The Second Round Ding Report

female

Ms. Social Enterprise (HBS ding without interview)

  • 760 GMAT
  • 3.98 GPA
  • Undergraduate degree in political science from HYPS
  • Work experience includes four years of non-profit, social enterprise work, two years in marketing and communications for a major non-profit and two years founding a new social enterprise
  • Goal: To move into urban economic development/public sector management
  • “My specific job goal is to do financial & spatial economic modeling to guide (sustainable, equitable) infrastructure improvements in cities. My work experience is only very tangentially related to this, so I could easily have come off as unrealistic…or as someone who would be better suited for urban planning or economics programs”
  • “I suspect both my essay and my career choices are a bit too idiosyncratic, and I might not have been very convincing in the Why MBA? department”
  • 26-year-old dual citizen/biracial female

Sandy’a Analysis: As you said in your post, “my specific job goal is to do financial & spatial economic modeling to guide (sustainable, equitable, etc etc) infrastructure 
improvements in cities. My work experience is only very tangentially 
related to this, so I could easily have come off as unrealistic…or as 
someone who would be better suited for urban planning or economics 
programs.”

That is spot on, and could explain this. You should have made goals more wide, as you seem to do in a latter post, and involve more leadership, blah, blah which could have been a better base for explaining why MBA.

When an applicant is unclear about motives and goals, it can have a damaging impact on an application– despite the fact that is TRUE about many applicants you cannot be overt about in your application. You need to have you app face on, and you probably did not.

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