My MBA profile seems to slip into a few cracks and I'm not sure how best to position myself.

First, I'm a non-traditional student. I was without parental financial support since turning 18, but a quirk of the FAFSA meant I couldn't qualify for financial aid on my own until I was 23. So, I began working instead. After getting into college, I continued to work my way through school, part time and full-time.

My overall employment history has some gaps. I had the bad luck of graduating just before the great recession. I was out of work almost for over a year during this time. I also left work for about a year to help with the full time care-taking of my grandmother in the late stages of dementia. I could show that I was productive during those gaps, finding freelance work and launching multiple websites. I've also commonly had side-hustles even while working, and the traditional resume format doesn't really do a good job of capturing this activity.

From the age of 18 at least, my work experience has all been in the same general field. Print design, web design, digital media, social networking, digital marketing.

College marked the beginning of a change in career focus. When I entered college, I majored in Art with the idea of going into a web design career. But as a member of an honor society (NSCS) with a focus on service, I think that planted the seed of the path I am now on, which is moving into the non-profit space. Post college, I have 10 years of work experience for non-profit and philanthropy focused orgs.

I would like an MBA with an emphasis on social entrepreneurship, with an eye on starting my non-profit or moving to an executive director position at an existing one. Which brings me to actually getting the MBA.

Because of my non-traditional status, I find myself in a situation with a long work history, but not necessarily as far along in my career as that amount of time would suggest. So for example, I see that EMBAs are commonly recommended for people with over 10 years of work history, but looking at EMBA programs, the candidate pool seems to have people far more advanced in their careers than myself.

I would almost prefer to pursue a full-time MBA. Based on my undergrad experience, I think I would get a lot out of the fully immersive experience without the distraction of holding down a job on top of it all. But the opportunity cost of not earning a salary during those two years may be too high to justify it. Not to mention, the impression I get is that there is a cutoff point where an applicant is too old to be admitted to a full time program, even though all programs will claim that it is not the case and that they are looking for diversity in every aspect, which ought to include age.

I have a 3.91 undergrad GPA from a state university, and this is another place where my profile falls through the cracks. I imagine the assumption is that applicants will have attended the highest ranked school that was willing to accept them. Because i had no guidance with how the university system worked, I think I shot myself in the foot on this one. I had the grades and coursework to get into a higher ranked school (AP and honors courses, a 3.8 GPA, and extracurriculars including editor-in-chief of the school literary magazine). I attended the college that I did out of convenience and with the hope of transferring to a more prestigious university after my sophomore year.

However, the state school system was impacted at the time and they were not accepting university to university transfers. Turns out, I would have been better served attending a community college instead, from which transfers were readily accepted. Hindsight is 20/20.

The end result of these circumstances I'm listing here is that I feel the "pedigree" of my profile is negatively affected. It seems being 40 is likely to be a negative factor in my application, and I am having trouble identifying a program that will be a good fit. I'll add that my practice GMAT is around 690 so far, and I hope to break 720 by the time I take it in October. I am looking at Anderson and Haas as my top MBA choices, but am not up to speed on the full field of MBA programs out there. Stanford, with it's D School, also really appeals to me as an art major, but it seems like it would be a real stretch. Any advice or recommendations are appreciated. Thanks for reading.