MBA Applicant Case Study: Underrating Your Potential

I worked with a client who initially approached us a couple of years before she applied. She actually started down the application process, and then she realized she wasn’t ready and said “I’ll see ya in a couple of years.” When she returned, she brought such a mature and reflective perspective to both her personal and professional path to date. Among others, she was accepted at Stanford GSB.

The MBA Applicant Profile

What was underrated in her background? What was that introspection that caused her to first step back, and then succeed? Let’s first start with some of the ingredients for the admit recipe:

-GMAT: 690 (43Q, 40V, AWA 6)
-Age: 28
-Work Experience: Brand name corporate experience with significant leadership roles and work on innovative projects within her company
-Interests: Strong interest in media and entertainment (acting background in prior years)
-Goals: Media co. in the short-term, marrying her finance, strategy, and biz dev background; Chief Content Officer in the long-term
-Personal: Miami-based, U.S. citizen, female
-Undergraduate Major: Economics and Political Science

Now, on the surface (and you’ll see what I mean shortly, but we need to go much deeper than this), it might appear as if a school like Stanford is a complete stretch. That score jumps out as a negative, right? When she returned to work with us and have a go at this “dream” program, I asked her to tell me about her life. No work stuff, no resume bullets—I just asked her to reflect on the incidents that shaped her life. “Take me into your childhood,” I remember saying on our first call.

What she thought was insignificant was actually what we needed to uncover! She loved storytelling, it drove her interest in media, and it was what much of her work experience to date had been about: bringing stories, brands, and products to life. When she opened up about a very powerful and emotive story involving her youth and family, we began to see the actual threads that would weave into her career goals, what truly mattered to her, and where she could make an impact in media. We tore up her original strategy plan, didn’t focus on the 690 score, and went all-in on sharing the resilience that she showed to overcome difficult challenges from her youth.

Crafting your MBA Application Story

Story. This is such a simple concept, right? But it was the massive, underrated aspect of her profile that she didn’t see at first. She was “telling” me who she was, rather than showing me who she was, where she had been, and what life experiences had taught her. She had values, principles, and strengths shaped by a story that brought me to tears. Chills. Frisson. We knew we had something. She showed vulnerability. She was genuine, and only she could tell this story.

So many applicants water down their essays with statements that have no emotive power and no visual. She was able to take me to the scenes of resilience. I could picture her there, dealing with all she did. She was that cinematographer putting her life in the foreground and her test score, resume, etc. in the background. And isn’t that what moves us, ultimately? We are all shaped by these moments, experiences, and incidents that inform our goals, our values, and provide a palette from which we can impress an Admissions Committee. She was authentic, real, and built her application around her character, showing who she was and the force she could be in the business world, simply based on grounding her career goals and values in her past.

To me, the takeaway is that adcoms really are most concerned with what you can do, not what you have done. If you can get them invested in your story and your future, they will overlook even quite large “defects” of your profile. 

John partners with his clients from a point of empathy, having spent much time as a pre-med student in hospitals and as a volunteer with a local ambulance. The embed we see reporting from the front lines with military teams is the analogous model John follows when guiding – with you, side-by-side through the entire journey, helping you craft, and make sense of, your own value and stories.

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