MBA Handicapping: Techies!!!! Start Talking & Thinking Like A Manager

After internships at both Meta and Microsoft, this talented software engineer from Argentina landed a full-time job as a software engineer at Microsoft. Now 31-year-old Ignacio is thinking about the future and his desire to manage and lead in a big tech company.

The route to that role is an MBA, preferring one from the following business schools: Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg, Washington Foster, Michigan Ross, UC-Berkeley Haas and UCLA Anderson.

While Ignacio has yet to take the GMAT or the GRE, you’d expect him to do well as a trained and experienced engineer. But he does have one hurdle to overcome: A lowish grade point average during his undergraduate years at the University of Buenos Aires. His 2.86 was the result of trying to balance nearly full-time internships while doing an engineering degree. Once he left those jobs, he earned a much better 3.52 GPA in his final two years.

What are his odds of getting into those top MBA programs? In this episode of Fridays With Sandy, HBSGuru.com Founder Sandy Kreisberg assesses his chances and provides plenty of advice to sharpen Ignacio’s application. First among them: Get a GMAT score that is in the 80th percentile on both the quant and the verbal. That’s a must because he will need that to offset the low GPA and because as a software engineer, the expectation is that a candidate would do well on a standardized test.

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