I am graduating this fall from a fairly low ranked private university in New England (I was not a good student in high school) with ~3.85GPA. I also have recently taken Calc I/II at a local community college (not for credit) and received an A in both. I worked full time throughout school to pay my way through. I started as a technician at a retail tech company, then a business analyst intern at a non-profit, a sales and marketing intern at a startup, and now an analyst intern at a major banking company. I’m not super familiar with the admission criteria for top schools besides what’s on there website (which seems to match up decently for me). Does this make me a competitive candidate for an MBA program at MIT/Harvard/Dartmouth?
I haven’t taken the GREs yet, and plan on taking them in December. I scored 2120 on the SATs in high school though which I’m told is a decent predictor of GRE/GMAT scores.
Without knowing your GMAT scores/GRE, there’s no way to know if you should be looking at top schools. I’d recommend you take a full length, timed, sample GMAT or GRE and see how you score cold, without prep. Use that as your baseline.
All decent MBA programs, and especially the top MBA programs, strongly recommend that you work full time 2-3 years before you apply. Ideal jobs would be consulting, business analyst, product management, programmer/CS, investment banking, but I’ve seen people from all types of jobs get into the top programs. They normally do keep a few open spots for people right out of undergrad, but the competition there is normally even more intense than for there “experienced” spots, so be aware of that.
If you can score 700+ on the GMAT, then you can consider a top 20 to 25 school.
^ You’ll need 2-4 years (usually 3-4) of FT experience in a well respected position and hopefully well known organization. Plus you’ll need a 700 GMAT, hopefully higher being your school is not highly ranked.
What you need is a few years of full time work experience that dazzles the adcoms.
Ideally you want to be working with some high powered MBAs or entrepreneurs making tons of money. You could also be the son of someone who has tons of money and is very influential. Your academic qualifications seem fine.