Mr. Giving Back To Society

You’ve got to like anyone who self-identifies as Mr. Giving Back To Society. Plus, you have some justification for it, having launched a start-up to provide banking services in rural India. I’m surprised, however, that your extras don’t include things that would line up with your post-MBA goal. I think you are a long shot at Stanford due to your background, stats, the relatively small size of the school’s intake and its tiny admit rate. You are in the most over-represented part of the applicant pool for elite MBA admissions: male engineers from India. What that means is that you are in a group competing with other male Indian engineers who have gone to more highly selective schools, have better stats and who may be even more accomplished than you. Even if you were not a male Indian engineer, you are already 32 years of age which means you would be 33 at matriculation at a school where the average work experience is 4.7 years. You have more than twice the average. Your GRE score of 319 is below Stanford’s class average of 329. So it’s a very significant 10 points lower. While you say you have led impactful projects at work, it’s not clear what they may be or what kind of promotions you have received in your ten years with a single company. And finally, you do not have to go to Stanford, MIT, Wharton or Harvard for the three reasons you cite: entrepreneurship, personal brand, and giving back. You can achieve those goals with any top 25 MBA program. So I would strongly encourage you to widen your horizons and apply to schools that would be more open to your profile.