P'ton Frosh Question on Summer Work Experience

<p>Hi, I'm a freshman at Princeton majoring in ORFE (Operations Research and Financial Engineering), with a finance certificate and also an engineering and management systems certificate likely. I would like to go to Harvard, Stanford or Wharton. Though I hear this is hard to do, I would ideally like to go straight from college to b-school.</p>

<p>How are important will be my GPA? and is it essential to spend all four college summers working on wall street or consulting, or would it also work out to work in sports management or with a tech. start-up or otherwise?</p>

<p>I'm just curious because right now I am looking for summer jobs....</p>

<p>Thanks.</p>

<p>If you want to go straight to an MBA program, especially at HSW, you better have darn close to a 4.0 GPA and a GMAT in the 99th %ile. You need to give the adcoms a reason to admit you, because 95% of the pool will have 3-5 years of work experience, awesome letters of rec, very good GPAs, and great GMAT scores. If I were the adcoms, I wouldn't pick someone straight out of undergrad unless they have a VERY compelling reason. </p>

<p>Why the rush?</p>

<p>Well haven't thought it through too closesly but thanks for the info...
Didn't know it was that competitive directly out of school....
Thanks again...</p>

<p>Another disadvantage of going straight to B-school without work experience is that you might be pricing yourself out of a job. You might not get hired by a lot of places due to lack of work experience, and you might not be able to get a lot of jobs that require less experience because you have an MBA and they won't be willing to pay someone at that job the salary of someone with an MBA.</p>

<p>But it is VERRRRRRRRRRRY competitive to get in to business school directly out of undergrad. A girl I knew from college got in to UCLA straight out of college with a 4.0 GPA in economics and a 760 GMAT.</p>