Do I have a shot at T15 MBA programs?
I'm putting the finishing touches on my MBA apps and I'm kind of having doubts now. The schools I'm targeting in order of preference are: Ross, Fuqua, Stern, Darden, Johnson, Kenan-Flagler
- GPA/GMAT: 3.7 GPA from community college; 3.9 GPA Summa Cum Laude from a state school. 720 GMAT
- Work experience: 3.5 years working in FP&A at a F100 life sciences company. I have two promotions here, my first one at the one year mark and I was promoted to senior analyst at the 2.5 year mark. Have some pretty big projects under my belt including my work being used in presentations to the CEO, leading some new initiatives and creating processes, conducting training sessions at our company conferences, and some others.
- Recommendations: My LoR's should be pretty solid. One is coming from my director who graduated from a T15 program and the other is from my current manager.
- Goals: I think I have a good story here. I plan to leverage my finance and healthcare background to recruit for healthcare IB in the short term. Long term my goal is corp dev with a pharma company that focuses on cell/gene therapy and rare diseases.
-EC's: Nothing special here honestly. I'm a youth mentor to high school kids to help them with college/career research, working through problems they have in certain courses, and other high school things. I also work with a food bank that helps to get food to the elderly and food insecure. Aside from those two just some small things in college.
My concerns are that my undergrad is far from prestigious, and although I have solid career progression and impact, my work experience is pretty vanilla.
Don't sell yourself short, you have a pretty good shot at a T15 program. I would throw in CBS and Yale, drop UNC.
On the surface your stats are strong, which should be good for stat admit focused programs like Yale. While your UG's prestige may hurt at a school like CBS, given your IB focus you should apply. If you really sell how IB is your career and why you picked a certain school, Johnson should be an 'easy' admit.
Much of your application is going to come down to your optional essay, where you explain why you ended up at a community college and how your career progressed after.
Thanks. I was thinking about the optional essay but wasn't sure if it was worth it. I do have a legitimate reason, long story short coming out of high school I had no direction and was abusing alcohol/drugs and I didn't really care about school. Even at the community college I didn't do great my first two semesters (3.0 - 3.1 GPA) until I had a come to Jesus moment and got my shit together. But I figured adcoms knowing that would probably make me even worse off.
It's not what you say, but how you say it.
Making a compelling polished case of how you self realized your issues in college and pulled yourself up by your bootstraps can only help your case. You can then talk about how this motivated you to seek out ppl in similar sits in your ECs and be a mentor. Frankly, your essays/apps are much strong with this essay that ties it all together than without it.
If you do a good job w/ your essays, you can even pull in your WE and why XYZ MBA program, etc...etc.... Your essays should be one unified story about how you started at point A, how you got to point B today and why b-school will get you to point C tomorrow, followed by point D in the future. I suggest outlining it all to begin. Your story can be sold very well, just takes time and creativity.
You have aimed at very realistic schools for you. If your application is strong, you could have multiple acceptances.
Best,
Linda
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