MBA Profile Eval

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MBA Profile Eval

by yashthakar1 » Fri Oct 24, 2014 9:36 am
Hi,
This is for application to MBA programs in fall 2016. I'm trying to understand my weaknesses so that I can plan the year ahead.

I'm an Indian national living and working in NY. Below is a high level overview of my background. I understand that my chances are depended on good execution but at a high level I want to gauge where I stand based on everyone's understanding.

Please note that even though I graduated from an engineering background my experience since graduating from grad school has been in non-technical consulting roles. I was an engineer by accident. While I say this, please note that I have some financial technical knowledge from course work/auditing of classes in graduate school. I have also developed deep capital markets and financial regulatory understanding from my job responsibilities since they have all been focused towards the same industry.

Undergrad: Computer Engineering, University of Pune (54%), Class Highest: 73%)
Grad Program: Master in IS from NYU (Joint program between Math and Stern Business school: GPA 3.56). Course work focused on Finance including corporate finance and capital markets.

Work Experience:

FYI, I went to grad school straight after undergrad.
Starting working with a big 4 firm in the advisory practice focused on high pressured regulatory risk projects. Moved to a competitor firm and promoted to Senior Associate. The group was new and expanded from 5 to 150 people in a year (senior management team moved from my old to new firm and gave me the opportunity to join them in the new venture, hence had lots of responsibility outside of my projects(recruiting campus hires, experience professionals, etc)). Received top performer rating at both places

After 1 year at both firms moved to a role with a Tier 1 bank (Goldman, Morgan, JP) in the Wealth Management group and have been working there since the past summer. (Will have 2 years with the firm by the time I enter business school)

Summary, total experience when I enter business school: 4 years (1+1+2)

Leadership during professional career:
Managed large project teams during my experience with the big 4 (7-18 team members in difference projects across multiple countries (London, Singapore and Hong Kong)). Delivered client presentations to regional and global heads of business. All my work dealt with extreme regulatory fines and clients in extreme trouble, hence requiring 100 hours/week for both years.

I now work within the bank in a fast paced market oriented role. Scope of the projects involves global interaction with various functional and regional teams (most people I work with everyday are based out of NYC, London, India, Singapore and Hong Kong)

References: 1 from 2nd Big 4 firm and 1 from current manager (should be very good references)

GMAT: 670 (q:46, v:37)

I know I bombed the quant but studying again and will retake the test in 2 months. For now want to understand the implications if score doesn't improve

Extra-Curricular:
Working with a children's nonprofit to design their curriculum for about 3 years. The curriculum is focused on helping provide under privileged children with an education so that they may attain sufficient knowledge to effectively succeed academically when they join public schools.
Captain of college basketball team for 2 years and helped organize the first sports festival in the college's history
Cultural and technical events co-lead coordinator
Led the school specific recruitment team to hire undergraduate and graduate students from NYU during my time with the big 4.

Short term career goal:
Leveraging past experience and transitioning to a role in Investment Banking. An MBA will help me gain the technical skills that I don't have. It will also help me cross the Chinese wall within banks (corssing from public side (market trading)to private side (deal making) and also help move from middle office to front client facing role

Long term career goal:
Internal Transaction & Execution group in a fortune 500 firm

Target schools: I have already visited information sessions for some school and reached out/spoken to some alumni. I have an affair understand of the pros and cons of each school. Will be visiting each school over the next year and hope to apply round 1 to the following schools. I'm not looking to stay in a big city (ps: I loved the Georgetown campus). Also, im not sure about my how I would stand at Columbia
"¢ Yale School of Management
"¢ Duke University: Fuqua
"¢ Dartmouth College: Tuck
"¢ University of Michigan: Ross
"¢ Cornell University: Johnson
"¢ Georgetown: McDonough

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by Bryant@VeritasPrep » Wed Oct 29, 2014 5:28 am
You have some great experience and the fact you went to grad school first will help explain why you have relatively less experience in the "real world" for your age, so shouldn't be a big worry there. You have a reasonable spread of schools in your target list, which is good in case you don't end up improving your quant score. The problem will be GMAT, since your application pool is full of folks with similar backgrounds but considerably higher GMAT scores. Schools will generally not take a hit on their GMAT average when they can bring in someone essentially "just like you" with a score that will boost their average. I would focus on that GMAT and if you don't improve it, then be willing to "settle" for schools lower in the rankings (both in and out of your target list). There are plenty of schools who can get you where you want to be professionally. Let us know if we can help you.
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by yashthakar1 » Wed Oct 29, 2014 8:00 am
@Bryant@VeritasPrep: Any recommendations for schools that would be a good fit. I'm looking to come back to the North East, hence eliminated schools like Texas from my list.

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by Bryant@VeritasPrep » Thu Oct 30, 2014 4:38 am
Georgetown, Boston College, and Temple are good choices.
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