Ms. Rock-Climbing Construction Manager

I expect you are going to climb your way into Kellogg and here’s why. You have a solid reason for your low GPA in a STEM subject at an Ivy with actual results (leading 30 people in designing and building a steel bride and placing fourth in a competition) . And let’s not forget, you have a 770 GMAT with puts you–a woman of color in the unusual field of construction management–among the top 3% of test takers in the world. You also have distinguished yourself at work, leveraging Tableau to create a company-wide standard for tracking construction materials. Truth be told, you are going to have a hard time turning down Harvard to go anywhere else. Good luck to you and congratulations on all that you have already achieved at the age of 25! Super impressive.

Yours is indeed a compelling and differentiating candidacy. Very few construction professionals apply (though, of those that do, many come from Cornell, so you will have some intra-school competition considerations), so you be automatically underrepresented professionally. Furthermore, your gender and ethnic demo will be further differentiating given your chosen professional field. We both wish your GPA were higher, but that is surmountable given 1) your stellar GMAT (dang, you killed it!!), and 2) the perceived rigor of a STEM degree at an Ivy League school gives you some grace re GPA. I’d be CAREFUL about the way you talk about your GPA, though. The purpose of school is school. That’s the way people in academia are going to look at things. If you had trouble focusing on your studies due to extracurriculars in undergrad, hoooooo boy is it going to be LOADS harder in MBA, when there will be EVEN MORE diversions. Your GPA isn’t low enough to require explanation or justification. I wouldn’t go there. If you do explain your GPA in an optional essay, I’d keep things short and sweet (e.g., talk about what you learned, how you are a different person now, upward trajectory of GPA over 4 years of college as you learned to manage time better, etc.)

Strategic positioning is your personal brand… the ambitious things you want to do in your career and why you want to do these things and why these goals are imminently plausible given your background. The best applications have strategic positioning that are both illustrious & professionally grandiose as well as socially impactful. All things equal, MBA adcoms want people who will contribute positively to society as well as be leaders in their respective fields. You are lucky because your professional ambitious are 1) grand and impressive 2) underrepresented in the applicant pool generally 3) in demand NOW 4) socially impactful (especially to the extent that you make green built environment a cornerstone of your future ambitions).

A word of caution: as a technical person and an engineer, you’ll want to be careful getting too in-the-weeds regarding your accomplishments. Your bullet on your tableau success, when presented in its current form, won’t be eye-catchingly attractive to an AdCom. It may even be red flag-y. You need to highlight COMMERCIAL impact – how were clients/revenue gained from projects you led? What efficiencies were achieved? Resulting in what recurring cost savings? Why was this project hard? How many people did you have to manage? Did you have to manage cross function and cross geography? AdComs care less about technical prowess than managerial potential, because that’s what going to set you apart in higher-responsibility roles (hopefully you want be a technical individual contributor for very long post-MBA).

As an aside, if you took any labor relations coursework at Cornell (that’s often popular with construction-oriented undergrads and it’s offered at Cornell due to the state-school affiliation with NY), it may be worth bringing that up in your essays as you talk about the management coursework you aim to take in MBA bc it would be differentiating to have that kind of undergrad coursework. If you didn’t take any of these courses, please disregard this advice.