Profile Evaluation Request

Hi uhhgmat,

Thank you for your post. Here are my thoughts:

WORK EXPERIENCE AND EXTRACURRICULARS

I know you don't get to share a ton of information in these profile requests, but on its face, it seems there is some good value to unpack within your professional experience and extracurricular activities. It would require a deeper conversation and a lot of probing and brainstorming, but I like where you could potentially go with some of the interdisciplinary work you've done; the problem solving, communication, leadership, and idea-to-execution transformation that often goes along with that; and the quantifiable business impacts that you've had, among other things. On the extracurricular side, I like the genuineness and depth of your mentorship activities; and again there, there is likely a lot to unpack in terms of what you've learned, how you've grown, how you've had to empathize and build relationships with people, and so on and so forth.

GPA, GMAT, SCHOOLS

Your GPA is great (at a great school and in a tough major... and at a school that I've always understood to be pretty strict with its engineering grade curves... so as an aside, I'd look for opportunities to articulate your ranking or percentile position within your engineering class, which might even evoke a "higher standing" than the already great 3.86 GPA does). That said, given the schools that are currently on your radar and some of the tough engineering pool considerations that go along with it, I really do think you'd benefit from boosting your GMAT score. That will also give you an opportunity to clean up the IR/AWA situation; even though those aren't a hyper focus of adcoms, IR is generally eye-balled more than AWA, and optically, it does make your 720 feel like something of a "720 minus" (if that makes sense).

I know that many of these schools boast average GMATs right around 730, and you're not far off of that mark, but at present, I think the M7 and Haas would be really tough. There are unfortunately just too many engineers out there with great GPAs, better GMATs, and in some cases more prestige business chops coming in. Even if you were to boost you score, I'd encourage you to consider gap-filling your school strategy "between" the M7 / Haas and UCLA / McCombs, as I think you could benefit from a more evenly balanced strategy. (That kind of depends on how exactly you regard UCLA, which is a great program that I'd imagine you're even more partial to, but even then, I think you might consider adding another program or two from the 9/10/11 to 15/16 tranche of the rankings, depending on how many programs you ultimately apply to.)

IR EXPLANATION

I would be careful about the direction your IR explanation is going. It feels overly detailed and I worry about pointing to "physical and mental fatigue" and long work-weeks, which essentially every applicant deals with, the schools will expect you to deal with as a student, and which begins to feel pretty excuse-ish. The panacea to this would again be a retake and improved score, which I know is a pain when you want to put the GMAT behind you. But I really do believe that overall GMAT score improvement would be very valuable for you. Beyond that, we could discuss whether it makes sense to include a brief acknowledgement of the IR result, but if so, it would need to be very carefully worded, have a good hint of self-awareness baked in, and a point in a non-braggadocios way to other ways you've demonstrated similar problem-solving, critical thinking, and quick reasoning ability, rather than try to explain away why your IR score is low. (If you go to bat with this score, you might also consider encouraging recommender(s) to help buttress this area... not as the lone focus of their recommendation(s), of course, but as one theme among a handful.)

APPLICATION EXECUTION

Not enough bandwidth to go into career goals, why MBA, why XYZ school, school fit, what you can uniquely contribute, your passion and purpose, etc. within this already long post, but those "application execution" and "story / fit / authenticity" elements will be critical as well. You can read more about them in this blog post: https://www.avantiprep.com/blog/the-mos ... on-process

FREE CONSULTATION

If you have any questions or would like to further the conversation, please feel free to sign up for a Free Consultation. We can cover a lot more via an iterative, back-and-forth conversation, rather than a static one. Hope this helps!

Best Regards,
Greg