Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

Dear all,

I'm planning to apply to business school this fall, and with but atypical background but very definite post-MBA goals I would like to ask for the community's advice.

I'm from Eastern Europe, I have a law undergrad, I worked in the government and a non-government public service institution since my graduation (mostly legal work, but also a lot of exposure to international work with the EU).

I also have a "second", parallel career path that started out as a hobby during my high school years and has since turned quite serious. I'm into sports journalism and publishing, I worked for websites, magazines, and then ran my own website and a magazine together with some other guys, and we recently ventured into tablet publishing as well (I also did related work on radio shows, TV broadcast commentating etc.).

What I would like to do is to sort of mold these 2 paths into one by going for an MBA, and afterwards I want to end up in government consulting, more specifically back in Europe, since most of my government experience relates to the European Union.

With that in mind, I'd like to ask you for some suggestions, most importantly US schools. Why US schools when I want to work with the EU? I just want to get out of my comfort zone and get a different perspective on management etc.

Yes, I do have a list of schools I'm interested in but I wouldn't like to bias any recommendations so I'd prefer not to tell them.

My GPA is rather average but I think I can explain it very well (the parallel career path I mentioned ate up a lot of my time and I only learned to balance it properly after I started working full-time upon graduating), and I also didn't take the GMAT yet, but please suggest schools from the full range.

Although I didn't get "promoted" in the traditional sense in my 3 years of WE, as our public service is quite strongly based on seniority, but I recently switched jobs which can be considered a promotion since I moved to a more “prestigious” institution, and I'll have good recommendations from my bosses at both the earlier and the new workplace as well.

I hope I gave you all the info necessary, if not, please do not hesitate to ask.

And thanks a lot for your help in advance!

GPT