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Laura Woman
- Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Dec 18, 2008 4:26 pm
I'm a 40 yr-old woman finishing a B.S.B.A. in accounting. My dream now is to get my Ph.D. in accounting.
My current GPA is 3.8 I will graduate with an honors diploma that includes 2 extensive research projects that my faculty mentors tell me are master's level quality. I have meaningful and relevant work experience from a co-op position I held that I believe with strengthen my application. My international competency is very high--I speak Spanish and German and have over 10 years' experience living and working in other cultures. I'm a student member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and have a very clean vision of the ways in which I want to do research and teach in order to contribute in the fight against the fraudulent accounting practices that harm so many innocent people.
I did the GMATPrep practice test today, though, and the news was awful: a 520. I'm pretty confident this goes back to 3 core things:
1) what little math I learned when I was younger was not very advanced. I did get A's in the math sequence required for my degree, but the last class was over 2 years ago. I never had geometry at all and although I've been giving myself a crash course, that can only make up for so much. Never really been required to learn number theory by heart either.
2) the curriculum for my business degree did not require any formal study in logic. This means that it hurts me across all sections of the test but especially in the data sufficiency portion.
3) None of my faculty mentors nor my adviser told me I should spend months preparing for this test. Everybody patted me on the back, smiled, and just said I'd do fine. As a result, I did not start studying until 2 weeks before my test date.
With a solid GPA and true academic research experience in the accounting field under my belt my professors all insist that I'm a strong candidate for even elite, highly competitive programs, especially in a time when the supply of doctoral accounting students is so low and domestic students are underrepresented. But no matter how stellar the rest of my application looks, there are limits, I know.
Does anyone have any thoughts on my situation? Do schools have an absolute minimum cut-off on the GMAT score when it comes to admission into PhD programs for accounting? Is it possible that a school that is very interested in me and sees me as a perfect fit might extend a conditional offer of acceptance based on some agreed-upon coursework and/or a second GMAT attempt in 6 months or so?
Thank you for any suggestions or insight you can provide.
--Laura M.
Huntsville, AL
My current GPA is 3.8 I will graduate with an honors diploma that includes 2 extensive research projects that my faculty mentors tell me are master's level quality. I have meaningful and relevant work experience from a co-op position I held that I believe with strengthen my application. My international competency is very high--I speak Spanish and German and have over 10 years' experience living and working in other cultures. I'm a student member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) and have a very clean vision of the ways in which I want to do research and teach in order to contribute in the fight against the fraudulent accounting practices that harm so many innocent people.
I did the GMATPrep practice test today, though, and the news was awful: a 520. I'm pretty confident this goes back to 3 core things:
1) what little math I learned when I was younger was not very advanced. I did get A's in the math sequence required for my degree, but the last class was over 2 years ago. I never had geometry at all and although I've been giving myself a crash course, that can only make up for so much. Never really been required to learn number theory by heart either.
2) the curriculum for my business degree did not require any formal study in logic. This means that it hurts me across all sections of the test but especially in the data sufficiency portion.
3) None of my faculty mentors nor my adviser told me I should spend months preparing for this test. Everybody patted me on the back, smiled, and just said I'd do fine. As a result, I did not start studying until 2 weeks before my test date.
With a solid GPA and true academic research experience in the accounting field under my belt my professors all insist that I'm a strong candidate for even elite, highly competitive programs, especially in a time when the supply of doctoral accounting students is so low and domestic students are underrepresented. But no matter how stellar the rest of my application looks, there are limits, I know.
Does anyone have any thoughts on my situation? Do schools have an absolute minimum cut-off on the GMAT score when it comes to admission into PhD programs for accounting? Is it possible that a school that is very interested in me and sees me as a perfect fit might extend a conditional offer of acceptance based on some agreed-upon coursework and/or a second GMAT attempt in 6 months or so?
Thank you for any suggestions or insight you can provide.
--Laura M.
Huntsville, AL
