Hi there!

I'm was hoping you would be willing to check out my background and let me know how you think I will stack up against my competition. I'm slightly concerned about my degree from an unranked undergrad business school (U of Kansas) and having a lower GPA. I initially started college as a computer science major because my parents pushed me into it when I wasn't really interested. My grades suffered because of that and I was sitting at about a 2.5 GPA for my first year and a half or so until I switched majors. After switching to the business school, I did a double major in Business & Accounting with an emphasis in Information Systems. My grades rebounded the last few years and my professional GPA was about a 3.55, but my overall GPA only came up to about 3.29.

I feel I have pretty good work experience...... I worked for a very selective management training program for General Electric for a little over a year and have been working for KPMG in the IT Advisory practice for close to 4 yrs (total work experience 5 yrs). I also owned my own lawn/landscaping business in high school that I later sold when I moved on to college. Most of my interviews for full time jobs were impressed with my entrepreneurial skills at a young age so I thoght that might help on my essays since that may be my emphasis of study in B-School.

My top schools I'm looking at are U Chicago, Northwestern, Michigan, Virginia, London Business School and Cambridge (UK). Can you give me an idea of what you think about my work experience and if you think that it is sufficient enough to outweigh my poor grades in undergrad. Do you know if they are focused on overall GPA or professional GPA when applying and should I try to emphasize my story and why my overall is lower? How well do you think I need to score on the GMAT to stand a chance at any of my top schools?

Thanks so much for your help.......I really appreciate it!!!!!

Your GPA is fine -- it's not law or med school.

Even at top b-schools, the classes are full of a lot of "B" average students, whereas law and med schools are usually full of "A" average students.

B-schools look for GPAs that are "good enough" and beyond that, having an exceptional GPA isn't really going to help since the process looks at a broader range of factors (quality of work experience, extracurriculars, leadership potential, career focus, etc.) beyond academics.

And in your case, the GPA is fine -- general rule of thumb is that if it's below 3.2, it's a concern, and below 3.0, a big concern. But your overall cumulative GPA is fine.

Just focus on the applications, do your best, and you should be competitive for the schools you mentioned (in your case Chicago and Kellogg are "reaches"; Michigan/Darden/LBS are "sweet spots", and Cambridge is a "safety" -- you've chosen a good range of schools so you should get into at least one of them if you do well on the applications coupled with a bit of luck on your side).

Alex Chu
alex@mbaapply.com
www.mbaapply.com
http://mbaapply.blogspot.com