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I have a well-rounded background, including operations and finance. I started with a small business for which I learned warehouse operations, sales, back office, and management. Then, I went to college, graduated, and went into finance, primarily working in commercial banking, investment banking, and private equity.
Target School: Kellogg SOM
Considering: Yale, Cornell Johnson, Tepper
See More Profiles For: Kellogg SOM
Application Status: Open
Undergrad School: Ohio State University
Undergrad Major: Economics
GPA: 3.5
GMAT: 700
Age: 34, Ethnicity: White
Extracurriculars: Volunteer Tutor - Inner City School Students | Philanthropic Leadership Development Program - Graduate | Chaired Young Adult Event - Over 200 attendees
Title: Private Equity - Associate
Industry: Banking & Finance
Company: Fortune 500
Length of Employment: 1 yr, 1 mos
Title: Investment Banking Analyst
Company: Boutique Firm
Length of Employment: 2 yrs, 6 mos
I ran a branch office for a marketing firm and was the #1 branch manager in the entire division. I led deals from start to finish as an investment banker, and also on the buy side in private equity.
I would like to start a search fund and run my own company.
Join in! Click here to assess the odds of Mr. Future Search Fund
Congratulations on your accomplishments in marketing, banking, and on the buy side. At 34, you will likely have about 12 years of work experience upon applying, or about triple the average for full-time, 2-year MBA applicants applying to Kellogg. This, more than anything else, will be the biggest detractor that you’ll have to address in your application. Your application needs to answer “why MBA?” and “Why MBA now?” in a way that doesn’t look like you’ve stagnated mid-career. Your application essays need to show rather than tell why you need an MBA to accomplish your goals without undercutting what you’d be capable of achieving without one. A quasi-entrepreneurial path (e.g., raising a search fund to purchase a company) for an older MBA candidate without direct …
Congratulations on your accomplishments in marketing, banking, and on the buy side. At 34, you will likely have about 12 years of work experience upon applying, or about triple the average for full-time, 2-year MBA applicants applying to Kellogg. This, more than anything else, will be the biggest detractor that you’ll have to address in your application. Your application needs to answer “why MBA?” and “Why MBA now?” in a way that doesn’t look like you’ve stagnated mid-career. Your application essays need to show rather than tell why you need an MBA to accomplish your goals without undercutting what you’d be capable of achieving without one. A quasi-entrepreneurial path (e.g., raising a search fund to purchase a company) for an older MBA candidate without direct entrepreneurial experience is also fraught with questions: why does this candidate want to burn hundreds of thousands of dollars on an MBA or load up on student loan debt when this would limit purchasing/borrowing power for a potential company acquisition? The AdCom might think, “this candidate has 12 years of work experience already – including many years in IB M&A and private equity – why do they need an MBA to purchase a middle market company with investor money? Don’t they already have access to an investor pool and haven’t they already proven their competence as a manager over these 12 years?”. Given your professional goals, you’ll need to be careful about explicitly signaling a desire for a top MBA for the purposes of networking and access to capital. This is a logical and rational reason why somebody who wants to run a search fund would want to attend Kellogg, but stating it explicitly makes you sound like a “taker.” Your GMAT is going to be perceived as slightly lower than average, even though you’ve crossed into the land of scores starting with “7,” which makes you “shiny” in the eyes of the AdCom. If your GMAT were higher, it would be great since your GPA, although solid and in an applicable discipline (economics) is going to be slightly below average and associated with a public university outside of the top 25 universities nationwide. Kellogg historically has had more tolerance for lower standardized test scores than other top-10 schools, but test scores still matter a lot for rankings purposes. Kellogg does offer an accelerated full-time MBA option where scores matter less (likely because these scores aren’t disclosed to the ranking agencies the way full-time 2 year MBA scores are for peer benchmarking), so that may be an option to you if you don’t need the summer internship and don’t mind an accelerated pace. Where you could potentially really shine is by appealing to Kellogg in a regional sense. It’s striking that two of the schools that you mention – Kellogg and Tepper – are in rust-belt regions, albeit big cities (Chicago-area and Pittsburgh). You attended UG in the Midwest. If you were were thinking about raising a search fund to purchase a manufacturing company and have experience with this kind of asset-heavy, operational-efficiency-driven business model from banking/PE, say so. It will be differentiating among the horde of applicants wanting to be in bay-area tech product management roles or coastal CPG brand manager roles or IB/MBB consulting roles who would only consider staying in the Midwest if they are in Chicago. To illustrate this point, the GSB actually offers tuition reimbursement for candidates who go to the Midwest post-MBA outside of Chicago: . While an affinity for the Midwest won’t be as much of a differentiator for Kellogg as it will be for the GSB, an openness to rural businesses and heavy manufacturing will still be very unique. Your aspiration for running a search fund didn’t detail what kind of business you were interested in purchasing, but talking about purchasing a tool and die company or an auto parts manufacturing firm or some part of the solar energy manufacturing supply chain will resonate more than purchasing a Chicago or Minneapolis-based marketing analytics firm. Obviously, you need the heavy industry chops to back up espoused competence in heavy industry and it’s unclear whether you have those, but if you do, that could make for a very compelling personal statement. You are an older applicant, which means that you’ll have some red flags to address, but the rest of your application is sound, statistically-speaking. If you can put together a memorable story about commitment to building a heavy industries portfolio in the Midwest, that could be very interesting to the AdCom, and potentially make up for some age-related hesitation they may otherwise have about your application. Best of luck to you!
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