jpatcourtney wrote:
Hi,
I am not sure how to judge my profile. I scored well on the GMAT, but I will have only three years of work experience at matriculation. My goal is to attend a high profile program, and my question for you is just how high profile can I get. Below is a summary of my application and a list of schools roughly ordered by rank. If you can, I would like to know where in the range of schools my application falls (if in the range at all).
GMAT: 760 with 49Q (85%) and 46V (99%)
GPA: 3.28 from Boston College, Majored in History with concentration on Neocolonialism in Latin America (so History with a fair amount of econ and international business thrown in).
Work Experience: Went to Portland, OR after college expecting to be mentored by and work for a independent hotel developer. Unfortunately because of the market I ended up just working at a hotel. I did oversee a department with 20 reports and run the hotel without supervision every night from 3-11pm (so some leadership experience to salvage from that).
I left that job and bounced around for a few months before getting a job in the finance dept with a very large but also very local commercial real estate company. I then moved to a third commercial real estate company and am currently doing new media marketing for them.
Extra C: I am very active, but mostly in independent type activities. I am a distance runner, I throw pottery, I freedive and spearfish, and do long distance kayak expeditions and deep sea kayak fishing. I don't think I'm uninteresting, but I don't have much to show in the way of club/organization leadership.
Why Business school: I come from a family of entrepreneurs in Latin America (my mother is Nicaraguan, but of Irish decent), and I would like to get back to my passion, which is thinking about the inequalities of that region. I am a career switcher who wants to study social enterprise and entrepreneurship so that I can be equipped to make large scale impacts raising up certain populations in Latin America.
So where do you think I might fall in the list below, and where would I fall if I were to wait and spend the next year working for a well know non-profit or social enterprise? Starting my own small social enterprise?
NYU
UCLA
UNC
Texas
USC
Georgetown
Boston U
Wake Forest
U Washington (Foster)
George Washington (DC)
Fordham
Thanks for any insight you can shed.
Best,
John
You sound like a great guy and I think your Nicaraguan background will help differentiate you. However, I would like to see more leadership and impact in your profile. Leading a 20-person staff of a hotel to just make sure the hotel operates through your shift is not as powerful as if you had led the hotel through a change in operations that resulted in an improvement in ranking or occupancy rates etc. Your social entrepreneurship goals are also difficult to claim without some connection to that field (which, from the lack of mention, it appears you don't yet have). If you can clarify your goals, prove your connection and commitment to them, and bring evidence of leadership, then you can certainly stand a chance at the programs you mentioned, but without these (as the profile for now suggests), I would have to lower those expectations to possibly include the bottom 7 of the program list you provided.
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08 Jan 2012, 21:28
