Questions on MBA admissions from an aspirant with little work experience

Hello all. I hope you’re all enjoying your weekend and are ready to start another work-week. As for me, I’m finally getting over the effects of jetlag from my trip to India and have checked the Inbox for this blog…whew, I have received quite a few emails in the past week or two. It seems that the interview I completed for ManagementConsulted.com (shout out to Kevin G.) brought some new folks my way, so I guess there are a few more people for me to help out. As always, I will get to all of the emails I receive, but it may take me a while so I ask people to be patient.

The message below is from an MBA aspirant who wants to apply to business school later this year but doesn’t have much work experience. He’s wondering whether his lack of work experience will totally rule him out for acceptance. Also, he wanted to know the range of GMAT scores that he’d need given his low amount of experience. As I’ve said before, it’s tough to respond to these emails because I’ve never worked in an admissions office, which is why I state this fact several times in my response to him. Hopefully, he finds my words helpful in some way.

——–
VM wrote:

“Hi Marquis,
Greetings. My name is ‘VM’ and I have a few questions regarding the MBA program. I am currently working as an intern in IBM and this actually is my first job. Getting an MBA from a good university has always been my dream and I really am confused as to the direction in which I need to proceed.Is there any thing that if you donot have much working experience, you are out of the game ? I want to write GMAT by 2009 november and then apply but I am not sure if my chances are good enough to get into one of the top 20 business schools.Also, pl let me know about the range of GMAT score that I need to get to atleast have a good chance of getting into a good school given that I donot have much of industrial experience under my belt. Pl provide me some guidance as to how to proceed. I really really appreciate your help sir.

Thanks,
VM”

——–
My reponse:

VM,

Thanks for checking out my blog and bringing your questions to me. It seems like you’re very focused on getting a top MBA and I appreciate your early thinking about the process. I’ve seen many examples of people who didn’t put in the requisite thinking before applying and it’s always tough to see them struggle as a result. Hopefully, my words below will be able to help you in some way.

It appears that you’d like to have my perspective on the following two topics:

– Does not having much work experience ruin your chances of getting into a good B-school? –> Being light on work experience definitely doesn’t ruin your chances of gaining admission to a top B-school. There were ~10 kids in my class at Stanford who came in straight from undergrad and several others who matriculated after only 1-2 years of work experiences. Please understand that having little work experience does make it harder for you to lay out the case for why you should be admitted. To make up for this short-coming, you’ll want to make sure you have spikes in the other portions of your application and present yourself as a strong candidate. I’ve written a few blog entries about this in the past, so I recommend that you look through my blog archives to find more of my perspectives on this issue.

– Range of GMAT score to do well without much work experience –> This is a great question and I’m a little wary of answering it because I’ve never worked in an admissions office and don’t want you to think my answer is THE answer. Instead of trying to give you THE answer, I’ll just tell you what I’d be gunning for if I were applying with no work experience. If I were in your shoes, I’d be gunning for a 700 GMAT or higher to improve my chances of gaining admission to a strong B-school…if not 700, I’d want something as close to there as possible (650+). Of course, everyone tries to get a 700+ score, right? The difference here is that I’d want to maximize my GMAT because the work experience component of my application would be a weak point. As you may have heard, the B-school application is a package consisting of grades, GMAT, work experience, essays, activities, and recommendations. My approach to the process was to present a strong total package on average, so, if one part of the package was weak, I’d want to be as strong as possible in another part to bring up the overall average. PLEASE NOTE that you should not let a sub-700 GMAT score deter you from applying to school if you feel that you have a strong overall application package!!! Remember, I just laid out what I’d do in this situation. You should talk to some other MBAs to find out what they’d say in response to the same question. Again, don’t take my response as THE answer here…it’s in your best interest to get as many data points as possible.

As I mentioned above, I’ve never worked in an MBA admissions office, so please understand that the above advice is just my own view on the issues. As you get closer to applying, I recommend that you attend a few business school information session and ask these questions to the admissions representatives in attendance. That way, you’ll learn the perspectives of people who actually do this for a living. Take care and I wish you the best of luck in your business school applications. Have a nice day.

-M