On the face of it, William has everything it takes to get into an elite MBA program. He racked up a 3.6 GPA in computer science at a public Ivy, the University of Texas at Austin. He has scored a 330 on his first try on the GRE, a score equal to the class average at Stanford and above the average at every other business school in the world. And he has been working for a highly selective FANG company, Amazon.
He also has an entire portfolio of extracurriculars, from serving as president of a security organization in college to being a volunteer for computer science outreach to disadvantaged high school students.
Armed with those impressive assets, he is applying to Stanford, UC-Berkeley Haas, MIT Sloan, Michigan Ross and Northwestern’s MBAi program, the joint MBA and master’s in engineering program. His post-MBA goal? To land a job in consulting with MBB.
Yet, we deem his chances at incredibly slim at Stanford, Berkeley and MIT–and give him only slightly better odds at Michigan and Kellogg. How come?
There are three major challenges faced by William.
1) He is applying to all of his target schools in the third round.
2) Having completed his undergraduate studies in three years and worked for Amazon for just two years, he is only 22 years old.
3) As an Asian male with a STEM degree working as a software engineer, he is in one of the most oversubscribed portions of the elite MBA applicant pool.
In this episode of Friday’s With Sandy, Poets&Quants Editor John A. Byrne assesses his chances and urges William to go through with his R3 applications but to be ready to reapply with an extra year of work experience, the completion of a major project he has been working on, and the chance for a promotion. Do you agree?
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