Handicapping Your Shot At A Top MBA

Mr. Varsity Crew

• 780 (50Q 50V)
• 3.5 GPA in engineering from Harvard/Yale/Princeton
• Work Experience includes three years of consulting at McKinsey/Bain/BCG
• Extracurricular involvement all four years in varsity crew, recruitment chair of eating; now volunteer to help underprivileged youth at a local school and also enjoy running, having completed a few marathons.
• Goal: To return to MBB for a few more years and then transition into an executive role at a Midwest manufacturing firm
• “I understand manufacturing in the Mid-West isn’t a sexy goal, but it is my honest hope”
• 25-year-old white male

Odds of Success:

Harvard:  50%

Stanford: 30% to 50%

Wharton: 50+%

Northwestern: 50+%

MIT: 50+%

Chicago: 50+%

Sandy’s Analysis: Dunno man, that’s a pretty good profile. A lot will depend on how much support you can get from your M/B/B consulting firm, but 3.5/780/varsity crew captain is real good start. Your career map is also OK, and saying you want to transition from consulting into executive role in leading a company is solid.

I would not specify manufacturing in the Mid-West per se, but instead just say you want to be impactful leader of a company which creates good jobs, like X, Y and Z. Try to come up with examples of executives you admire, they do not have to be household names.

Stanford is always a question mark because it is so small, guys like you get into HBS and Wharton all the time.  At Kellogg, Chicago and especially MIT, it really comes down to convincing them you want to attend. At Stanford one barrier would be not having the essays damage you. Recs will count a lot there too, since they get lots of apps from M/B/B and cannot take them all. But they don’t get many from an Ivy crew captain with a 780GMAT and 3.5 in engineering. I’d say your are starting this race with a couple of boat-lengths lead.