Profile Evaluation for Columbia EMBA
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17 Jan 2019, 21:04
Background
Work experience:
Started a mobile gaming company (Y-Combinator backed) during last semester of college (Dec 2011) with some high school friends. Managed design and development of 2 top grossing titles as CTO. Sold to a Chinese gaming publisher 4 years later with around 15 employees for $3M.
Then, with same founding team, started an e-commerce business primarily focused on makeup (also YC-backed, as well as Index Ventures, Goldman Sachs). Performed more of jack of all trades duties: developing software, logistics management, setting up photo shoots. I left after about 8 months as it was much more of an operations play than a technology play, and was no longer geared towards my strengths. The company has gone on to raise a series B, 30M at 160M valuation, although I claim no part in their success.
Moved on to a mid stage fintech startup focusing on consumer lending. Primarily did standard software eng work, most notably leading a team of 3 engineers to onboard the company's biggest enterprise merchant. Left after a year and a half because I wanted to move out of the Bay Area.
Joined a NY tech-based quant hedge fund as a quantitative software engineer mid last year. The work primarily consists of doing equity research and analysis using terabyte-sized datasets, which requires good knowledge of parallel computing frameworks. I am partnered with a few data scientists and take care of any engineering requirements. To date, there is little leadership in my current role, but plenty of opportunity to have a team built around me if I execute correctly. I am also going to be leading a project starting next month so this could pan out pretty quickly. I am one level below VP title, although in finance that doesn't necessarily mean much.
Undergrad school/major: UC Berkeley, Electrical Eng and Comp Sci (graduated in 3 years, 2012)
Race/nationality: Indian American
Sex: Male
Stats
GMAT Score: Not taken. Planning to take EA within the next month.
Undergrad GPA: 3.65
MBA Info
Goal of MBA: To take on increasingly influential leadership roles within the engineering and modeling department of my organization.
Target schools: Columbia EMBA, NYU part-time MBA
Do I have a chance of getting I Columbia EMBA program? And if so, will I be at a significantly lower level than other candidates, i.e. are most of the students managing large teams? Columbia's EMBA program seems to skew slightly younger than other business schools since they don't have a part-time option. I just barely hit the 7 year work experience mark, although my previous entrepreneurial work may play to my favor here. I am not interested in doing a full time MBA since I like my current job and don't plan to leave the tech industry.
While I don't have a super concrete idea of my long term goals, I suspect I will start a tech company in the finance space if/when I get bored at my current company (already have a couple ideas for software products targeted at hedge fund clients).
Any advice would be helpful!