Mr. MBB (For Only A Year)

• 770 GMAT
• 3.6 GPA
• Undergraduate degree from a top Canadian university, with graduating awards and valedictorian
• Work experience includes two and one-half years in sales and trading at a Canadian bank before moving to MBB for the past year; promotions at each employer
• Extracurricular involvement as a member of a board for education -focused student group; pro-bono consulting for educational charity
• Goal: To lead consulting practice specifically focused on pension fund operating models
• Recommendations from manager and partner at MBB firm
• 25-year-old white male

Sandy’s Analysis: Dunno, but just noting here that S+T, otherwise known as sales and trading, is not a favored place to come from. Not sure of your chronology, but you may have been at MBB shorter than usual when you applied. It may make sense for you to stay there another year or two before reapplying.

You might have thought your 770 GMAT would wow them enough to get you in. Not at HBS or Stanford. That might work at Wharton, Columbia or Booth where a 770 would cause adcoms to jump at you.

For Harvard, meantime, your goal to lead a consulting practice specifically focused on pension fund operating models comes out of nowhere.

I’d reject someone who said something that specific and mildly odd, and was not aware of how WTF it sounds, even if true and important in the real world.