Hello everyone,

First of all this is a great forum, thank to all the contributors!

Few days ago (after a serious amount of stress) I finally took the GMAT and with enough surprise I achieved a fairly good score:

700 (Q42 59th V44 97th)

First of all I am very happy I took the GMAT previously to get into a Msc (nearly 5y ago) and got a 580 that was cause of a bit of depression (thats why I did not retake it). On my first attempt verbal went really bad (29) and thats why, when I decided to retake it, I mostly focused in improving my verbal score.

I am quite happy now and planning to apply to a top tier school (HBS / STAN and even Columbia) however I am quite worried about my low quant (42 is like 59th percentile).
I have an Italian Bsc in Law and Economics with 3.9+ gpa and solid scores (A or A+) in math, microecon, macroecon, finance and accounting. I have a Msc in Stretegic Management between France and Germany (with some time spent in England and Argentina). I am a former semiprofessional rugby player and I speak professionally 3 languages + 2 on a casual conversation level.
I am currently working in a top tier consulting firm that yearly send at least 6 candidates each to HBS and Columbia (Not familiar with figures from other uni). I am planning to get recommendation from a client (CEO), Senior Partner and possibly my Math professor during my Bsc (Italian luminar that teaches in Ivy league UNIs as well)

At first I thought that my profile was solid enough to achieve my target schools however reading this forums I started to sadly realize that my supposed "excellent 700 GMAT" score is not that good as it is "Unbalanced" .

I see two option sin front of me:

1) Retake it - which I really dont want, as I have a clean 700 with my old 580 expired, preparing it was really stressing, the test is changing soon and I am honestly proud of my 97th percentile verbal as a non native english speaker

2) Back up my application with quantitative stuff, Bsc subjects records, highlight quantitative intensive project I took part in and the recommendation from the Bsc math prof

What do you think?

PS I admit that the Q score could be improved by a couple of points ( i kinda panicked during the quant part, however would really a 65 or 70 percentile change that much?)