Mr. Mini Car Racer

Wow. For a philosophy major with a 2.56 GPA from the University of Pittsburgh, you have really done well for yourself landing a plum job with a Fortune 10 company in the tech field. That tells me a lot about how driven and hard-working you are, not to mention ambitious. You clearly have a fire in that belly of yours and that is a tremendous advantage to you in the competitive race to get into a great MBA program like INSEAD. I have some bad news for you, however. INSEAD is the only school that will not accept a GRE score if you live in an area where you can take the GMAT. Given your work for a Fortune 10 company, I have to assume you are in that dead pool.

Hi Mr. Mini Car Racer! It’s Kate Richardson, Senior Admissions Consultant here. I’ll admit I’m not much of a techie and didn’t know much about mini car racing, but how cool! I love that you can bring that personal passion to connect to your long-term career goals. In terms of your goal, you remind me of a previous client (at Kellogg now) who wanted to work in the autonomous vehicle space. From our conversations, I gathered that there are lots of problems to still figure out in that space and that creates a prime opportunity for innovation, critical thinking, and other MBA skills. As you know, your GPA is going to be a challenge. Plan to write an optional essay about that to own up to it and provide any missing context. Taking additional pre-MBA courses to create an “alternative transcript” would help too. Your fast progression since college, and ability to turn a philosophy degree into a successful (albeit unfulfilling) career is impressive! I believe INSEAD has accepted the GRE for a few years now, and they advise having above 80% on both Quant & Verbal sections, so if you’ve met those marks, I hope they will see past the GPA, because I think you have an interesting story to tell. Lastly, have you had any international experience? If not, that could present another challenge for INSEAD and that would make your odds tougher.