Mr. Masters To MBA

There’s good news and no-so-good news in your profile. Let’s start off with what’s good about it. Your 730 GMAT score is right on target, given the latest class average at Booth of 731. Your GPA of 3.9 is nicely above the class average of 3.6. And you have a master’s degree from a well-known U.S. university. Unfortunately, as a male Indian engineer, you fall into the most over populated segment of the elite MBA applicant pool. That puts you up against significant competition from others who went to IITs and who work for brand name companies, not an unknown startup. Many of those candidates will have similar or better raw stats and have squeezed through the fine filter screens of better undergraduate universities and employers. To get yourself out of this pile, you need to have a compelling narrative and from your description here I just don’t see one that would make a real difference. Chicago Booth’s acceptance rate is about 22.5% so I’ll give you similar odds. Wish I could be more optimistic but you are in one of the most highly competitive pools in elite MBA admissions. I like the mix of your target schools and feel very confident that you will get admits from several of those schools. Carnegie Mellon would be a wonderful choice for you. Hope you get an admit from Tepper!

Hi Mr. Masters To MBA! Krista Nannery from mbaMission here. I’ll try to build on what John has offered.

Every year, I work with a few candidates just like you. (Indian-educated (for undergrad) male Engineers.) The ones that are able to set themselves apart can usually display that combination of left brain/right brain. They’re engineers, but they’re also creative and have interesting hobbies and extracurriculars. So if you were my client, I’d first start with your resume and make sure that it’s not too technical and instead focuses on business impact and leadership of people and P&Ls. I’d also try to understand what types of things you do at work beyond your day-to-day. Are you part of any resource groups? Do you lead any internal initiatives? Then, I assume you are working in the US right now which will help you in this process, but do you have other international experience? That can really help set you apart.

It seems like you are low on extracurriculars today so maybe one idea would be to reconnect the social service group from your undergrad and see if you can help them from a distance?

The other thing I would concentrate on with you if you were my client is school selection. Because you are from such a competitive demographic, you are the type of candidate that may need a broader selection of schools. I think you’ve done the right thing here by adding Tepper, McCombs, UNC, and Foster to your list. I think they will all get you to where you want to be career-wise and will provide a higher chance of admission. My recommendation is to sprinkle these options into R1 so that you know where you stand in R2 and are not scrambling to get more apps in in R2. (A lot of candidates like you decide to only focus on dream schools in R1 and safe the back-up options for R2. While that certainly sounds logical, given the competitiveness of your demographic, I prefer to see a mostly R1 strategy for you.)

Hope that helps!

Krista