TL;DR - I work in education but dabble in stand-up comedy. My side gig is owning a small independent comedy club and working for Don't Tell Comedy (recently promoted to Northeast Regional Manager). I want to get into entertainment/sports/media.


Work Experience: I went from 1st grade teacher (1 year), to PE teacher/director of after school program (1 year), to Undergrad Admissions for Haverford College (3 years), to a full year off doing my side hustles (1 year, more on that later), to College Counseling at an independent school where I am in the middle of year 3.

My post-grad activities have consisted of: a ton of coaching baseball (varsity high school for 2 years and youth travel for 5 seasons), playing basketball in a weekly neighborhood pick-up game, I'm on the board of a family foundation devoted to helping local Philly public school students pay for college with last dollar scholarships, admissions volunteer for my alma mater before I did it professionally, and then I have done stand-up comedy almost every night for the past 7 years...

Comedy/Entertainment: I did a bunch of entertainment internships when I was in college. That industry was the idealistic vision for the bright eyed and naive kid. But after I graduated I had fantastical dreams of making it as a creative not an executive. As a wannabe stand-up comedian, I read every book, listened to every podcast, and interviewed any comedian who would take time to speak to me to learn the path. The advice every comedian had at the time; was move to a medium sized B-city (not LA, Chi, or NY) and do comedy every night to get good, before moving to one of the bigger comedy cities once ready. I decided to listen to them and that's been the last 7 years of my life. While working these jobs in education, my main devotion was to comedy at night (but I'm also not wired to half ass anything... so I couldn't sit idle at work and have continually aspired for more, hence the upward mobility in jobs and pay). I knew that to get good at comedy you have to get stage time in front of real paying customers, not just open mics. Thus in late 2021 I started a comedy venture, Next In Line Comedy, that was initially a show I produced in various bars and it got so successful that we have since turned into a full-fledged independent comedy club in Philly (first full year 2022 we did $30K+ in ticket sales at our various bar shows and in 2025, the second year in a permanent location, we broke 190K+ in gross sales). We've won Philly Magazine Best Comedy Night in 2022 and won Best Comedy Club in 2025.
At the same time I started NIL, I simultaneously got a job as the lead Philadelphia producer for a now renowned international comedy company, Don't Tell Comedy. Both of these ventures were pursued solely in service of getting myself high quality stage time to become a better comic, but it ended up resulting in a ton of time focusing on the behind the scenes/business side (and it proved money is in producing and not performing, not to mention I might be better at it than as a comedian). When both of these were starting to get some heat, and I wanted to try comedy full time, I left my job to focus on them both. I spent a full year where my income was solely from comedy (realistically roughly 75% was because of the two businesses I have a hand in and 25% were exclusively paid gigs for my own work). I now realize that despite having more success than 99% of people who ever try to go into stand-up comedy, it's a brutal career and unless you're in the top .01+% you don't really have the income or work-life balance that I aspire to. Now I'd like to move to the business side of a much more established company (Apple TV, HBO, Netflix, etc) as opposed to the more start-up nature of Next In Line and the more gig work of Don't Tell (in the smallest of nutshells, my work for DTC consists of: finding venues, booking acts, and being the boots on the ground to produce the show and make it run smoothly... oh, and performing). Comedy has still been about 1/6 of my income even since I got the higher paying gig as a college counselor. My personal comedy account has over 20K followers on instagram and I have performed in about 20+ states. Recently for Don't Tell I was promoted to Regional Manager of the entire Northeast, so that will now make up 40% of my income.

College Internships: Lionsgate Entertainment, The Soup with Joel McHale, Late Show with David Letterman, Gary Ross's Larger Than Life Production Company

College: American Studies major, Film Studies minor. I went to Dickinson College (US World News: 45th small liberal arts). By far my biggest extracurricular was a D3 college athlete for baseball. I dabbled in a lot of random things including: working for the athletic department, Film Club, wrote some TV reviews for an on campus magazine, started a club devoted to comedy, worked as a phonathon caller soliciting donations, and was a designated notetaker in some classes (paid job).

I haven't taken the official GMAT yet but I am in the thick of studying now. This is by far the most daunting/time consuming part of the process for me. I am looking to get a testing accommodation, if possible. Do schools care about or know if this is used? What score should I be aiming for given my list, quant light background, and more outside the norm experience pre-MBA?

MBA Goals: I want to go into the business side of entertainment (this includes media or sports). These are the areas of the world I'm genuinely most interested in and feel like I also know the most/care the most about. In an ideal world the outcome of an MBA is where my passion meets knowledge/skills as well as a significantly scaled up salary. My longstanding love of entertainment (currently side gigs) is going to be my application story and the ultimate plan will be this route once in a program (that being said I am very aware this is a fickle industry so I have a sense I may need back-up plans).