorified paper pusher/ grammar checker. I want to get an mba now because I want to go into management consulting, something I can't do with my current resume.
I know nothing about your family business, but would curious to hear more. Regardless, I am a Sr Associate at a large PE shop and my goal is to eventually buy a business around the size of yours and see what I can do with it. Sounds awesome to me - so much better than management consulting. Just make sure you really understand what the day to day of management consulting is vs the perception (similar to what happened in your law school experience). If you want to step away for the sake of stepping away from the family business to try something different, I would consider going to a larger competitor in the same industry, learn as much as you can and "best practices" and eventually come back to your own business and kill it.
Just a different perspective. Grass is always greener, and sounds like you have a pretty awesome thing going (albeit I know very little). But i bet you if asked 100 management consultants your age and even older whether they would rather stay doing what they are doing or [eventually] own and run their own $0.5M ebitda business, 90+ would choose the latter.
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