Profile Evaluation..

[abhir]

Hi,

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

[Bryant@VeritasPrep]

Your profile should be able to catch the attention of schools in the top tier (top 30) schools. As for which specific schools, you should do some homework on schools from that list and see where the cultural and curricular fit seems to match with your desired learning environment. You can also see which schools seem to host your target consulting employers most often as recruiters. Tech background with Indian citizenship is common in the applicant pool, but being female will be an advantage. I think you could leverage your work history as a positive, particularly the acquisition of your group into another firm. This kind of transition would likely have given you a unique perspective on how mergers are done from the inside out and could parlay into valuable classroom and consulting advantages. Additionally, if you speak about your business startup as a learning experience and perhaps how you discovered you were not as ready as you anticipated, it will come across as humble and mature. Any "failure" can be an asset when presented properly. B-school is perhaps what would have made the difference, so it's a good argument to go back now. As for the XC activities and appearing as if you were just doing it for application purposes, perhaps you can tie it into a long term passion of yours and connect it to something you have done in the past so it appears more continuous.