bostonbp wrote:
Dude I'm your age. Every year over 30 it gets harder and harder to be competitive for B-School, and socially the gulf between you and the median student will widen. If you were younger I'd say you may be able to take another year. As an aside, Darden can get you MBB but my understanding is for all the non-M7 schools you need to be really competitive; I spoke to someone at Tepper who said that everyone there who interviewed for MBB had a 740ish GMAT. Similar story at Ross. It may be a bit lighter on GMAT for M7 but not much. That being said, I still think that you should take the opportunity staring you in the face. You'll be able to land a consulting gig, either MBB if you up the GMAT or big 4/second tier if you work hard at Darden. It's also an amazing business school and UVA has good sports teams, a ridiculously attractive student body (important? no. perk? yes.), a gorgeous campus and is actually WARM for most of the year. The program's rigor is well known and regarded. A friend of mine recently graduated and speaks volumes of the program.
Wouldn't it suck to wait a year, work hard to add 50 points to your GMAT, get a bunch of dings and end up in the same position, now graduating at 33? You'd be a 35 year old consulting associate. If you think you can leverage the year into an opportunity at a higher ranked school that is a fit for you that's fine, but it had better be substantially better to compensate for the risk.
Thank you for your eyeopener comment. You shed light on my anxiety about age issue and provided an invaluable new window about UVA. As you mentioned I have to consider the risk of facing with bunch of dings for the next application cycle and it might be ended with more or less the same result if I will not be able to up my GMAT score over 700. Unless I will not be able to get a score above 680 in my next GMAT, I decided to go with Darden and focus on my post-MBA goals.