Profile Evaluation

[abhir]

Hi Stacy,

I have taken the GMAT and scored 700 (49Q,35V). I want to know which all colleges can I apply to. I want to get into top 30-40 colleges. I just want to know where all do I have my chances. I am open to both the options of MBA in strategy consulting and general management.

Profile: 24 years female, Indian. Will be 25 years by the time I join b-school.

Background:I have done computer engineering with 70%. I was working as a software engineer with a healthcare giant for 14 months and then with an IT giant for 7 months as the project was moved to the IT company (In all I have 21 month of work experience. The company change was not voluntary but because my department was moved to the IT company). My work involved application development for the Latin American countries and many from the Asia Pacific. I had to interact with the users from these countries on day to day basis. As i was interested in starting my own company I left the job. But because of some problems I might have to shut it down and go back to a job in an IT company again.I want to know will all of this affect my profile? In 3 years of time (by the time I start my MBA) it will be almost 4 job transitions. The work ex by the time I start MBA will be around 2 years 9 months.

What i frankly think of my profile is that things are not as organized as I have seen in other people's profiles. I want to know which colleges will be open to consider my profile. I want to get an MBA to move on to the consulting side and work at a tier 1 firm post MBA.

Extracurriculars: Have volunteered for events in college. Volunteered for CSR at my office. Have participated in dance both at office and college. I am also a sponsor of a child in a charity organisation.(This I have started recently as I didnt know about this before.I dnt want this to sound as a desperate attempt to show NGO work. I might remove this from the real apps. Although I need your advice on this.)

I am planning to apply this year for the R1.
Please suggest me 8-10 colleges.

Thanks for all the help,
Abhivarna

[mbaMissionJenK]

Hi Abhivarna,

Thanks for posting... not sure if you meant to post elsewhere since you addressed 'Stacy' , but that's ok, we'll give it a shot anyway!

You come from a common applicant pool, computer engineering background from India. Being female helps to a certain degree, and your GMAT is respectable. You are correct that 4 job transitions in less than 3 years of experience will be questioned and a potential weakness. Certainly the experience working on your own start-up is also a learning experience though, and depending on how you tell the story, you can help somewhat off-set that concern by focusing on what you learned and gained from it. So you have positives and negatives to your application... it might be stronger if you worked another solid consistent year and then applied. At this point, I'd focus on schools outside the top 20 (as per US News & World Report best business schools ranking). But as for specific schools, it depends on what YOU are looking for, and there are a number of factors to research, including geographic region, academics, class size, class profiles, hiring profiles, projects/specializations, etc. I encourage you to keep researching various programs to get a better feel for what is the best fit for you!

Good luck on the process!