Profile review request (social sector experience)
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10 May 2015, 02:52
The basics - 27, female, Indian
1) Brief description of your full-time work experience. What do you do?
- 4 years in management consulting with a focus on social entrepreneurship and venture capital (social enterprise - a venture that creates positive social impact through its core activities while creating financial value at the same time). This is with a top-tier firm in my industry but is not a Big4 so I'm pretty certain ad-com wouldn't have heard of it. I could potentially offset by listing its key achievements and since I've had a hand in some it might fit in well with my essays.
- Designed, built, and currently manage an incubator (in addition to regular consulting gigs - with folks such as World Bank, International Finance Corporation, several European aid agencies, and PE funds that invest in socially impactful firms etc.)
- 3 promotions in the past 4.5 years, made a lateral move from operations (marketing and corporate development) to consulting within the same firm; only non-MBA, only woman, and youngest amongst my peer group
- Sectors of focus - healthcare and renewable energy (with technology and product innovation as cross-cutting themes)
- Pre-consulting: 1 year as a business analyst in the real estate industry but quit quickly because I wanted my work to have more meaning than just raking in the money.
2) Your GMAT.
700 (AWA - 6, IR - 5, 41 - Q, 45 - V)
- I know Q is weak but I have math scores from school and college that put me in the top 20% of my class. Also consulting is inherently quantitative and analytical in nature. I don't know what it is with "is x>y" type of questions but my mind completely shuts down and refuses to deal with them out of sheer boredom. I do rigorous analytical at work everyday though - I've built a specific business success predictor algorithm as part of a project that involved pretty advanced stat and some coding - all self-learnt. I think the difference is that real world problem solving is something I enjoy very much, unlike the GMAT quant type of stuff. So can I get by this hurdle without taking the GMAT again? By justifying it in my optional essays? I really cannot do anymore pointless Algebra - I'd rather go MBA-less I think.
3) College info:
Public University in the South of India
GPA - 3.5
Major - Engineering in Biotechnology
Year of Graduation - 2009
4) Significant college and post-college extra-curricular activities or community service, especially leadership experience.
Just before starting college (if that counts at all) - youth ambassador to the UK for a month, trained with the British Army as part of a cultural exchange initiative
College - 3 years of extra-curricular volunteering with AIESEC where I played several leadership roles and won a bunch of awards.
Part of the core student committee in college responsible for annual student fests and so on
Captained the throwball team for 3 years
Post college - Mentored startups and have assisted several in writing business plans (especially non-English speaking entrepreneurs)
5) Your target programs. Please note that my experience is with the top MBA programs (FT, PT, EMBA, Sloan Fellows) around the world. If the programs you are targeting are not listed here, I may not respond due to lack of time.
In order -
Stanford
MIT Sloan
Haas
London Business School
Harvard/Wharton
(Should I have safer schools on this list as well?)
Post-MBA goal
Return to India to continue helping social enterprises grow but with a very specific focus on product and technology innovation.
Post-MBA goal
Return to India to continue helping social enterprises grow but with a very specific focus on product and technology innovation.