Mr. Class President

You have a super profile from top to bottom for an admit to Kellogg. Your academic credentials are stellar, having graduated magna cum laude in three years from Virginia Tech along with your master’s in management from Mendoza. Your extras demonstrate true leadership, having been elected class president in your master’s program. And your work experience show you to be a caring and thoughtful person of accomplishment, given your promotion at TFA to Grade Level Chair and that is after nearly five years at a top accounting firm where you rose to become a manager. Kellogg should eat this up!

Dear Mr. Class President,

Congratulations on your various successes! One part of your narrative that I find intriguing is your mix private sector (accounting) and nonprofit sector (education) experience. Accounting and finance professionals tend to be overrepresented in applicant pools, so it is always important to find a way to distinguish yourself. One area to explore in your application is how you plan to leverage your insights from TFA to achieve your vision of launching a network of technology-focused charter schools.

Your career vision also needs more clarity in terms of:

1) Why/how will these new charter schools be different from what’s currently available?
2) Why you are the person to lead this initiative?
3) How will Kellogg resources specifically help you achieve this vision?

I am particularly curious to learn more about why you are personally passionate about disrupting education. Is there a backstory to this? For example, on my mother’s side, I come from 3 generations of educators. Please be sure to include authentic highlights of your backstory embedded throughout your essay to showcase your unique perspective and passion for education.

I also encourage you to highlight leadership experiences from the past years outside of your professional day job. It is clear you were very active during your time at Virginia Tech and Notre Dame, but I am eager to understand more about any potential “extracurricular” activities that you have supported since graduating.

I highly encourage you to retake the GRE (or take the GMAT). I also suggest that you thoughtfully construct your resume and essay with key metrics about your past successes combined with strong theories regarding leadership insights and the future of education to show your intellectual horsepower to be a strong member of the Kellogg community. Overall, you have most of the right ingredients for a successful application. However, it will be critical in how you present this information and your vision for impact.

Hi Mr. Class President, Jen Kedrowski here at mbaMission. Like your title indicates, you have shown you are likely to be involved on campus, given your history at VA Tech as Class President, Phi Alpha Theta, Golden Key and so forth. That is a strength of your profile, as is your GPA, and congrats on graduating in 3 years on top of it. Kellogg will appreciate all that you accomplished in your university time.

Now that is has been 6+ (?) years since undergrad, the admissions committee will also be interested in your accomplishments during your career, your rationale for your choices (definitely curious how you chose accounting post TFA! If I am following the timeline here) and how your story flows, as well as whether you’ve been involved in the community outside of work post-college. You excelled during your time at TFA as evidenced by your promotion to grade level chair; would love to hear more about your time as a Manager in Accounting. In working with several successful TFA alum in their MBA applications, I have seen what a great learning experience TFA can be, so I encourage you to really dig deep and highlight stories of how TFA helped you strengthen your leadership and communication skills, as well as to highlight why you chose TFA and why education is your passion (which will be important anyway since you mention it as your post-MBA goal).

I have seen Kellogg show appreciation for similar candidates and feel that you have a lot to offer, but at the same time your GRE sounds a touch low ideally for Kellogg. I am curious as to the quant subscore, since you were a history major, and to whether you took the exam just one or really exhausted what you are capable of scoring. All in all I feel your odds are about 35% as of now (higher than the schools’ roughly 25% acceptance rate), but if you improve your score and successfully explain your professional story to date, that could be improved.

Hi Mr. Class President, this is Donna Bauman, Senior MBA Admissions Counselor at Stratus Admissions Counseling and a Kellogg alum. You have some impressive leadership—if I were coaching you through this process I would encourage you to reflect now on some of your leadership experiences so that you have some good material to draw upon when it comes time to write your essays. I have worked with several successful Teach for America applicants—that’s a great experience and it is also helpful that you have been working at an accounting firm for several years. Kellogg has a long tradition of using the tools of management to help improve education—in fact I recall one of my favorite classes at Kellogg gave us the tools to use Total Quality Management principles to help improve schools in Chicago. I would reach out to students in the Education Club and the Inner City Mentoring Club at Holy Angels School. I could see someone with your background thriving at Kellogg so put the effort in to submit the strongest application you can. Since you have a little time before R1 applications are live, use this time to give the GRE another chance if you have not already done so. Given your MS in Management already, be sure you have solid reasons why you want the MBA. In some ways you could be a candidate for the 1YR program, but given that you want to make a career pivot I think you would be better off applying to the 2YR program. I like the other schools on your list—you might also consider adding Duke Fuqua and also as long as you are looking in the Chicago area, I would research the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at Chicago Booth in deciding if you want to also add Booth to your list.