Ms. Football Captain

Your Big 4 consulting experience in human capital along with your 4.0 in engineering are really solid indicators that you are a competitive MBA candidate. As a young woman, you also majored in a difficult STEM subject and then went into consulting which is highly competitive and an industry in the past that few women entered. Your involvement in a team sport as a captain (and I assume by football you mean soccer) is a big plus, especially for a school like Kellogg where collaboration, teamwork and likeability are a big focus. So if there is a ding on your application, it’s your 700 GMAT score. For an Indian engineer, that is lower than what one would expect and it is also 30 points below the class average at Kellogg. I think it shouldn’t matter in your case, given your work experience and GPA but if you wanted a bit of insurance, the tough-love advice is to retake the test and score closer to the class average. One of the most unfortunate developments in elite business school admissions is the over-indexing of GMAT scores, largely due to U.S. News’ ranking where those scores are a significant factor, and the wrong-headed view that the GMAT is something of an intelligence test, which is most certainly is not. So if you can stomach it, I would prefer you retake the test and aim to add 20 to 30 points to your score. I also think you should add several schools to the mix. Given your goals to work in MBB, I would put Dartmouth Tuck, UVA Darden, Michigan Ross, and Yale SOM into the mix. As I have said before, the ideal number of schools a person should apply to this season should be about half a dozen because it will be more competitive than it has been in quite a few years.