Handicapping Your Odds: Mr. Teach For America, Mr. Consulting, Ms. Startup, Mr. Emerging Markets, Ms. Marketing

Ms. Startup

 

• 680 GMAT (projected)
• 3.4 GPA
• Undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California
• Work experience includes two years as the senior marketing manager at a VC-backed tech startup, with three promotions, managing 10 direct reports; two years as community manager of a vegan cosmetics company, with two promotions, generated a four-year product marketing plan to target Gen Y and presented plan to board and then on stage at 10,000 person conference
• E-commerce marketing internship at TOMS Shoes
• Extracurricular involvement as a volunteer in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Romania; extensive traveler, ballet, painting and sculpture
• Goal: To launch a tech startup
• 26-year-old female

Odds of Success:

Harvard: 25%

Stanford: 20%

UCLA: 50%+

Sandy’s Analysis: You have a great career with lots of real success and promotions at non-name companies (a lot will turn on what adcoms think of VC-baked tech start-up) with iffy (3.4/680) numbers. What that adds up to is a good chance at UCLA and, sadly, no real chance at HBS and Stanford. You have a very good alternative career at a VC-backed startup and a vegan cosmetics company with terrific accomplishments. You had a college internship at TOMS. You would do better if you worked at TOMS now because that is a brand name that people know and like. And all God’s children, even adcoms, got shoes.

For HBS, you would need to have higher numbers because you lack a known blue chip employer on your resume. That’s why your GPA and GMAT are going to disproportionately punish you at HBS and Stanford. Both schools have people like you (bright and attractive marketing types) with better numbers, so the decision for them becomes very easy. They take the other people. At Stanford, those people often work at Google.

Think I am kidding?? Here is an exciting story from the New York Times about a young Stanford grad who has had great success in launching a dating app:

This last week, the League closed a $2.1 million round of seed funding from venture capital and received a flurry of attention online, but on that night, Ms. Bradford was just trying to raise awareness of her app. Ms. Bradford, who turned 30 the week her app was introduced, speaks in a low, confidential voice and has blue eyes that either scan the room or lock in on her interlocuter to create an immediate sense of intimacy . . .

Oh boy, tell me more about Ms. Bradford?

The week had been a busy one for Ms. Bradford, who graduated from Carnegie Mellon University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and is riding the crest of the San Francisco app boom.

Well, OK, I’ll bite, how did the personable and high ET Ms. Bradford get into Stanford GSB? As the story notes, before Stanford she had worked at Salesforce.com and Google.

This is actually worth reading:

“I’d never really been single and dating,” she said, noting that she had met her long-term partners at college and through work. “If you think about it, those are the two biggest pools you meet at. Why not optimize for that?” While Ms. Bradford declined to share specific numbers, she said that the League currently has a few thousand members largely drawn from the network she built during the years she worked at Salesforce and Google [and] Stanford . . . .

The League, a Dating App for Would-Be Power Couples

Salesforce and Google are major Stanford feeder firms. That is true today and even more true when Ms. Bradford applied.

I do not know Ms. Bradford’s GPA and GMAT, but it is a safe bet that if there had been no Salesforce and no Google, there would have been no Stanford GSB.

The question for you is, does your “two years as the senior marketing manager at a VC-backed tech startup, with three promotions, managing 10 direct reports; two years as community manager of a vegan cosmetics company . . .” equal Salesforce and Google in the minds of Stanford adcom.

Your Hail Mary pass at Stanford and a little bit at Harvard is to develop the volunteer work in Africa and Romania you list and turn that into an explosive essay. But there is more, alas.

Here is some tough love advice: Take the GMAT as many times as you need to to get a 730. You might sneak into the back door at HBS with that score and perfect execution. I look forward to stumbling across your story, a la Ms. Bradford, in a future New York Times.

At UCLA, you are a little below their GPA and GMAT average but your excellent work experience should fill in the gap. And you should consider other schools that would help prep you for the startup you want to launch, including Cornell and UT at Austin.