Mr. Military Quant

Hi Mr. Military Quant, this is Kristen from MBA Prep School. Firstly, thank you for your service. While you haven’t followed the path well traveled, I find it more impressive that you have paved your own way. Your hard work got you to Princeton and Amazon, no small feat! Your GMAT score is also a strong plus. Vets and active duty military applicants are typically viewed very favorably by Admissions Committees, as they naturally exhibit a lot of leadership and collaboration. Admissions officers will definitely take note of your medals, but they will also want to hear about what you did during your deployment. I’m not clear on what your role is at Amazon; since you’ve only been there a year at this point, you should seek out opportunities to make an impact in your role. I think the biggest concern an Admissions officer will have about your candidacy is your career goal. What is driving your decision to leave tech after such a short stint? Why PE specifically, and is that really realistic as a “first stop” in your finance career? You’ll need to prove you’ve given thought to this decision and you understand the path to achieving it. Feel free to reach out to chat further about your application strategy!

So let’s start this off with a sincere thank you for your service. Your life journey so far is fascinating. I love that you started in community college and ended up at Princeton. That is an amazing accomplishment and tells me a low about your smarts, ambition and desire to succeed. The fact that you were awarded three medals for your service in Afghanistan and graduated at the top of your two Marine classes is super impressive as well. While it’s not clear what you are doing for Amazon, it would make a very big difference if you were in some sort of leadership role at the company. That could be crucial to getting an admit from HBS. Based on your story and your stats, you should get an interview invite. Then, it’s pretty much up to you and them on whether you get in. One word of caution: While it’s okay to say you want to work in finance, I do not think I would use those two letters–PE–to the admissions folks. PE jobs are very hard to get and usually go to people who already have some private equity experience on their resume. No reason to give admissions reason to worry about whether you will be diappointed because you don’t get a PE job post-MBA. You also need a solid reason for going into finance from tech. Finance loves vets, particularly those who have your story, and you may very well get that job in PE, just don’t say it’s your post-MBA goal.