thatboy wrote:
So true! Actually, if I were in admissions committee and if I reviewed myself based on my past until this year I would not accept myself to the program. The good part is that, now I am feeling mature as I have never felt before. Some people get mature when they are 20 years old, some get mature when they are 30,and some never get mature.. Now is the time when I know myself. However, my feeling doesn't mean anything to adcom. They are not going to ask me how I feel now, they are going to look at my past records which is as complicated as it could be. My concern is that, now that I am determined and confident about myself, how do I make the past record affect my chances the least? Any idea?
My inclination is for you to construct an entrepreneurship goals story.
Instead of saying you dropped out of the PhD program because you didn't like it, I would say you dropped out because you fell in love with a new business idea and knew you needed to invest 100% of your time in it. You were so passionate about entrepreneurship that it negatively impacted your PhD grades and the birth of the startup, you had to choose one or the other, and you choose the new venture because you're a risk-taker who sees the world a little differently.
I would make the 1 year of nothing disappear by saying you were working on this new business idea by doing market research and acquiring necessary technology skills.
You took the initiative to build your own business, you put money into it, and you're still hard at work on it. It hasn't turned a profit yet, but you've learned some valuable skills and also identified some holes in your game. You need a MBA program to fill in those holes, give you a lab to test more ideas in a community of brilliant minds, and provide potential networking and competition access to investors, because as you've figured out, self-funding may not get you where you need to go.
MBA programs are all about entrepreneurship right now. Intrapreneurship is probably another big wave that will really hit in a few years as more F500 companies understand how to make innovation teams work. So that's working in your favor because this is actually the one thing you've done (and recently), so you need to polish it up and sell it big. Link it to the MBA program, sell your deficiencies as opportunities to get better through the MBA world.
You're between a rock and a hard place. So hopefully this is a little pickaxe you can use to get started. There's probably some ethical decision making here regarding how far you want to stretch the truth, and certainly, that's a personal decision. But to me, it's got to be entrepreneurship, there's no other way.