Ms. Public School Teacher

Let me bow in front of you for your service to our children. Being a public school teacher is one of the most important jobs in a society. I have no doubt whatsoever that you are terrific in your job, too, based on your obvious passion for education and music. Your GPA is solid and so is your degree from Michigan State. It was a good idea, too, to take some quant courses because admissions will be looking closely are your ability to handle those math-intensive courses, given your musical background. It would be helpful to know how you did on the qaunt portion of the GRE. Your overall 325 score is certainly in line and, I believe, above the class average at Kellogg which remains one of the few schools that declines to disclose average and median GRE scores of its enrolled students. By the way, that leads me to suspect that they are lower than their peer schools which is why I think your score is very solid, especially if your quant showed well. Afterall, the GRE average at Harvard Business School is just a point better than your score. To me, the big question is how well you performed on the quant side of the GRE. If you didn’t do well and killed the verbal to get that high score, you are more of a risk as a Kellogg admit. If you did okay or even better, your odds are quite good.

Hi Ms. Public School Teacher, Melisa here from Stratus Admissions. Thank you for supporting children through music in education. The next couple years are going to be so interesting in education – and how some of the norms can be broken through the forced change of Covid. What a great time to be in a business school program that is looking to support social change. There are 2 areas I suggest you might consider to strengthen for your application: Quant skills and further outlining your goals. Depending upon where your GRE quant score is – you may want to consider taking a Berkeley Extension class to show that you have the quantitative skills to succeed in a business school program. And I would love to dig a bit deeper into why MBB post MBA. Where do you see this taking you long term? Consulting is a very popular path post MBA, and you need to be able to explain how consulting will help you where you want to be long term. Would you like to stay in consulting? Or head back into education to lead from within? Make sure you check out the Tamer Center at Columbia. And ROMBA if you haven’t connected yet. Assuming you can support your quant readiness, I think you have higher than average (26%) chances at Kellogg. If you are interested in expanding your list – other socially oriented programs to look at would be Haas, Tuck, Yale, Ross (if you would go blue/maize from green/white) and Fuqua. Best of luck and reach out if I can answer any other questions.