Calculating Your Odds of MBA Admission

Geeky GuyMr. ITT

 

  • 780 GMAT (51%Q/46%V)
  • 3.5 GPA
  • Undergraduate degree in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology
  • Work experience includes nearly two years with a Big Three consulting firm
  • Extracurricular involvement includes winning President gold medal for Best All rounder student (batch of 800); Best sportsman of the year award for all years, with a record number of medals; Under 19 sports champ, held national records- Led and participated in various student organization, founding the first student-alumni cell in my institute
  • Goal: To start a consulting firm focused on the needs of small-to-medium sector companies or work with a manufacturing firm founded by father
  • 23-year-old Indian male
  • “I am most interested in Wharton because of my inclination towards their analytical approach. But what I keep hearing is Wharton prefers a mature crowd as compared to HBS and Stanford. Wharton doesn’t have any 2+2 program either. I really want to know your views on the same.”

Odds of Success:

Wharton: 50%+

Harvard: 30% to 50%

Stanford: 25% to 45%

MIT: 50%+

Sandy’s Analysis: Dunno man. Wharton says here that a sizable 19% of its MBA class has three or fewer years of work experience. So while you will be in the low side of normal for the entire class, and might be in the middle of even that 19%, that still leaves you a lot of company. You say you will be applying from the second year of a two-year gig with a top 3 consulting company, and you have a 780 GMAT and a 3.5 GPA from an IIT. Those stats cut a lot of ice at Wharton and any other business school.

Throw in your other miscellaneous blue ribbons–best all rounder of 800 batch at school, best sportsman, solid extras–and you got a very solid app at Wharton and HBS, Stanford, MIT.  Wharton will not let two years of experience get in their way and MIT will admit pretty much anyone not on a terrorist watch list who has a 780 GMAT (and you are their type besides). HBS takes lots of kids like you and the ones they don’t take usually wash out in the interview due to bad luck or congenital jerkitdue or some odd mixes of the two. Stanford is smaller but even there, they often tell fellas like you, “You had me at 780 . . . .” Also,  as PQ notes here in summarizing Stanford’s  top feeder firms, the school   not only goes for BIG GMATs in a big way, they are also the most impressed of all business schools with where exactly you worked before applying. Here is what PQ notes:

“A mere half dozen of America’s most elite consulting and investment banking firms account for more than a third of the students in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business Class of 2013 . . . . It shatters the common myth that Stanford is the anti-establishment school versus Harvard.  . . .And Stanford’s heavy reliance on just six elite firms for more than a third of its MBA students is also a primary reason why Stanford’s starting salaries are as high as they are–former consultants and investment bankers tend to be among the highest paid graduates.”

All that may be shocking to the uninformed but it is good news for you since you will be working for one of those six firms, you have a 780, and you have enough other good stuff to have them very predisposed to you from the get go. You will have to concoct some juju about What Matters Most To Me, but as far as they are concerned, what matters most is that 780 and working at a Magic Six firm.

You said your goals post graduation were to  “transition into starting a consulting firm focused on needs of small and medium sector companies or work with a SME unit founded by my dad (primarily focused on manufacturing).”  Hmmmmm, helping SME’s in BRIC and MIST countries (if any reader does not know what  those terms mean, get thee onto wikipedia) is a good long-term goal and a good pulpit to pontificate from, but I would not go so far as to say that is what you want to do for your first job.

Also, starting such a firm is needlessly risky, both in fact, and to say on your app.  I would say having an impact on SME’s blah, blah is important to you because that is where it is happening, but the way you plan to do that is via working for a BIG consulting company, very much like the  one you are currently working in, where you hope to learn best practices about SMEs.

Working for dad is also a needlessly risky idea for you, although top schools would mostly ignore it, given how strong the rest of the app is.

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