Handicapping Your MBA Odds: Mr. Big Data, Mr. IEEE, Ms. Government, Mr. Startup

Mr. Startup

• 700 GMAT (plans to retake)
• 3.52 GPA
• Undergraduate degree in international business from Marist College, a small, selective private
• Work experience at a three-year-old startup that works at the intersection of business, law, and healthcare, coordinating and managing logistics and operations; interned at a local consulting firm founded by a Big Three retiree
• “I work with VPs, executive, and other directors at hospitals and healthcare systems across the country, and my work goes in front of the higher levels I do not directly interface with”
• Extracurricular involvement included leadership positions in the Greek system at the national level, involved in the college’s theater program as well as heavy & diverse charity involvement, primarily relating to domestic
• abuse/relationship violence; on a nationally ranked rugby team and an active Second Dan in Shaolin Kempo Karate
• Goal: To leverage experience and an MBA into a strategic consultant role for McKinsey, Bain or BCG, with longer-term goal of gaining a corporate strategy leadership role
• Interested in the JD/MBA program at Northwestern: “Why the JD? A&D and Healthcare are two of the most highly regulated industries and, due to the increasing importance of technology in these fields, a mass of changes and regulations is sure to come down as technology continues to far outpace existing laws. Understanding and interpreting the laws, as well as the law makers, when negotiating and predicting major movements, will be essential to strategy in these industries”
• “A white male, with a Hispanic sounding last name thanks to Ellis Island during World War I. I usually do not identify with my race, and, truth be told, our family’s history is not that clear”

Odds of Success:

Northwestern: 20%

Harvard: 10%

Duke: 20%

Yale: 10% to 20%

NYU: 20%

Wharton: 10%

Sandy’s Analysis: I don’t htink you’re getting into Harvard or Wharton. After the smoke clears, you have a profile where you went to Marist which is a respectable school, a below-average GMAT for the schools you have targeted, with an iffy work history. You have only worked for one comapny. It’s a startup and my guess is that it is not a brand name company. Let me offer this advice to other applicants out there: It is better to work at a startup after you have worked at a name company. What you don’t have is a name college, a name internship or a name employer. That is okay with me, but it is not okay with the nation’s leading business schools.

And you also want to be a consultant. That is a crowded cohort. That is the default course for people in the military or those with gold-plated resumes. You do have a lot of interesting extras like judo and rugby. That is all okay on the other side of a decimal point on your GPA, but this is not competitive diving and it won’t make a difference at the schools you want to attend.

You say you have a Hispanic sounding name. but that is an Ellis isaldn screwup. you don’t have a history of working with hispanics. the category of hispanic surname is one you should check.

You also say you are interested in an MBA/JD joint degree at Northwestern. That is a detraction to your application. It signals that you don’t know what you are doing. I am routinely against joint degree programs. If you get into a good MBA program and you figure out that you need a JD, you can always get into law school. Nobody is going to law school these days.

The best thing you can do is to take the GMAT again and keep taking it. This is a heart breaking case where an extra 30 points can make a difference at schools ranked seven through 15 for you. A 730 certainly makes all the difference at NYU. In your current state, NYU is even a long shot. Business school admissions is its own world. What works for you on planet earth isn’t going to work for you in the buisness school world.