MBA Admissions Consultant
Joined: 25 Jan 2010
Status:Admissions Expert
Affiliations: Founder, Amerasia Consulting Group
Posts: 1081
Given Kudos: 264
Re: PROFILE EVALUATION REQUEST !!!
[#permalink]
06 Sep 2011, 00:44
Abhinav,
We have worked with many candidates who fit your description (outsourced to clients, led small teams, mainly tech background, a bit of international experience, solid scores), which is indeed your biggest weakness as you are probably aware. There's just a lot of folks applying to MBA programs with a similar profile. The ways to rectify that are:
- Be smart about your goals and articulate them perfectly ("appropriateness of degree" separates about half the applicant pool alone)
- Be very sure to articulate fit with each program - really nail the DNA of a school
- Get your passions and interests on the page (don't try to fit in, try to stand out)
- Avoid the huge metro area schools whenever possible, because that is where EVERYONE from overseas is applying
Now, as for your list...
For starters, that's a pretty long list. I'm not going to be able to go through it in detail. But when I can tell you, very quickly, is that you have tons of regional schools on there. And this is problematic if you have a specific region or part of the world in mind for your post-MBA career. If you will truly work anywhere, then it is no big deal and you can get great value from a lot of those hidden gem type programs. But if you are dead set in working in New York or Chicago or Hong Kong or anywhere else specific, then many of these schools will have a hard time getting you there. You need national programs to give you that kind of reach.
Only Texas (in tech) and Kelley (in consumer goods) can really boast of huge national and international reach in any area among the schools above. The rest are somewhat confined to the regions that house them. If you want to work in Chicago then anything from Illinois to Kelley to Notre Dame can work great. But none of them would be terribly helpful at helping you land a job in L.A. - then you would be better off with USC Marshall or even a Pepperdine type. Your schools are all over, so you either don't care about location (again, that works great) or you aren't thinking about this part of things.
I'd recommend isolating a region and loading your list with schools from that area and then perhaps stretching to a few national schools in the 10-16 type range (Darden, Cornell, UCLA, Duke, Ross, Yale, etc.).
Hope this helps.
Respectfully,
Paul Lanzillotti