mjav wrote:
Hi,
Please see my profile below. Any insights on how to frame my application would be appreciated!
Nationality: Pakistani
Age: 25
Gender: Female
GPA: 3.64 (Dean's honor list, top 5% of graduating class)
Undergrad major: Economics, Math minor
Lahore University of Management Sciences (Lahore, Pakistan)
GMAT: 710,
Verbal 85%, Quant 79%, AWA: 6 92%
Extra curricular during school:
-Founded Emergency Medical Services at my university, a 24 hour service available on campus. Started from 11 members and grew it to 100 in 3 years. Arranged professional training workshops and certifications for volunteers, managed scheduling, acquired corporate sponsorships to fund medical equipment and training courses.
-Launched a Bike-share campaign on campus as part of the Environmental Action Forum to reduce the usage of cars
Work experience (2.5 years currently)
- Operations Officer at TD Bank: Real Estate Secured Lending (2012-2013)
- Finance Analyst at TD Bank: Management Reporting Operations Risk & Controls (2013- present)
• Responsible for collaborating with Internal and External Audit teams for annual Finance Technology compliance review (including SOX compliance documentation). Received the Act of Impact award for this work.
• Supported all lines of business in change management initiatives regarding financial and management reporting. Received second Act for Impact award on delivering exceptional customer service to our internal business partners.
• Responsible for security framework and game plan development on the project management side for TD's biggest technology initiative implementation to date (project expected completion is in 8 years)
Target schools: Wharton, Berkeley, Columbia, Harvard, Yale
Entry date: September 2015 Full time MBA
Post MBA career: Management consulting
I grew up in Pakistan and received all my education there. Due to personal security reasons my family had to relocate to Canada. With the job market not being so great in the Toronto area, coupled with a poor financial background, I started working as a Sales associate in Retail. From there I landed a contract job at TD Bank as an administration officer, through which I networked my way into the Finance Analyst role I have today. Even though the bank is a highly rated company, my work experience is mostly backoffice support and my impact has been minor process improvements affecting only my department.
Due to my parents not being able to find employment here, I am partially supporting my family. We have had a difficult transition to life here and I was thinking of including that in my applications as one of the essays.
Hello there!
So sorry it had taken me soooo long to get back to you! Normally I am much quicker, but I was on the road for about a week and a half.
Anyhow on to our business!
First of all I like your story! About how your family needed to leave Pakistan, and how you worked your way up. I mean, I sure wish you had had it easier, but it will make a strong and potentially motivational story. The next good thing is that both of your significant extra curricular activities are LEADERSHIP activities, with FOUNDING something new. The business schools will like that a lot. And finally, you have the advantage of being a female from an applicant pool which is quite highly skewed towards the male side of the population.
Now, even though I do think these things are awesome, I think that limiting yourself to Top 5 schools is a very unwise strategy, for even candidates from front offices of BB banks with 740 on their GMAT. And I think you should expand your school list to select a range of schools in the Top 20.
Although I know you are Pakistani and not Indian, there are some similarities in the applicant pools, and you might find that this post about Indians and Top 10 schools is helpful to you as well:
https://admissionado.com/mba/resources/t ... b-schools/Make sense?
I hope so!
Best,
JF