Mr. Civil Engineer

Your 770 GMAT and 8.9 GPA in civil engineering speaks loudly in your application. And your big win boosting membership of the Entrepreneurship Club from 40 to 160 is a sign of how driven you are. Your future role as a Teach For India Fellow also shows your deep concern for others, along with the two years you spent volunteering for a women and child rights NGO. You would be a real asset to Chicago Booth and I think your chances of gaining an admit to its deferred admissions program are very good.

Hi, this is Deepak Punwani from MBA Exchange. You are a very strong candidate and are ticking all the boxes for most top schools. So am going to approach this a little differently. Am not really sure how the deferred program fits into your career goals. Real estate IB or PE is more about finance than about civil engineering. While that justifies the need for an MBA (to pick the finance and commercial side of things and then match it with your engineering acumen), it still doesn’t explain the justification for looking at a deferred program. If your goal is to enter IB on buy side or work in a buy side investment role then you would need that on your CV as pre MBA experience. If you have that locked up, then you are a really strong candidate as every B school will want to support you. But if you think you cant break into the buy side, then am not sure that an MBA will help that much to realize your goals. HBS 2+2 goes as far to say that they prefer those working in tech (internships / projects) or wanting to move in tech – are preferred cohort for their deferred program. Just illustrates the point made above. Dont see how your goals aligns with a deferred program. Otherwise your acads are spectacular and you do seem to have good activities outside work. Wish you very best.

Hello Mr. Civil Engineer! Thanks for posting. WOW 770!!! Great stuff. Combine that with your NGO experience in the past plus your Teach for India experience coming up and there is a lot to like here. Can I convince you to add Yale Silver Scholars to the list?? I think they’ll like you a lot, and given the sorts of things you do when you’re not being an engineer, I think you’ll like them too. As a Booth grad myself, I love that you have Booth at the top of your list! Assuming strong application execution, I think you’ll do well in this process.
All the best,
Krista

Hi Mr. Civil Engineer, This is Donna Bauman, Senior MBA Admissions Counselor at Stratus Admissions—and my first thought is just wow! You have a lot to offer and good for you in being so organized to know about MBA options in college. There has never been more options for deferred admit MBA programs so I do encourage you to give these your best shot. Your STEM background combined with your social impact interests in working as Teach For India fellow bring out both the poet and quant in you. I think that the relationships you can build with Booth around PE could be very valuable to you—while it might not happen for a few years—I could see you taking advantage of their pre MBA internships in PE to help you gain some business related experience prior to matriculating into the program. As a Kellogg alum I encourage you to look at their deferred admit program as well as the classics of HBS, GSB, Sloan and Darden as you plan to do—and I really like the addition of Yale Silver Scholars—although that program would require you to matriculate right away so that might not work if you really want to do the Teach for India experience. CBS and Haas also have deferred admit programs that are worth considering. I like that you are showing impact in your extracurriculars—I also encourage you to try to connect the dots between your interest in real estate IB/PE with your interest in Teach for India—I think sometimes the hardest thing for the deferred admit students is to gain clarity on the career goals. I started the in house undergraduate business program career advising program at UNC Chapel Hill years ago so I have lots of experience helping college students map out career plans. Happy to talk further if you want!