Yale Profile Evaluation - Tools for B-School Profile Evaluation

Your stats are low for Yale, but the last paragraph of your post has lots of fertile ground to plow for essays which could help you overcome your GMAT score. X-factors like teenaged, under-resourced motherhood + rural upbringing + cross-cultural career leadership + underrepresented minority demographic might overcome the lower-than-average scores. There are vanishingly few mothers in top MBA programs. Very few qualified applicants who are mothers apply. It’s been our experience that they have an edge. Schools love them, because in general top MBA programs have lots of dads, but very few mothers. Even fewer mothers were teenaged underprivileged mothers. This could be an amazing story if presented with memorable, compelling anecdotes of the challenges of achieving what you have done in your career while juggling the responsibilities of motherhood and navigating the cross-border cultural complexities of global tech.

One important metric is your age and years of work experience. If you are below 31 (older than this will raise red flags which will not necessarily insurmountable but still real), and you have a solid career trajectory showing upward mobility in terms of titular advancement and comp increases (schools like Yale will ask about historical compensation in the application for this reason), you have a pretty good shot. After age 31 and 7 years of work experience, all things equal, probability of admission decreases.

International students make up an increasing proportion of top-ranked MBA classes (between 30-45%). There are relatively more international applicants than there are international students, so generally speaking, international applicant admission is more competitive. Not all international students face the exact same demographic headwinds, however. Women applying to MBA programs from Latin America ex-Mexico are fewer in number, so your headwinds are not as fierce as those facing Indian, Pakistani, or Chinese men.

Your GMAT stats are low for M7, though not insurmountable if you can signal your academic/intellectual potential in other ways. If you can prove that you can handle the rigors of Yale SOM to “make up” for your lower GMAT score (things like high undergraduate GPA in a quant discipline) or a CFA or CPA or something like that, I think you have a good shot. Yale has a tighter band of accepted GMAT scores than other top schools, likely because it’s a much smaller class so they can’t take as much risk with lower outliers. You might actually have more luck at higher-ranked Wharton with your GMAT score bc although the averages are similar, Wharton has historically had a wider range (look up decile or quartile numbers for the two schools). If you apply to Wharton with a lower GMAT score, you can increase your chances while leveraging your strengths by applying for the Portuguese-track Lauder Program.