Hi Hjort,
first of all I hope that my double posting doesn't matter, but I want to get as much information and tips as possible to complete my applications successfully.
I would really appreciate your advice to my application profile. I haven't definitely chosen any Business Schools to apply to, there is still a huge list of schools I'm interested in (e.g. Duke, Wharton, Kellogg).
What do you think about my profile, which points should be emphasized and which are less important?
I'm a 25 years old male from Germany. After finishing my university-entrance diploma in 1999, I immediately started my studies at the "Berufsakademie Stuttgart", which is a dual system of theoretical studies at university and practical training and experience in real job conditions. After these 3 years I got a Bachelor degree and the German degree of a Dipl-Ing.(BA) for Information Technology. Because of some personal failings, my GPA was not the best (carefully spoken)... I guess translated to GPA it would been between 3.4 and 3.0.
My cooperation partner in this time was IBM and I worked in several project management and software development projects in teams between 5 and 20 people. These projects were spread over different clients, for example for a German insurance company, but also in the scope of military logistics.
After my studies I changed to another employer which is a medium-sized engineering company that's doing development and project management work for Daimlerchrysler and some other customers. My daily business is in the field of telematics, at the moment I'm doing the project management for the TV tuner, which is for example used in the new S-Class, Maybach and some other vehicles from DC. To improve my understanding of financial issues and management, I am studying in a job accompanying program that was designed by Daimlerchrysler and will earn the degree of a business economist in 2006 with very good grades (at least so far ;o) )
So I have an overall work experience of about 5-6 years.
Hobbies and extracurricular information:
Since I have reached the age of 18 years, I'm a member of the local (voluntary) fire fighters and have achieved the rank of an so called group leader. This means that I'm allowed and able to lead groups of around 10 people in deployment and also instruct their training.
Due to a sport injury I had to abandon another favorite hobby: sports, especially handball, which I played ca. 15 years. Besides the training (3-4 times a week as our team was quite successful), I was also coach of several youth teams at our club.
Why do I want to get a MBA-degree?
The most important argument to me is the improvement about my abilities in my job but of course also to have the possibility to accomplish different goals either in my current company or perhaps in another company, too. This is also the reason why I would probably prefer an distance learning MBA, such as the Cross Continent from Duke/Fuqua, or an cooperation program with an German university, for example Duke+Goethe or Purdue+Gisma. But this is only one of my ideas.
Problems:
One huge problem I see is to improve my English (you might have noticed it, reading the lines above)... as I had only few possibilities to use it in the last years.
I haven't taken the GMAT so far, but I'm now preparing to it, so I can't tell you my GMAT score, but I'm aiming to a 700+ (and hoping to achieve this goal)
At first: how would you rate my profile, where is space for improvement? How are my chances to be admitted to the mentioned business schools? Are there any chances despite my bad GPA or do I have to head for other, less known business schools?
Thanks for your help and sorry for this huge profile but I don't want a thing to be misunderstood ot incomplete.
Oli