Hi Aringo!
I'm applying to bschools (harvard, LBS, stanford, stern, wharton) in R3 and expect to get a 710 gmat score. I'd be so delighted to get your opinion on my profile below:
> 24 yr old (black) Liberian-American (Liberian by heritage, American by birth)
> GMAT (expected): 710
> GPA: 3.2 (I was the first student from my school to solidify an exchange program between Euromed Management business school in Marseille, France...to say the least, my grades suffered during this semester and I didn't quite recover. I'm hoping my work experience and my startup ngo can overshadow this...)
> SCHOOL: Howard University Business School in DC . Note: I applied for the honors program in the 2nd semester of my freshman year and got in. I was an active member for three years and served as the team leader for Citi Group, essentially acting as a liaison between the firm and my honors program. I also lead and won many case studies that were sponsored by our honors program sponsors (i.e. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America etc). However, since my GPA didn't survive study abroad, I did not graduate with my honors program in our senior year. Nonetheless, I did participate in the program up until graduation.
> MAJOR: International Business concentration in Marketing
> OTHER EDUCATION: I also participated in the Harvard Business School Summer Venture in Management program as a rising junior; Post graduation I did a certificate program in Project Management at Georgetown University as part of their continuing education college. Also study abroad at Euromed Management
> UNDERGRAD ACHIEVEMENTS: As part of the 21 CAP program at my business school, for 1 year (my sophomore year), I lead a team of 28 freshman students in a business plan competition sponsored by Ford. I lead my team to a first place victory, beating 22 other teams in the same program; As a mentioned earlier, amongst hundreds of other applicants I was chosen to represent my school as an exchange school at Euromed Marseille; etc.
>> WORK EXPERIENCE: During my junior year, my mother and I launched an ngo dedicated to the maternal/infant mortality cause in Liberia, West Africa. For the past four years, I've served in the capacity at Executive/Projects Director and have raised over 100,000 and impacted more than 2,500 women and children in rural Liberia. As I am currently living in Liberia, by night and on the weekends, I wear my ED hat!
Post graduation, I was looking for a truly international opportunity so I sought out an opportunity with the National Port Authority of Liberia (NPA), convincing the Managing Director that the NPA needed to better marketed in order to attract the large scale financing partners and concessionaires the country is/was looking for. I picked up my things and moved to Liberia and have been working as a full-time Marketing Strategy consultant to the NPA for the past 16 months.
>> HIGHLIGHTS FROM MY WORK: ...Forgot to add highlights of my work: I launched the country's first trans-coastal company since the war in 1989 (it is currently the only vessel that can bring goods from the capital Monrovia to the other outports); I have produced two (working on a 3rd) highly marketing-oriented annual reports for our concessionaires and investors, transforming our reports from word documents to having an international appeal in content, look and feel; I have worked on a number of re-branding initiatives from the re-launching of our website to writing speeches for the MD to communicate the authority's new image and strategy; I also conduct the market research on interested investors so that the MD and the exec team are properly prepped during courtesy visits and can articulate what the best partnerships between the investor (or country representative) and the NPA would be (i.e. UK Minister for Africa visits the port....what should we come out of the meeting with?)
> CAREER GOALS: After working in both the ngo and government (albeit, NPA is an autonomous agency of the govt) space, I feel strongly that what Liberians/Africans need is less aid and more economic opportunities. I've seen first hand that aid can, in fact, be extremely deprecating and demoralizing overtime and can create a first-rate handout culture. While African leaders are discovering their moral conscience, I want to help provide jobs for people in Liberians and Africans so that they depend less on the government and more on their own skills and capacity. Just like the United States and Western Europe, continental Africa is coming upon its own industrial age where manufacturing will be the single most important turning point for many African economies. Liberia in particular, in partnership with the World Bank and Norway (amongst other donor countries, has undertaken a project to lower the barriers to electricity through the renovation of the country's largest power plant. Once that barrier is lowered, I want to open Liberia's largest textile manufacturing company. I want to use my MBA to transition from general marketing to textile production with a focus in supply chain management as, in my capacity at the port authority, I have observed that efficient supply chains is the difference between large companies in Africa and barely scaled SMEs.
> RECOMMENDATIONS: 1) a Nobel Peace Prize winner that has been a great friend and mentor to me for the past 4 years (she has seen my work with the nonprofit and was a guest speaker at our first fundraiser); 2) my managing director
>> OTHER: Forgot to also mention that i started the ngo with my mom, whom immigrated to the US during the 14 year civil war that took place in Liberia. She was a single and pregnant with no family when she landed in the New York City (where I was born!). My mom struggled to get her degree with two kids...and strangely enough I graduated from the same university as she did 11 years later
. I'm super proud of her and how hard she pushed my siblings and I to do well!!!
