What Are Your Odds of Getting In?

Mr. Banker

730 GMAT
3.88 GPA
Undergraduate degree in economics from a mid-tier University of California campus
Work experience includes four years in financial services at a custody bank, in fund accounting for nine months and in project/business analysis for a little over three years. Given high-profile and prestigious assignment across country to help transition a legacy accounting platform to a standard accounting.
Extracurricular involvement as a team captain in recreational basketball for one year and one-half and a leadership role in a community service organization
First-generation college grad
Raised in a single-parent household
Goals: Short-term is to get into strategy consulting while long-term goal is to get into venture capital or private equity
26-year-old Caucasian male

Odds of Success:

Harvard: 15%

Stanford: 10%

Wharton: 20-30%

Northwestern: 30+%

MIT: 30+%

Berkeley: 20% to 30%

Sandy’s Analysis: Hmmmmm, mid-tier UC and some boring set of jobs at a custody bank. Well, you can spin what you do there however you want, but custody bank = bye bye at Harvard and Stanford for non-minorities. You are competing with dudes from Ivies and Public Ivies with the same stats and gold plate jobs in investment banking, management consulting, and private equity. Also, the fact you stayed there for four years is a negative. What you were supposed to do, in their minds, was get a better job after two years.

As noted, schools understand why a guy like you would start at mid-tier UC, but many guys like you got into Berkeley. Wharton might buy this, on numbers alone and a sympathetic back story.

Your extras are OK but not door busters. The extras will help you at Kellogg, which is your natural fighting weight, although, as noted, you might punch up to Wharton. Sloan is hard to predict. Aside from solid numbers, this is not a story full of the so-called “innovation” they claim to be looking for. On the other hand, they might respect your operations background and secretly figure you will drift back to it.

Sorry to be a bit negative, I respect your story. Staying at that job for four years was a big mistake in this game and the right move in every other game. So you got caught in some odd wind shear.

The upside is that any one of those places can be a platform for a consulting gig –moving out of that into VC/PE with no prior experience in I-banking, well, that could be hard.