Admissions Success Stories

Hi all, I've done a few posts here before on my strategy for the GMAT and on my profile. I got a lot of great encouragement and some pretty frank advice. I'll repost the basics here in one place.

My profile is as follows:
25 y/o female, 48 months of work experience at matriculation.
Undergrad International Relations major, 3.39 GPA, Honors with Thesis & Cum Laude. My undergrad is unrated, not what you would call a public Ivy.

I'm an officer in the US Air Force. I've been responsible for managing a 70 person large crew, and helping to establish not only a new 150-person support squadron, but also a brand new flight which increased in size by 50% from the time I left.

I've been a part of the Language Enabled Airman Program for Japanese since the program started shortly before I graduated college. So I've spent 3 hours a week learning Japanese, and occasionally go on language intensive training trips.

I'm active in my squadron's booster club, and I've raised over 4000 dollars to provide for morale events for our men and women in uniform. I am the first woman in my family to go into the military, and also the first officer.

The first time I took the GMAT, I got a 600 (36Q, 35V, 6IR). After studying, I improved my score from that to a 680 (47Q, 36V, 7IR).

I also tried submitting my GRE, which was 154 Q, 162 V.

NOW, all that aside, I can start going back to when I first started looking at grad school 3 years ago. There is a lot of pressure in the military to get your masters degree ASAP, and I knew I wanted to go to a quality program. It was good motivation to look at what my options were, and to consider what I wanted.

So I'd looked at programs a lot-- I actually contacted Kenan-Flagler about their online MBA at one point, but decided against it after I realized an online program was definitely not for me. By the time I'd decided to seriously apply, I'd narrowed down my choices to three: Booth, Haas, and McCombs. Haas was my number one choice out of all of the schools, in part because I loved the campus and had a great experience there, and also in part because I'd grown attached to California after living there for so long.

I applied to both Haas and Booth in round one, with a 600 score. I pushed off applying to McCombs until Round 2 due to time constraints. Though I'd applied to Booth and Haas, I started working on retaking the GMAT to improve my chances while getting ready for a deployment. I didn't manage the retest in time for Chicago Booth, and was dinged pretty early.

By the time I managed the retake, it was December 31st, and I asked to have my Haas application pushed to Round 2. Before I left the states, I submitted my application for McCombs as well.

While I was waiting to hear back from Haas and McCombs, I received a new assignment. If I chose to accept it, I would have had to pull my applications from both schools and take another 2 years in the Air Force. I declined the assignment, knowing that it put me in a position of grad school or bust.

I heard back from Haas, fully expecting a decline... and was surprised to see that I'd been offered a place on their waitlist. I hadn't interviewed, and being in Afghanistan meant that interviewing was going to be more difficult. In fact, once I finished the interview, I was self-criticizing a lot of the answers I'd given. And it didn't help that I came back to an email in my inbox from McCombs stating that they'd like to offer me a place on their waitlist.

However, I didn't give up. Even if I wasn't feeling great about how I'd done, I knew that I could get into either program. Given McCombs wish for candidates to wait until prompted to provide updates, I held off and started building up things I could send when they asked for them. Meanwhile, at Haas, I decided to put a lot of effort into making the personal statement as honest and open as possible while still maintaining some professionalism.

I ended up writing about my goals a little bit more, and then elaborating on why Haas was my number one choice, just based off the visits I'd had to the campus and to the Berkeley area in general. I also signed up for a quant class through Berkeley Extension, and updated my resume. I also got one more recommendation.

It's been extremely stressful, I won't lie. While doing all of this, I started sending my resume out and applying to jobs, just in case the worst case scenario happened.

But it didn't. I got an email from Stephanie Fujii on the 13th asking for a good phone number to contact me at, and I finally paid my deposit yesterday. Though it might not have been the most traditional path, and I definitely had weeks of little to no sleep, the entire experience was worth it, and definitely proves, to me, that you can do anything if you really set your mind to it.

Congrats grazie, impressive story and wish the best on the new adventure.