Mr. CPG Marketer

Hi, this is Deepak Punwani from MBA Exchange. You have great experience in consumer goods and from sound of it, you have had the opportunity to work on traditional and new age consumer products. The adcoms will respect your professional experience and progress that you have made in your work. Your academics are also solid. Consumer goods players will see a renaissance of sorts in our view in post Covid era and MBB firms will really like your profile as CPG industry will come out of the current situation with “growth” still on the agenda. Also like the sports background on your profile and congrats for the comeback post what sounds like a ankle ligament injury. Shows your willpower and resilience and will make for a good personal story. All your ducks seem to be in a row for a top school admit therefore. The one surprise for me though is that you have MIT as your top choice school. Its not traditionally been a school that’s big on consumer goods profiles (not as much as Kellogg or Wharton or Cornell at least !) so I may question fit. But if you have your reasons then go ahead and apply. If you execute well, you should have a good chance at all top schools. Good luck

Hi Mr. CPG Marketer, this is Julie-Anne Heafey with mbaMission. I have a somewhat different take on your candidacy. I do think that if you are a R3 applicant, you might need to somewhere address Why Now (but probably not in the cover letter for MIT – there’s no room)…but if you’re R1, this might be somewhat less urgent to me because overall your years of experience will total 5+ at entry, which is a pretty normal time to enter Sloan. So, I’m not sure this is a dealbreaker. The two interesting things that jump out at me about you, though, are your CPG experience – this is not as common as it used to be and right now is pretty desirable – and your unique “Renaissance man” combo as an athlete with creative chops. You just strike me as someone different and interesting in that pool (and you have on-target stats to boot). Agree with explaining why Sloan, but if you have a solid reason, then I think your odds are at least double the norm. Good luck!

Hi, it’s Jennifer Jackson from Stratus Admissions. It looks like you’ve got some really strong experience in building brands at both a large and a small company. Your GPA and GMAT are solid. I always like seeing high school and especially college athletes because it shows (usually) that you can balance it with workload and work well in teams. You have goals that make sense with where you’ve worked and what you’ve done thus far. Be sure to go into detail about Why MBA and Why Now? You’ve only been in your job 7 months so why is now the time? What are the gaps that you have in your skillset that prevent you from reaching your ST and LT goals? For Sloan there’s precious little real estate in the cover letter (assuming they keep it this year) but for other schools you’ll have more space. You want to be quite focused on the past with Sloan — how have you demonstrated leadership in your life, both at work and outside of work? What resources at Sloan do you need that you can’t get anywhere else? Sloan’s acceptance rate is painfully low but you have the pieces in place to be competitive there — good luck!