Hi and thanks for your question. It does sound like you have an interesting background.

A few thoughts:

- One of the challenges of applying to business school is that rich life experience is great; but, it's more of a frosting on the cake of really good business and management experience. I think you outstanding frosting but am a bit concerned about the cake.

- It sounds like two years of your experience has been in the hospitality business (I'm assuming a hotel or restaurant) and then you have a chunk of time working as an English teacher. These are both great jobs and I'm sure you learned a lot (including about business) but they are not the typical background of an MBA applicant. So...I'm worried that your work experience may not be what a typical admissions committee is looking for.

- Are you sunk? Almost certainly not. But, you're going to have to show some kind of career arc and you're going to have to make the case for why an MBA makes sense for where you're coming from and where you want to go. Doable...but, based on what I hear from you, not easy.

- Your GMAT is good but not great, especially for the MITs, NYUs, and Columbias of this world where the average tends to be a bit higher. USC (I assume you mean Southern Cal) may be a better fit GMAT-wise.

- On the plus side, you have good grades, great athletic experience, and lots of international experience. Those are all good things that are looked upon favorably by business schools.

In a nutshell, I think Columbia, NYU, and MIT may be a bridge too far at this point. But, if you are fixed on those schools, you may want tot take The Big Five:

- Macroeconoimics
- Microeconomics (ideally calculus-based)
- Calculus
- Accounting
- Statistics

If you can cram finance into this, then so much the better.

You should also re-take the GMAT and try and get your score up and at or over 700.

You can also think carefully about other top-twenty schools: UNC, Vanderbilt, etc., are all very very good programs that may not be quite as hard to get into as the programs that you mentioned.

Finally, consider hiring a consultant; I don't always recommend this, but I think you would get a lot of "positioning" bang for your buck which could have a significant marginal impact on the likely success of your application. A good consultant can help you "frame" your application and then you can do all the work of filling it in.

Good luck and let me know if I can offer further thoughts--

Paxton