Mr. Ivy League Marine D1 Athlete Consultant

This is quite an impressive profile. Four years in the U.S. Marines, including a deployment in Afghanistan, an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in economics where you compete on the rowing team, and then you land a job with a top management consulting firm. So what could go wrong with a Stanford application? The weaker parts of your profile are your GRE score of 305 (25 points below the latest GSB class average) and a GPA of 3.2 (vs. Stanford’s 3.78 average). If it were up to me, I would welcome you to Stanford with open arms. Your service to our country, your entry into a highly selective Ivy League university, and your employment at a highly selective consulting firm tell me that you are an excellent candidate. You also have strong extras. But as you know, the odds at Stanford are slim, with just over 6% of the applicants getting an invite from a self-selecting pool of very good candidates including you. So here is what I suggest to move the odds more in your favor: Retake the GRE to get a score closer to Stanford’s average (a 25-point increase is a huge lift but if you narrow the gap it would help you considerably); do not say you want to go into venture capital (it is a hard and difficult field to enter and while you may be able to do it with a summer internship between your first and second years it’s better to just tell admissions that you want to go into big tech), and make absolutely sure you execute every aspect of your application in a superb way. Get help, if you must, or ask friends or colleagues at your consulting firm to look over your full application, not merely your essays. Given your goals, I also think you should apply to Berkeley and Harvard. Because HBS enrolls a significantly larger class, you have a better chance there than Stanford. If you can’t get that GRE score up by 15 or more points, I think your odds of a yes from Stanford are low unless you have a truly remarkable story to tell in your essays. Good luck. I’m rooting for you!

You will definitely earn points for your service to your country and your demonstrated leadership ability. The fact that you achieved success in the military *prior* to Ivy League undergraduate attendance will make you an interesting outlier. Your candidacy would be much stronger if your GPA and GRE scores were higher. Is there a reason for the low undergraduate GPA? (For instance, PTSD post marine service or being a young father at the start of UG and then achieving an upward GPA trajectory over the course of UG after your first 3 semesters). Your low GRE score seems odd given your Ivy League attendance and your success in MBB. Did you practice the GMAT to make sure that you favor the GRE? Taking a GMAT practice test is definitely something worth doing if you have not done so already. The GSB Admissions Committee will accept either of these two tests – so you should make sure that you submit the score that is the most favorable to your candidacy.

While you may very well find success in VC in the mid-to-long term, it would be foolhardy to express immediate post-MBA employment ambition in VC given your previous experience. Vanishingly few recent MBA graduates find a home in VC, and the ones who do typically did VC prior to b-school. Strategic positioning – that is, what you want to do after MBA / why you want to do these things / why the ambitious things you want to do are imminent achievable given your prior successes – is the single most important aspect of your application. You’d be much better served if you talk about wanting to reposition your military grade leadership skills and your MBB MECE paradigm into the tech sector as a product manager at a VC-portfolio tech company and then working your way up to VC from there. That is imminently more achievable than VC straight out of MBA while still syncing with the skills and abilities you already have.

What will make you stand out is your leadership skills and adaptability (e.g., serving in foreign wars at a young age, starting college as an older student and starting at MBB as an older analyst). These are the kind of things that you should flex in your application. If possible, get a senior military superior as well as an MBB manager to write your LOR, since this mix will be less represented in the applicant pool.

GSB acceptances hover around 5% these days, so it’s a crap shoot for almost any candidate. Shoot your shot with the best you’ve got! You’ll have even better odds at Wharton since it is more than double the size of GSB and favors veterans. You also probably have a good shot at CBS, where you may already be a known quality.