Please evaluate my profile for MBA/MS

Graduate School Business School - MBA
1

<p>Hi Everyone,</p>

<p>Let me start off by giving you my stats:</p>

<p>23, Female, US Citizen
Undergrad - Tier 1 Research University in USA
BBA, Finance and BS, Psychology (graduating with both in August 2013)
GPA Cum: 3.04, Finance GPA: 3.67 and Psychology GPA: 3.83
Both degrees are Magna Cum Laude*** (my university only counts last 2 years for this honours calculation)
About 2 years of intern/part time work in the financial field
GMAT: expecting to get at least 700</p>

<p>***For those of you who aren't familiar with the latin honours system, Magna Cum Laude is for a degree with great honour.</p>

<p>NOTE: I had a 3.6gpa in my first year. My cum. GPA is low because during my second year I was struggling very hard to decide what I wanted to do in my career. I started off as a finance major, however, back in 2009 when the market was doing horrible, I was advised that it will not be a wise decision in the end. So, I made the horrible choice of deciding to study something else... my grade kept dropping for a solid 1.5 years because I had literally zero motivation to go to class and take the exams (I simply did neither). I have two or three Fs and a couple of Ds, because of this reason. After changing my major 7 (Yes, SEVEN) times, I soon came to realize that I will only excel in a subject that I am truly interested in learning. So during my fourth year, I changed my degree to BS in psychology and during my fifth year, I added BBA in finance to that. I could only do it in this order because the business school's entry requirements made me wait until i get my gpa to at least a 3.0. Otherwise they wouldnt admit me into the program.
While I realized that I would be going into an additional year and risking admission on the premise that I would get a 3.0, I figured it is worth it simply because I wanted to get the degree in what I absolutely wanted to do, plus I wanted to finish what I started. I was a much happier person after I got back on track and actually enjoyed the learning experience much more. That's why my gpa got back up. During the past Spring (official last full-semester) I managed to get a 3.75 in 24credit hours (8classes = 6 were from 4000-level fina and 2 were from 4000-level adv business) while working 30hours in a professional financial setting. </p>

<p>My gpa trend is strong in the last two years, hence the Magna Cum Laude. I am hoping that this would play to my advantage, over the low cum.GPA.</p>

<p>These are the universities I am hoping to apply to:</p>

<p>USA:
Stanford, Booth, NYU, UCLA, Cornell, Duke, Columbia, Rice and UT (UT is my safe school)</p>

<p>UK (let me just say that it is my dream to go to UK to do my MS in fina-related/MBA, but the main focus is to go to a top school):
Imperial, Warwick, LBS, Manchester and Oxford</p>

<p>Thoughts on my chances of acceptance?</p>

<p>I would greatly appreciate any serious feed back!
Thank you again for taking the time to read the long post!</p>

2

<p>Let me just add Cass to that list from UK.</p>

3

<p>This flagged for me b/c of the Oxford part, and I wouldn’t be too optimistic on your chances there, just because their average age is 29, and with more substantial work experience than you seem to have (could be wrong- just working from what’s here).</p>

<p>Fwiw (which isn’t much) I know somebody who just finished up at Manchester and loved it, but be aware that if you are going to be working in the US most of the UK schools that you are looking at don’t have much of a name in the US. </p>

<p>Also, imho, an MSc (whether from the UK or the US) might be more useful than an MBA- there are a lot of MBAs out there right now.</p>

<p>I don’t have much insight on this- a long time since I did my MBA- and I am still amazed that a 3.0 GPA gets you Magna (!) but I suspect that you would want to have something more to your story to get into the top US schools.</p>

4

<p>Thank you for the reply!</p>

<p>I actually plan on working in UK, if I get a job there.
And as for the Magna Cum Laude… No, that GPA is not 3.0… I believe it’s close to a 3.7 in the last 2 years. :slight_smile: My university only counts the last two years for the latin honours.</p>

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<p>If by UT, you mean Univ. of Texas, their MBA program requires 2 years of post-grad full time work experience, they say Highly recommended but looking at Student profiles, none had less than 2. The average GMAT for that program is just under 700 as well. I haven’t looked into their MS programs though.</p>