Paul,
This was an absolutely fabulous evaluation. This is going to be a long reply, but I'm going to structure it so it is readable - if you have any more thoughts at all, and the time to relate them, then I am all ears.
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there is a "guilty until proven innocent" assumption that the candidate is just in a huge hurry to barrel through life and they neither know for sure what they want, nor are they prepared to really dig deep and share life experiences with other members of the class.
Maybe it's just my Poet instead of Quant nature speaking to me, but I feel that certitude is one of the luxuries not afforded us in this life. We are allowed to make choices, but only a few of them have guaranteed outcomes.
I do not know if I will ever know for sure what I want. How people definitively arrive at this conclusion mystifies me. What I want, today, is to do well on the GMAT, keep doing my job well, and apply to business school because I want to try my hand as a consultant, and my undergraduate background alone would not provide that opportunity. If I end up hating it, as I am sure that many people do, then I hate it. No big deal. I'd do it until my B-school debt was cleared and try something else.
Take my father, for instance. My Dad retired from bluegrass music to be a lawyer and found law to be boring. A few short years after his law school graduation, he was back on the road with his band and had a much smaller caseload at the office. (NB: This story is why I happen to be posting on a GMAT forum instead of an LSAT forum - I witnessed all of this first hand and didn't want to go through it myself.)
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your GPA, while not horrible, suggest that maybe you weren't totally plugged in to what you were doing in college.
My major progression was Music Education - Sociology - History/French/Political Science - French - History w/ a French minor. The coursework just felt so pointless sometimes...I probably should have just changed my major to business. I was not plugged in at all - I devoted most of my time to helping with the kid, theater, spending time with my fiance, etc.
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What about your experiences have prepared you to take literally the final training step of you business career?
The way you have framed this question made me realize that I, perhaps erroneously, consider an MBA to be more of an early-step in a business career. (If a college degree is crawling, and your first job after graduation is walking, then the MBA is what teaches you how to jog and eventually to run.) You work for 2-8 years, get an MBA, work 35-40+ more years. You know more about it than I do, but I find it hard not to see it this way. Perhaps this is a fair way to put it -
don't get an MBA until you have had a job that taught you how to walk, otherwise you won't keep up or be able to motivate your classmates, who may be more "out of shape", to run.Quote:
Your GMAT score will obviously play a role as well and it could determine whether Stern/Yale are stretches are realistic chances (720 gives you a shot with perfect applications, 690 is an uphill battle).
If I were to change my schools to which I might apply to Ross, Columbia, Duke, Tuck, Kenan-Flagler, Darden, Tepper, Mcdonough, and Goizueta, since consulting is my primary focus, would that alter anything you've already said?