Handicapping Your Elite B-School Chances

Ms. Unemployed

 

• GMAT not yet taken
• GPA unknown
• Undergraduate degree in business from a French university with honors
• Master’s degree in financial engineering from a French university with honors
• Work experience as a junior trader for a year and one-half and then in sales with a blue chip bank for two years; now living in London but unemployed for the past six months
• “I had been travelling for the first three months (Asia, 
South America, and North America), and since then have used my time to pass three professional certifications”
• Extracurricular involvement includes training in Israeli martial combat, tango and horseback riding for years; also had been a volunteer tutor for summer camps
• Goal: To use the MBA to “re-base” my sales position to get more opportunities (“The market is so difficult 
these days that it is almost impossible inside sales to move to one product to another, or one client base to another”)
• “I have been 
working since I was 16 to 18 years old (wanted to be autonomous, and was also helping my father who was sick), then went to college at 18 (had multiple 
jobs to finance during my studies)”
• 29-year-old French woman

Odds of Success:

Duke: 20% to 30%

Virginia: 20% to 30%

UCLA: 20% to 30%

Michigan: 20% to 30%

ESADE: 40+%

HEC Paris: 40+%

Sandy’s Analysis: Well, I like your story and interests, especially — “working [since] 16 to 18 years old (wanted to be autonomous, and was also helping 
financially my father who was sick), then went to college at 18 (had multiple jobs to finance myself during my 5 – years studies).”

But I am not the admissions board of a business school. It’s hard to be real precise about your chances since we don’t have a GMAT or GPA or the names of schools or employers. But in general, 29 year olds, with what seems to be 3.5 years of experience in trading and sales at OK and leading banks, who are unemployed for six or more months when applying are going to have a hard time at Top 10 U.S. schools, well, for all those reasons.

Being unemployed per se is something that schools will wink at. If you claim to be doing something purposeful at the time, e.g., retraining or helping a friend start a company. Even if you were employed, at last job, this would be a hard sell, unless you have strong GPA and GMAT scores and could craft a story about how you plan to reshape your finance/sales/trading past into a post-MBA future as a _________. Filling in that blank is the issue.

You hint at this yourself when you say you want to “use an MBA to re-base my sales position to get more opportunities  . . . .”  I think with your background you could get another banking job, or even a consulting job with a firm that specializes in financial institutions. You could also work as a product manager or client “hand-holder” for a big bank, pension fund, or mutual fund.  If you get a near 700 GMAT and your GPA and recommendations are strong, and you execute well on recs and applications, I could see this as a possible reach at places like Duke, Darden, UCLA, Michigan, and generally schools ranked seven through 20.

Don’t get bummed though, your dreams can come true at those places, and by the time you graduate, the market and economy may turn around even more strongly. So in some odd way, your timing is good.