Mr. ESL Teacher

You are an impressive non-traditional MBA student for Harvard Business School and, for that matter, any highly selective MBA program. First off, you have the stats: a 336 GRE that is above the 330 class average at Stanford or the 326 average at Harvard. You have a 3.8 GPA in economics from the University of Maryland. That is also slightly above the Stanford average of 3.78 or the Harvard average of 3.69. The fact that it is from Maryland, rather than an Ivy, Public Ivy or Near Ivy, is NOT helpful given the elite nature of MBA admissions at your first choice school but it should be. Finally, you have obviously distinguished yourself in Teach for America as both a math and English As A Second Language teacher. Your Big Life Wins make it clear that you are a standout TFA teacher. I will also add another fact that plays in your favor: The steep decline in domestic applicants. All of these factors give me a fair degree of confidence that you will get interviewed at HBS and most of the other schools to which you intend to apply. I also think you have a very good shot at Stanford and would urge you to drop USC Marshall and put the GSB and UC-Berkeley in the mix. Your post-MBA goal of working at an ed-tech startup makes Stanford or Berkeley Haas ideal places for you.

You have done impactful work that signals a deep care for humanity and a desire to make the world a better place. For most applicants with traditional backgrounds (e.g., banking, consulting, tech), their biggest challenge is demonstrating what you already have in spades: that they care about causes bigger than themselves. YOUR challenge will be proving why you need to go to BUSINESS SCHOOL to achieve your edtech goals.

The best way to tacitly answer the “why business school” and “why business school now” obvious questions that the adcom will have about your candidacy is to use HBS’s 900 word open-ended prompt to concretely explain, step-by-step, your future career plans and how HBS will get you there. Your brief bio highlights transitioning out of the classroom and into edtech. In order to make a compelling case for yourself, get concrete about what your vision looks like for your career. E.g., using your teaching/langauge experience in Asian markets to work for an Asian edtech unicorn (many of the largest edtech companies are Asian, such as Zhangmen) as a product manager or a similar role in a US-based company like Coursera or Udemy or a product manager of corporate training suites at LinkedIn. These product manager roles are believable immediate post-MBA placements for a newly minted HBS grad with your pre-MBA background, and listing specific companies and roles outright will show that you have done your research on what you need to do to build the impactful career that you want in edtech. Go on LinkedIn and find HBS alums (or other M7 alums) at these companies and talk to them about how they used their MBA to get the roles they have now and what they are thinking of doing in the future. Their ambitions and career stories can be mined to build your own intermediate and long-term plans for the purpose of the essay. Reference these conversations – especially if they are with HBS alums – in the interview and the essays. Having these conversations and thinking about your career in this way will signal your ability to network the way a successful business person would (a characteristic that would be evident in a resume from a rapidly-rising corporate-profile candidate but not necessarily from yours since you’ve spent your career in the education space). The key-takeaway here is that as a non-traditional student, you’re recruiting capabilities are less of a known quantity than somebody who has a more imminent employable profile. There will be McKinsey consultants applying to HBS who do lots of educational volunteer work who espouse an interest in EdTech and will have very clearly defined goals with imminently employable quantitative and strategy skill sets. You arguably have a BETTER profile than these types of candidates for EdTech due to your demonstrated passion and experience, but the reality is that HBS wants to make sure that you are going to get a job and succeed after business school because a major factor in their rankings is % employed 3 months post-MBA graduation. The clearest signal that you can give that you will be EMPLOYABLE (rather than just a do-gooder visionary) is to get specific about how and where you want to make your impact.

You are coming from a tough demo as a caucasian male, but there will be very few applicants with your global experiences applying from the state of Mississippi. Your profile is harder to evaluate because there are very few people like you so comps aren’t easy. That’s simultaneously your achilles heel and the feather in your cap. HBS’ class is enormous – by far the largest of any top full-time, 2 year MBA program – so there are more spots for nontraditional applicants. Wharton is a close second in terms of size and can be thought of the same way in terms of odds. With very well-defined strategic positioning, top-notch LOCs (from senior regional brass at TFA if possible?), I’d peg your odds at 50%. If Yale SOM isn’t already on your radar, I’d add it. They tend to like socially impactful candidates like you as well.