Ms. Education Reform

I really admire you. Clearly, you have overcome an incredibly difficult experience and turned it into something good in helping others who have been victims of sexual assault. That is a powerful story for Stanford, particularly given your entrepreneurial success. Your experience–if told in a compelling and honest way–would help to offset the very low GPA for Stanford which is, by the way, the most selective prestigious MBA program in the world. I do see you prefer to say on the West Coast, but I would toss an app over at Harvard Business School which has an admit rate roughly double Stanford’s and a much larger class that gives HBS the luxury of taking on more admission risks. Your overall GRE score on practice tests is solid at a 331, which happens to be a point higher than the class average of 330 at Stanford. But–and this is a very big but–people tend to score higher on their practice exams than they do when they take the test for real. I suspect that both GMAC and ETS deliberately make that happen so you stick with their test and don’t jump to an alternative. The other issue is clearly your quant score on that GRE. You need it to be very strong because of your low GPA and the fact that you were an art major who probably took few, if any, quant courses in college. In fact, it would be beneficial if you were to take an online course or two in calculus and/or statistics from a well-known university and scored well on those courses. Based on Stanford’s 6% accept rate, your low GPA and my guess that you aren’t going to do as well on the real test as you have done on the practice test, I think Stanford is a reach. Good luck to you!