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scbguy
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 04 Jun 2010, 06:52
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Went to a small liberal arts school in iowa, graduated with a cgpa 2.7/2.8 double major business and political scieneces. Relatively active in extra curriculars, RA, political science club, international club, fraternity, tutor for political science and micro/macro 1. 80 % scholarship and worked three jobs on campus. Pretty much everywhere from the cafteria, alumni office, janitorial staff, library
Have approx four and a half years of cross border banking experience, 2 and a half in retail banking ( consumer risk, product management ( asset product- secured and unsecured ), sales in Pakistan and then moved to Dubai for Corporate Banking- trade finance covering the regional markets of Middle East and North Africa.
Contributed over the years for humanity i.e citizens foundation
Just gave my gmat, got a 580.
Possible preferences are UVA, Georgetown, Columbia, NYU, Cornell, Fuqua, Kellogg
First Choice would be columbia
Any advice, recommendations, suggestions ?
Thanks :-D :)
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shadow
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 07 Jun 2010, 14:33
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i'd probably study some more and try to retake the gmat this summer. a low gmat isn't a dealbreaker, but most of the people i've read about who got in with a low gmat and low GPA were either some important guy's kid or something along those lines.
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scbguy
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 03 Mar 2011, 03:37
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Hi Shadow, Thanks for your reply, can you please advise my course of action. Ive started studying for the GMAT again and ive started with the manhattan strategy guides, ive purchased all the 8 books and plan to go through all of them thoroughly and then close it off with doing all the questions from the OG. BTW, i did the GMAT and didnt get a 580 rather ended up with a 500. So the aim is now to move to 700+
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 03 Mar 2011, 12:08
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Hi scbguy, definitely take in Shadow's advice and try your best to raise your GMAT score. Your undergrad marks are something that you can't change anymore, so the only variable academic-related score on your profile is the GMAT score. As shadow mentioned, a high GMAT score won't get you in, but a low GMAT score will keep you out. A 580 is considered the lower range (most likely below 10 percentile of the admitted students) and unless you have some amazing work experience and stellar GPA, your chances will be fairly slim. If you can get a 700 on GMAT, you will then be in a completely different ballpark from where you are right now.
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 05 Mar 2011, 12:31
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It seems from your work experience that you would like to get into a finance program. While you have good building blocks on work experience side, you should also leverage your leadership activities outside work, especially after your undergrad. One main hurdle for you is going to be your low GMAT which when combined with your GPA might raise red flags about your analytical abilities to handle the rigor of MBA coursework. While you should definitely talk about the fact that you were working while studying to address your low GPA to certain extent, your best bet for GMAT would be to retake it and get ~ 100 points raise. At the end, everything comes down to how well you execute your application because that's what the adcom will read.

Good luck!
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scbguy
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 01:04
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Hi Bizschoolprep, thank you for your reply, and thank you to everyone else for their reply as well.
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scbguy
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 02:48
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What is the impact/weightage of support letters/ recommendations from alumni ?
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 03:27
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I agree with what other posters have stated here. I would highly recommend retaking the GMAT to give you a decent shot at the schools you have mentioned.

Additionally, even though you can't do anything about your undergrad GPA at this point, you could take part time courses at a University to complement your undergrad transcript. The UCLA Extension School offers some good online courses that you could take and aim to get As in them.

As for recommendations from alumni, it is my impression from reading/listening on ad com websites that they don't give much importance to who the recommendation writer is but rather to how well he or she knows the applicant.
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scbguy
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 03:55
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any recommendations for books for the gmat?
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scbguy
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 04:14
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i have the manhattan strategy guides and the OG 12th edition
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 12:29
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The MG guides are pretty good as indicated by most. I personally have used only its sentence correction guide and I've seen my SC improved dramatically. By looking at your breakdown (quant and verbal score separately), you'll be able to see what your weak spots are. Also, I'd recommend take one Gmatprep exam (there are 2 free ones on mba.com that you can download and install on your computer) and go back and see exactly which ones you've gotten wrong. This way, it won't be a wild goose chase and you won't have to tackle everything all at once. If you noticed that critical reasoning is your most troublesome area, you can focus a lot more heavily in that section than, say, your quant section.
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 12:52
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Hi bakfed, thanks for the advise. Just a quick question, did the answers from the OG make sense to you all the time i.e. did the explanation come naturally/flow naturally when you read the answers in case yours were originally wrong. In my case the answers in the explanation dont necessarily make sense.
I am doing all the eight books because i feel im weak in everything hence a 510 score.
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 06 Mar 2011, 13:10
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Honestly, some of the OG answers did not make sense to me. One thing I knew for sure was that I am not a genius. There's absolutely no way that I have the time, energy, resources, and willfulness to understand EVERYTHING that's covered on the GMAT. Knowing that, I purposely skipped certain aspect of the questions, in the wishful thinking that it won't appear on my actual test. What I mean by what I said was that I tend to ignore/skip the explanations for hard combination/permutation questions, because I knew that I don't have the energy to try to understand it. The more simple material I understood perfectly fine. At your current score, yes, you'll want to try to understand everything because chances are, the material at 510 will not be the permutation/combination level. If you wish to improve your score pass 600, you'll want to understand all of the 500-level questions. One thing that this forum is so helful is that when you don't understand something on the OG, you can always post here and ask for help. Furthermore, you can come on this site to tackle the questions posted by other users.
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 13 Mar 2011, 00:33
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Hi Bakfed, thanks soo much for your answer. Any chance i can get some 500/600 level questions to see how well i fare on them ?
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Please evaluate my profile- and suggest B-School options 13 Mar 2011, 13:30
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scbguy
Hi Bakfed, thanks soo much for your answer. Any chance i can get some 500/600 level questions to see how well i fare on them ?
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Hmm...I don't have any questions with me on hand, but I do suggest you to check out the forum where people post GMAT questions. You should be able to see some 500-600 level questions there. Forgive me ignorance, but I haven't read back up to what you and I talked about, but if you haven't, definitely get yourself an Official Guide, which consists of authentic GMAT questions posted by the GMAC itself. The guide is great in the sense that the questions (for all different sections) go in difficulty level, ending with about 650-700 level at you reach the end.