Veteran Profile Evaluation

Hey veteranwantsmba,

You seem to have a pretty interesting profile.

Before I answer your question, I’d like to clarify that other than your academics and the GMAT score, there are lots of factors like your work experience, extracurriculars, and achievements, that play an important role in your chance of acceptance into the top schools.

That said, you have provided limited information for me to give you an accurate estimation of your chances in schools like HaaS, Stanford, and Marshall.

However, beginning your evaluation with details presented, academically, your undergraduate GPA of 3.62 showcases your strong academic prowess, and the brand of your undergraduate college gives your profile a boost as schools tend to pick out applicants with prior education in top colleges.

One concern that I’d like to address is that gap years are never appreciated by any top b-school. Having said that, if you have any gaps in your profile, you need to be posing a right alibi for the same and portraying constructive endeavors during this time.

As you have not mentioned your extracurricular activities - during or after your undergrad, I’d like to let you know that Extracurricular participation plays an important role in strengthening your application as B-schools are on the hunt for all-rounder profiles. Hence, it is essential to shed some light on the endeavors you took up in any clubs, associations, sports, fests, or events you managed or participated in. Thus, you should dig deeper into this aspect and bring out varied skills in your profile, or seek to build the relevant proficiencies in this area to show that you are constantly on the path of upskilling yourself.

As far as your work experience goes, your 6 years of work experience in the Navy would differentiate you from the cohort and thus give you an upper-hand in the competition. Although you need to back your transition from Navy to a managerial program like MBA with a strong reason as both fields are completely unrelated. Moreover, any endeavor taken in the field of business whether in your internships or extracurriculars would definitely strengthen your pitch.

Moving on, a 730 GMAT score would allow you to target almost all the top business schools. As for the schools that you are targeting, HaaS and Stanford come under the dream category whereas USC Marshall falls under the competitive category. You would have a 40-50% chance of getting an admit from the schools in the dream category and a 60-70% chance from the schools in the competitive category.

Furthermore, in order to stand at par with the competition, you need to shine some light on the differentiators that allow you to have a unique profile and add value to your profile. Moreover, whenever you are applying to schools abroad, it is always better to target a good mix of dream, competitive, and safe schools. Hence you can broaden your options, and thus look at 6-8 more schools in the respective mix of categories that better fit your profile. Thus, some other competitive schools that you can be targeting are - Fordham, UC Davis, and McCombs.

Lastly, while you have a competitive profile with the waiver, to increase your chances of getting admitted to these schools you would need to ensure that you have a very strong application (consisting of - Essays, LORs, and Resume) that highlights your strengths and overshadows your weaknesses in order to differentiate your profile. You need to showcase your journey, what makes you different from your peers, and how you are a great value addition to the school.

On this note, having helped over 3500+ applicants get into their dream schools, you can thus check out our comprehensive, All-in-One Solution, to gain insights into how we can assist you in creating an impactful application that could boost your chances of acceptance by a minimum of 3x!

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Hope this helped!