Harsha:
thanks reaching out to me. Your 71st rank stat is pretty impressive. While I understand that percentages change from school to school, at first glance your 77% seems to be excellent as well. Your GMAT score is excellent, even considering the ultra competitive demographic you represent.
the bottom line is that your numbers "look good." The one thing that you are going to have to worry about is differentiation, as well as demonstrating leadership in your work experience. I know that you said you did not have this leadership experience, but you really need to dig deep. What I mean by this is that there are several types of leadership -- formal and informal. While you may not have a significant amount of formal leadership, I'm sure that in your years of work experience you have demonstrated informal leadership. For example, have you ever served as an informal team lead on an IT implementation that required you to coordinate with team members who may have been located in disparate geographic locations? This is quite common in the IT project management world -- at least it was when I was an IT consultant plugging in PeopleSoft. These are the types of leadership experiences that you want to highlight. Talk about your ability to communicate and reconcile differences. You do not need to talk about how smart you are or your technical proficiency. They expect this from you, given your excellent test scores and grades. Do not over emphasize your strengths, work on addressing your weaknesses -- again, showing differentiation and leadership.
I would caution you against telling admissions committees that you want to be a career switcher. Finance is an extremely hard industry to get in to -- even in a great economic environment. Additionally, do not confuse your exposure to finance, based on your project management experiences, would legitimate finance expertise. This will tell the admissions committee that you are someone who may not understand the depths of what you're getting yourself into.
I would align your future career goals along the lines of working for a strategic consulting firm. This consulting firm would be global in nature and would bring your current IT experiences up a level. He would be able to take your operations, IT and budding of finance knowledge and apply them to reengineer the existing IT infrastructures of larger an international client companies. You would be able to use IT, in conjunction with other areas with large organization, to create IT strategy that will and can serve as a differentiator for client firms.
Respectfully,
Paul Lanzillotti
crack700 wrote:
My profile:
Indian Male / 27 years old
Education:
B.Tech In Computer Science & Engineering from JNTU Hyderabad,India (Not as good as IITs but one of the top universities in the state of A.P. I ranked 71 among 140000 entrance exam takers to get into the college)
Undergraduate GPA: 77%
GMAT: 760 (Q50 V41) +4.5 AWA
Work Experience:Working in an Indian IT Consulting organization for the past 7 years .
0-2 years - Worked for a US credit card/banking client in India.
2-7 years - Have been working with a financial services client in USA.
I am currently working as a project architect for one of the technology assets within the client organization.My responsibilities include creating and maintaining long term strategy/roadmap for our assets, Analysing Industry trends in the technology used by our group, evaluating new solutions and providing recommendations to clients.
Prior to my current role i have worked as tech lead and responsible for building new technology infrastructure in our group when our client separated from another company.
All 7 yrs of my experience have been in the technology arena and i don't have any managerial experience.
Extra Curriculars : Long Distance Runner. Ran 2 full marathons in the last 2 years and a 193 mile relay race recently. I also volunteered in few local running races.
Reason for MBA: Working for a financial services client got me interested in finance and post MBA i am interested in switching career to finance.
I am considering the below list of schools to apply in Round 2 for fall 2011 admissions.How good are my prospects for admission into these schools?
Wharton
London School of Business
Duke
Kellogg
Ross
Are there any other schools in US/Europe that might be a fit for me and worth exploring?
Thanks
Harsha
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