Mr. Infantry Officer

Hi Mr. Infantry Officer, this is Kristen from MBA Prep School. Firstly, thank you for your service. I have to echo all of John’s comments on your profile. You definitely have strengths that MBA Admissions Committees will value: strong quant performance at West Point, involvement outside the classroom, and leadership experience in the Army. However, it is really difficult to gauge where you fall in terms of competitiveness without knowing more about your professional accomplishments. Your GRE score also falls below the average for both of your target programs. You are setting your sights high here, and I would encourage you to expand your school list. As a former MIT Sloan adcom, your career goal certainly fits with the resources the school has to offer at the intersection of tech and entrepreneurship. But you’ll need to highlight your leadership achievements, collaboration, innovation, and drive to be successful and clarify why this is your career plan. I’d be happy to offer you a complimentary consultation to talk through more of the details of your candidacy and provide a better assessment!

First off, thank you for your service to our country. Your West Point education, our involvement on the football team, your 3.7 GPA in math, and your leadership experience in the U.S. Army makes you an excellent candidate for a world class MBA which would be an ideal way for you to transition into a successful civilian life. You are aiming awfully high, however, in targeting Stanford, which rejects 94% of the self-selecting pool of candidates who apply there, and Harvard, which turns down 88% of its applicants. Your GRE score is also ten points lower than the current class average at Stanford and six points below HBS. More importantly, though, the lack of detail about your service, your leadership experience, and your passions made it super difficult to give you a full assessment. I think your chances at HBS are better than Stanford, largely because the school admits a much larger class and has a higher acceptance rate. I also would urge you to apply to a few more schools. Given your post-MBA goal, MIT Sloan and Carnegie Mellon should be on your list. Given their courses and alumni networks, I could easily argue that those schools would be even better for your goal to launch your own cybersecurity firm. I also would admit, however, that your access to startup capital is best at Stanford and Harvard. So my odds for you are only for Stanford, the most selective prestige business school in the world. Good luck to you!