MBA Handicapping: How This Consultant Bats Above His So-So Stats

Sean had a great track record of success. As an Accenture consultant for nearly four years, he has been promoted twice and is on track for a third promotion. He wants an MBA degree to pivot slightly to niche strategy consulting or break into big tech strategy or business development. He’s also heavily involved in mentoring others, including advising and guiding undergrads at his alma mater as a member of the university’s Economics Advisory Board.

His target business schools: Dartmouth Tuck, MIT Sloan, Michigan Ross, Cornell Johnson, and UCLA Anderson. It’s a good mix of exceptional, highly-ranked MBA programs for someone with a 3.5 GPA in economics and business intelligence from James Madison University. His GRE score is 325, with an 88% on the verbal side and an 81% on the quant.

Those stats are a bit below the averages for his target schools so the big question is how does Sean offset the numbers and stand out from the crowd of other applicants.

In this episode of Friday’s With Sandy, HBSGuru.com Founder Sandy Kreisberg offers some valuable advice for anyone with lower GPAs and standardized test scores and assesses Sean’s odds of acceptance to a top MBA experience.

If you would like to participate in a future Fridays With Sandy webinar, you can contact Sandy and Poets&Quants Founder John A. Byrne here.

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