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Young accomplished female applicant with exemplary academic credentials assesses chances for MBA



Hi applebee,

Thanks for your message. As you probably know from our thread, we assess our applicants from a three-sided perspective of academic achievements, professional performance and personal profile.

From the academic perspective, your application is exemplary. Your GMAT score is way above average across all top schools, as is your GPA. The Ivy League school background is another feather in your cap. The academic section is the strongest part of your profile. Great job!

I would like to know more details about your professional experience to offer you more detailed insights and tailored feedback. For instance, what was the focus of your work in the securities firm? What kind of skills and attributes did you develop? As a result of your experience, do you have strong analytical and quantitative abilities, people and project leadership experience, multicultural team exposure, or broad and well-developed communication skills? What were your biggest projects and most significant achievements? As I always tell my clients, especially those who are applying for an MBA at a younger age, the quality of your experience matters more than the other benchmarks of length, company name, etc. As an MBA candidate, your competition will be peers who have worked for a longer time and have had greater professional exposure. To make up for the length, demonstrating the depth and quality of your shorter experience is important both from the initial admissions perspective and the later recruiting angle.

I do like the book experience and think it helps sets you apart. To make it even stronger, I would love to see a link between your past professional achievements at the securities firm and future career plans for the MBA summer internship and post-MBA. Your achievements are impressive by themselves, but to increase their impact, I would recommend putting them in context of how they apply to your MBA ambitions. Also, dwelling on the timing is important - for instance, why securities before, why book now, and how will these together contribute to MBA in the future?

From your email, I am aware that you plan to focus on consulting/entrepreneurship in the future. Business schools like candidates with well-structured career plans since a more prepared candidate is likely to be a more successful one, resulting in higher placement rates to help the school, and a more satisfied alum who promotes the program. In view of this, I would like to see more details around your career goals - what kind of consulting engagements or business ventures do you see yourself participating in, how do these apply in the long- or short-term and as above, how do these relate to your past achievements and present activities.

Working both in the US and Asia as well as fluency in 4 languages shows desirable international exposure, which will help boost your candidacy. As I mentioned above, it will strengthen your application if you can tie these to show how you intend to use them to achieve your MBA ambitions. Your extracurricular activities are good both to show leadership and community involvements, but any that are more recent, i.e. after graduation, would be even better. Recency and length of involvement are two of the most important criteria in judging the quality of your extracurricular activities, preceded by impact of your involvement. Extracurricular involvement is something that can be a concern for many candidates, and we have a proven track record of helping our clients identify appropriate activities and position them to their optimum strength in an application.

In summary, you have fantastic academic credentials, diversified professional experiences and potentially strong extracurricular activities. The challenge will be to tie all of these into a compelling application package that emphasizes your strengths, supplements your post-MBA career goals and mitigates any weaknesses such as fewer extracurricular activities.

As admissions consultants, communication is where we can help. We use our elite business school admissions experience, extensive client exposure, professional backgrounds in, among others, business, creative writing and engineering, to help you develop an application that communicates creative and interesting essays delivered in a logical fashion to best position your unique achievements against the competition.

Let us know if you would like to talk further in our Free Initial Consultation. We offer a number of admission consulting packages tailored to different budgets and application preparation levels and would be happy to help you understand our services. Our unique Candidate Profiling and School Selection report (currently offered at a discount for $75) simulates a mini-application process to develop a detailed profile and offers 100+ schools with your chances of being accepted at each of them.

Get in touch with us at MBAConsult@MyMBAAdmit.com for our new prices! In the meantime, check us out at My MBA Admit.