Profile Evaluation - Indian - Banker

Thank you, Neer1983. I appreciate your follow-up. While I do think there are challenges here (and my apologies if the initial response sounded overly dire or blunt), I would, at the same time, encourage you to not get discouraged! You will need to put more work into school selection, though, and should be realistic about where your chances lie when building your strategy.

IMD's average work experience is 7 years, and getting in with 2x the average is usually a low probability event. Kellogg's 2Y average is 5 years, and 7 years is in the 90th percentile; the 1Y program trends a little older, but 14 years of experience is nevertheless a significant outlier. On the score side, folks applying from very crowded and competitive applicant pools (even with more conventional work experience ranges for full-time programs) are often encouraged to have GMAT scores that can be 30 or 40+ points above a given school's average. (For reference, you'll see schools in the U.S. T10-16 where the middle 80% GMAT range for all students is 670 to 750, and the middle 80% GMAT range for Indian students at the same school is 730 to 780.)

This doesn't mean that you "can't" or even "shouldn't" apply to an IMD or a Kellogg 1Y program if you really like them and want to give a try. It does mean, however, that schools like this should occupy very few slots in your overall strategy and should be viewed as significant reaches. With the core of your strategy, I would encourage you to identify and build around programs where your work experience average aligns and, if they are programs outside of India, where your GMAT score trades at a premium or significant premium to the class average. (The more of an outlier you are on the work experience side, the more of a premium you will want on the GMAT side.) And these obviously aren't the only factors. You will still want to execute extremely well across other elements of your application, as covered here: https://www.avantiprep.com/blog/the-mos ... on-process.

As an example of the above, you might look a little bit further (on the U.S. side) into one-year programs like Pittsburgh (Katz), Southern Methodist University (Cox), University of Florida (Warrington), Babson (Olin), Pepperdine (Graziadio), or others. These are one-year full-time MBAs where you would (very likely) still be a large work experience outlier, but where you might find that your GMAT score is strong enough relative to the program's average to make you competitive (along with strong applications and rationale for "why MBA" at this juncture in your career). The degree to which your GMAT will be advantageous will vary according to the school (e.g., more so at Pittsburgh, less so at SMU). You will also identify other one-year programs that rank between these and the Kelloggs and IMDs of the world (NYU Stern, Cornell Johnson, USC Marshall, Emory Goizueta, Notre Dame Mendoza, etc.), but given your work-experience outlier status, I would view these as reaches, ranging from "significant reach" to "reach" (in roughly the order I've written them).

I also realize the visa challenge with Executive programs if you are looking to study outside of India. There are a couple of mid-career full-time programs out there that you can look up, such as USC's IBEAR program. That program carries an average work experience level of 10 years and an average GMAT of 630, so it could be an interesting one for you to look into: https://www.marshall.usc.edu/programs/m ... ss-profile. (It's a pretty small class, so just because your GMAT is above-average doesn't mean admission... you would still need a very strong and differentiated application across all of its dimensions.) The MIT Sloan Fellows program is another of this ilk (average work experience of 14 years), but note that it is regarded as more elite, so please consider it as such when you build your application strategy: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/mit-sloan-fell ... 20-profile. Finally, I would encourage you to look at European programs where your work experience aligns and GMAT score trades at some premium to the class average; those are a little more obscure than I usually deal with, so the research lift is going to be a little heavier for you there.

Thanks!
Greg