Mr. Indian Product Manager

Hi Mr. Indian Product Manager! This is Kate Richardson, Senior Admissions Consultant, weighing in on your profile. I’m impressed by the switch you made on your own from the development to the product side. And it sounds like you’ve had some impressive wins with the first data product. Your post MBA goals seem reasonable, and also make me want to dig in more to your interest in healthcare, as it seems health/wellness is a personal passion of yours. I’d want to know things like: Where does that interest stem from? Are there particular problems within healthcare you are eager to solve? What opened your eyes to those problems? Answering those sorts of questions will help you formulate a cohesive story. Stanford is such a selective program so I have to put your odds quite low. Your amount of work experience gives me some pause too, as I wonder how you can pitch needing your MBA now, when the average at Stanford is 4.6 years. Thanks for reaching out!

Hi Mr. Indian Product Manager, This is Donna Bauman with Stratus Admissions. You have a great background to work in product management in tech with your engineering background and current work. My concern with just the one year of work is that you may want to stay put for this next year or 2 and get more results on all the great initiatives you have in process. There are 2 great things about that—when you apply you will have even more success to share and you may bypass the covid disruptions to the MBA marketplace. Especially if you are targeting such a top program as GSB, I suggest you give it a bit more time. However, that does not mean you forget about the MBA for now—on the contrary—use this time to engage with students virtually and to learn more about the professors and clubs and classes that are most interesting to you. I also would like to see you develop your leadership beyond work so if you were to work with a consultant in the year prior to applying, you could get some feedback on how to keep improving your profile overall so that when you are ready to apply you are in the strongest shape possible. Reach out for a consult if you would like to know more about our Early Edge program. And don’t be thrown off by the low odds– 5% is the standard odds for GSB give or take a point– and I just could not bring myself to tag that 5% so I put the 10% odds– if you prepare to apply with more work wins and stronger leadership you will be closer to that camp– but make no mistake the odds at GSB are not great for anyone! Doesn’t mean that it is not worth giving it a try– just know what you are up against and go in with your absolute best shot!