PrecisionEssay wrote:Harvard!
A good school.


Well, like you said, it's hard without the GMAT. Basically for 2+2, it helps to have been the top in everything. valedictorian, student gov leader, church leader,model UN chief, college newspaper editor, sports hero, etc. besides the GMAT... got any of that?

Thanks for the reply.

I've never had a great deal of "leadership activities". I suppose what I think is my largest achievement in that area is starting a company at 16 that's made me quite a bit of money every year (more than I'd make going out to work with just an undergraduate degree) and has allowed me the freedom every summer to move abroad to work, go to China after I became comfortable with Mandarin, etc. and allowed me a freedom to pursue my interests that I don't think many people, especially during their undergrad, ever get to experience.

To be honest between business, trying to keep a high GPA (especially when I made the mistake of taking courses in Physics), doing the LSATs and now the GMAT, and keeping a social life where I enjoy my undergrad since I'm at a 'party school' has made most ECs seem like nothing more than fillers, perhaps beneficial ones, on my application.

I've gone to a few meetings of different investing/business clubs where they meet once a month to talk about nothing in particular. I'm sure it's much different at Yale or Harvard but being in quite a small city with small clubs (same with all the political ones and student government) like that I don't feel there's much to derive from them other than a point or two on my application.

Perhaps that's a downfall and I should push myself just so I can say I'm president of xyz club or create my own and con a few friends into signing up. But like I said before with being so busy I can't bring myself to do things that are of no benefit to me or anyone else just to make my application a little more interesting.

I'm a member of a few different things, again not really "leadership" because I don't want to dedicate huge amounts of time due to other priorities, like the Clinton foundation, SPCA locally, soup kitchen locally (where I've actually put in a few hundred hours over the years), Habitat for Humanity, have two sponsor children in Bolivia and am also a donor and contributor to a few organizations in the States that advocate civil liberties including the ACLU. My last 'project' was being involved in partially funding and paying a graphic designer I use to create the mock up for billboards to be used to raise awareness surrounding a certain bill that was ultimately brought down.

So there's a bunch of little things like that. Not sure I'd put them all on an application or not. They're all more little hobbies/interests and I much prefer to fund things I think are good causes than to spend my time being the face of certain causes or trying to gain control when other people are much more suitable for the job. Which I'd think would be more congruent with what many MBAs ultimately go into, but maybe not.

So I don't know how strong any of that really is. To me that's more "leadership" than being president of a few clubs or being in student government, at least around here, where you don't do anything. But I've talked to enough admissions folks to know that's usually not the case.