UlissDA wrote:
Hi everyone!
I'd like to ask for help evaluating my profile and also for advice on which schools to apply given my career aspirations after MBA. Please see details on my profile below:
Citizenship: Russia
Age: 25 by the time of matriculation (fall of 2016)
Amount of work experience: 48 months by the time of matriculation
Companies: All time spent in an local internet focused VC fund, 3 years as Analyst, 1 year as Associate (got promoted recently); 1st year as an Analyst was during my last year at the university (worked full-time)
GMAT: 770 in the 1st try (Q50/V45, AWA 5.5, IR 8)
TOEFL: waiting for results, hope to be high enough
Previous education: Combined Bachelor/Masters in Math from Moscow State University (1-tier university in Russia), graduated in 2013
GPA: 4.1 on 5.0 scale
Extracurriculars:
Co-founder (working on product) of an indie game studio (built 2 interesting prototypes, tried to raise funding, failed to close due to some local problems in Russia)
Mentor/lecturer at educational program for students wanting to join VC funds in Russia
Helping local non-profit promoting child adoption with revising their content & partnerships strategy
Recommendations: both coming from my colleagues at the fund (Partner and Investment Director), possibly can get recommendation from somebody in our portfolio companies, if it'd be helpful
The most interesting schools for me are:
HBS
Stanford GSB
Wharton
MIT Sloan
Kellogg MMM
Post-MBA Goals:
VC (probably 1st choice)/Strategy/Product Management (all in tech industry), either in the U.S. or in Europe
I'd like to apply to 3 (maximum 4) schools in R1. Harvard/Stanford are the obvious ones to apply to, but the 3rd choice is hard to make. From the sheer point of prestige, Wharton seems better, but MIT Sloan seems potentially more relevant given my interest to continue working with tech company (or inside one of them) after MBA. It would also be helpful to know if my profile looks competitive enough for Stanford/Harvard, and if applying to only 3 schools in R1 seems to be a wise strategy.
Thank you for your help!
I think you have a strong enough profile that you'd be competitive at any of the top 8 b-schools. However, it's a numbers game, and you do want to apply to enough schools to maximize your odds (or minimize the randomness of results between one school to the next).
What you'll find is that there's not a huge difference in time and effort between applying to 2-3 schools and say 6-8 schools, because of the overlap in material. Once you have say 3 schools' worth of material, you have more than enough to adapt to your 4th school and beyond without much additional time or effort (I know that is anathema to some consulting firms here who may be trying to sell 5+ school packages...). Same goes with the recommendation letters, which most of the top schools have settled on a common set of short answer questions (so that once a recommender has completed one school, he/she can essentially populate that to the other schools' rec letter forms; the only exception to that is Sloan, which still uses the outdated list of unnecessary rec letter questions rather than conform to what the other schools are doing).
Again, I think you have a strong enough chance, but you should consider applying to more than less - in fact, apply to all the schools on the list, as you really have no idea in advance which ones you'll get in (you have a reasonable shot of getting into at least 1-2 schools on that list, but the odds of that happening become starker if you limit yourself to just 3 schools).