An Uncommon Journey To HBS

On the day in March when Harvard Business School would release its round two decisions, Émilie Fournier stayed home at the urging of her boss. “Whether it is good news or bad news, you obviously need this private moment,” he told her.

Her husband, Sébastien, was home with her in Toronto, on his spring break from the MBA program at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. As noon approached, the two of them sat down on the couch together, holding hands, a computer in her lap as Fournier clicked through to the private section of HBS’ admissions page.

“I couldn’t do anything that morning because I was so on edge,” she recalls. “And then noon comes around and the site is taking forever to load. I remember thinking in that moment that when the news came up I probably would have to read through a paragraph or more to get the answer and thinking how I would hate even that delay.”

And then the news popped onto the screen in one simple, blissful line:

“The answer is yes!”

A SURPRISE CELEBRATORY GIFT FROM AMAZON

“We both started screaming,” she says. “I started crying I was so happy. This whole journey had many ups and downs, of staying at work late at night to study for the GMAT for hours, of not getting the result I wanted and having to take the test three times. And then finally, after literally years of planning and work, there it was.”

Her husband dashed off the couch, ran upstairs to the second floor of their loft and came down with an Amazon box. In it was a burgundy Harvard hoodie. A dream that she had held onto for more than a dozen years years since she was 14 had finally been realized. Emilie Fournier was going to not just Harvard, but the Harvard Business School.

Her journey to become one of 11% of applicants admitted to the school is as much a story of tenacity, resolve and hard work as it is an inspirational tale for other anxiety-filled candidates who may sometimes doubt themselves during the long and arduous process of getting into one of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

OVERCOMING A 43 QUANT SCORE THAT PUT HER IN THE 52ND PERCENTILE

For Fournier, Harvard was not a slam dunk. In fact, many other candidates might very well have talked themselves out of even applying. After three tries, her GMAT score was 700, 30 points below the median at HBS. Even more worrisome, her quant score of 43 put Fournier at the 52th percentile (meaning that 48% of all test takers did better).

Her undergraduate degree in commerce from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal was not from an elite school or one that was an obvious feeder to HBS. Indeed, it was not even in the same league with the top ten colleges that routinely account send the most students to Harvard Business School: Harvard, Stanford, UPenn, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Duke, Berkeley, and MIT (see Top Feeder Colleges To HBS). And though she works for a Fortune 500 company–Walmart–no one would consider the big box retailer a feeder company to Harvard (see Feeder Companies To HBS).

And yet, not only did she receive an admit from Harvard, she was also accepted at Booth, Kellogg and Tuck, and waitlisted at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business after an interview that, she believes, didn’t go all that well. How she overcame those weaknesses in her applications should give others hope that they, too, can make it happen.

Still, as an undergradate at John Molson, she didn’t think she would ever want an MBA. When her future husband finished his undergraduate degree in 2010, a year before her, he decided to take the GMAT and urged her to do the same since a score could be submitted on an MBA application for five years.

‘WHY GO BACK TO SCHOOL FOR TWO YEARS OF SLIGHTLY MORE ADVANCED FINANCE?’

“‘We probably will want to do this in the future, anyway,’” she remembers him telling her. “‘Do it with me and we’ll get it out of the way now.’ But I was not even done with my undergraduate studies, and I didn’t want to waste time doing it. That was the first time the idea of pursuing an MBA came up on my radar, but I hadn’t given it much thought.”

For one thing, she was uncertain about going for an MBA after already having a bachelor’s degree in commerce. “I thought why would I want to go back and do two years to take slightly more advanced classes in finance and accounting,” she says.

But when Sébastien began applying to schools in the fall of 2014, she visited several campuses with him and quickly rethought her early assessment. “Going on these visits and information sessions really opened my eyes to it. Seeing him go through the process and seeing all the amazing opportunities that an MBA can offer changed my view of it. I began to think about resetting the clock on what kind of leader I want to be and what I really wanted to do with a career.”

Her boyfriend applied to five schools in round one and was dinged from three and waitlisted at two. He applied to three more schools in round two and was accepted to Chicago Booth. “It was the perfect school for him,” she says. “He is quantiative and data driven. He really likes the flexibility because he is a CPA and the idea of having to take intro finance and accounting courses was unappealing to him. He loves the culture and the people there who are so friendly.”

AT A CHICAGO BOOTH ADMIT WELCOME, SHE ‘JUST FELL IN LOVE WITH IT’

When they went to Booth’s admit weekend in the spring of 2015, Fournier found herself wishing she had taken the GMAT way back when she was an undergrad. “Everyone was so welcoming. They put together this amazing agenda for admits and I remember sitting next to him as a partner and thinking I want to do this. I just fell in love with it. Seeing it for myself and the realness of it over two or three days was the kick in the butt I needed to go for it.”

As soon as she returned to Toronto, she bought a few GMAT review books, knowing that if she couldn’t get the test out of the way, it was a no-go for sure. But her work and social schedule was daunting, to say the least. She and Sébastien had just gotten engaged in January of 2015. He was obviously starting the Booth program in Chicago in August, while she would stay in Toronto at a highly demanding job at Walmart Canada where she was a senior manager on the corporate strategy team. And then, there was that wedding, planned for June of 2016.

When Sébastien went to Booth, they agreed to be with each other every other weekend and to stay in touch daily via texting and Facetime. “It cost a fortune in flight tickets but it was an investment in our quality of life and an investment to maintain our relationship,” she says. It meant even texting pictures of the the most mundane things, like the food on a plate, to capture what Fournier calls “the richness of day to day life that you lose if you don’t live together. We are both very career oriented and we both wanted the best careers for each other. I could have quit my job and moved with him to Chicago but that would have put my career at risk. We have a foundation of being really open with each other and cheering each other on.”