Ms. Big Pharma

Hi there! It’s Stephanie Horn, Master Consultant with the MBA Exchange and recent Poets and Quants “Top 10 Admissions Consultants”. Ms. Big Pharma, I love your passion. I spent five years working in healthcare, and I miss that sense of being mission-driven. I think your goals are clear and achievable. You will need to demonstrate your quantitative abilities — hopefully, you got strong grades in math classes in college and have a good quant score on your GRE. If not, there are strategies you can pursue to offset this. You will also need to demonstrate your leadership and ability to set strategic, quantifiable goals through your work experience in your essays and letters of recommendation. Other big city schools you can consider include Foster, Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and I would include Duke if you can strengthen your test scores.

Hi, it’s Nisha from mbaMission! It’s always great to come across the profile of someone who’s so passionate about their industry, and healthcare will only continue to grow. Your academics are in range for Kenan-Flagler, and you have solid work experience (which hopefully involved some promotions and increases in responsibility) along with meaningful social impact. I think that as long as you’ve shown career progression (bolstered by excellent recommendations), explain your motivations behind wanting to switch to the strategy side of healthcare, and make a strong connection between yourself and KF to show why the program is a good fit for you (make sure to visit campus, go to events, and talk to students/alumni) you’ll be a solid contender.

You’d mentioned big cities – which ones are you targeting? I recommend applying to Fuqua as well, as it may have a broader reach in terms of companies that recruit there and the cities that grads end up in. Best of luck!

Hi Ms. Big Pharma, this is Donna Bauman, Senior MBA Admissions Counselor for Stratus Admissions, reaching out about your profile. It is great that you bring some healthcare industry knowledge through your work as a policy analyst and that you have an undergraduate major in Health Policy from Emory. Your GPA and your GRE are a hair on the soft side for Kenan-Flagler but you are close enough that with a strong application and interview you can be successful. I encourage you to learn all that you can about the healthcare concentration at UNC Kenan-Flagler. You have the opportunity at Kenan-Flagler to engage in a lot of experiential learning around healthcare through programs such as STAR (Student Teams Achieving Results) Healthcare projects. Talk to students in the Healthcare Club about their experience hosting 50 graduate students from UNC’s other graduate programs for an internal Healthcare Case Competition. As someone who used to work in MBA Admissions at UNC Kenan-Flagler and someone who knows the school very well as an alum of the undergraduate business program and has worked successfully with many clients seeking admission at UNC Kenan-Flagler, I have more ideas than I can share here to help you! But I think the strategy of going deep and knowing why UNC Kenan-Flagler can help you reach your goals will be a great strategy for you. Even though you are likely applying for next year, UNC Kenan-Flagler has an online event scheduled on Feb 26th at 8pm ET to ask questions about the application process for students applying this spring. You can sign up to learn more about the application process at UNC Kenan-Flagler and hear directly from Danielle Ritchie, Senior Associate Director of Admissions and Student Recruitment. Get to know her now and ask when they will host their annual women’s workshop that is held usually in October or November. I highly suggest you plan to attend this weekend as it is a great way to learn a ton about the program in a weekend and make some connections with students and staff at UNC Kenan-Flagler.