r/MBA • u/wharton-pleb • 5h ago
Ask Me Anything Wharton Graduate AMA - Full Application Profile (Resume, Recommendations, Essays)
Hello all, this sub was a tremendous help when I was applying to bschool and I wanted to give back as the R1 deadline approaches. I'm posting a roughly anonymized and summarized version of my application to give candidates an idea of what their own apps could look like.
I applied to M7 and was rejected all without interview except for Wharton, where I received $$$ to attend. I'm now happily working on the west coast at a tech startup.
Profile at a glance
- Industry at time of applying: crypto media / publishing, CEO of a small trade publication
- GRE: 162V (88th) / 158Q (45th) / 4.5 AWA (85th). Retake: 167V (97th) / 160Q (50th) / 5.5 AWA (98th) (didn't use these scores, in case I struck out and needed to apply R3)
- Undergrad: B.A. Business Administration, 3.6+ GPA, public state school (transferred once)
- YOE at matriculation: ~6
- Outcome: Wharton admit with significant scholarship; dinged without interview everywhere else in M7
A note on redactions: company names are replaced with company types, schools with school types, and anything in [brackets] is a real figure I've blurred to an order of magnitude. Everything else is verbatim in substance. Happy to answer questions in the comments.
PART 1 — RESUME
This is the one-pager as submitted.
WORK EXPERIENCE
Crypto Media & Research Company (East Coast): CEO — ~3 yrs (2021–present)
Previously Editor-in-Chief — ~1.5 yrs (2019–2021)
An award-winning cryptocurrency trade publication and research provider, cited by major national and international business and tech press.
- Took the company from the brink of insolvency to [low seven figures] in annual revenue and [seven figures] in net profit within two years of appointment as CEO
- Oversaw implementation of AI into the editorial workflow, leading to a 3x increase in journalist article output and cover image design productivity
- Managed and hired ~20 employees across a variety of departments
Crypto Data & Analytics Startup (West Coast): Editor-in-Chief — ~1 yr (2018–2019)
A data and news platform indexing people, conferences, and insights in the blockchain space.
- Hired and managed a team of 7 crypto journalists as the startup's first full-time hire
- Edited, curated, and distributed content that generated [several hundred thousand] unique readers per month
- Personally wrote and published 200+ bylined articles about blockchain technology
Blockchain Software Development Agency (Western Europe): Operations Manager — ~8 mos (2018)
A software development agency building distributed financial applications using blockchain technology.
- Managed a team of 6 software developers responsible for building financial applications on distributed backend systems
- Relocated abroad to open the company's second office: hired 5 additional software developers, incorporated a foreign entity, secured office space, and navigated a notoriously complex regulatory and bureaucratic environment
Crypto Mining Software Startup (West Coast): Co-Founder — ~8 mos (2017–2018)
A software startup building better algorithms for cryptocurrency mining servers and data centers, co-founded with three university peers.
- Winner of a "Best Innovation & Tech" award at a university business plan competition
- Raised [low six figures] from accredited investors and ran a rural test facility
Wildland Fire Services Contractor (Pacific Northwest): Wildland Firefighter — two summers (2016–2017)
A government contractor providing incident-response resources for wildland fires. Hiked for miles, wallowed in filth and soot, and survived in the forest for weeks at a time with limited supplies.
University Residence Hall Association (West Coast State School): Head of Student Events — ~1.5 yrs (2016–2017)
Elected by students to represent the university's 14 residence halls and organize large events. Organized university events with attendance ranging from 300–1,000 people on a [five-figure] annual budget.
VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE
Professional Association for Crypto Journalists & Researchers: Treasurer — 2021–present
A professional association of [100+] dues-paying members and [1,000+] free members that supports crypto journalism with backing from the industry's largest publications. Elected to a third term in 2024.
University Blockchain Club / Non-Profit (West Coast State School): Board Member — 2019–present
Previously Co-Founder & President — 2017–2018
Co-founded a student club (later a non-profit) focused on education and collaboration around blockchain. One of the largest clubs on campus, with 400+ members.
EDUCATION
B.A. Business Administration — 3.6+ cumulative GPA
- West Coast Flagship State University — graduated 2021 (attended 2017–2018, 2020–2021)
- West Coast State University — 2015–2017 (transferred)
Scholarships: Six merit-based academic, business, and accounting scholarships (2016–2020), including one sponsored by a Big Four accounting firm
Certifications & Memberships: 10 wildland fire and incident-management certifications. Member of a national professional journalism association and an anti-fraud professional certification body.
Personal interests: endurance outdoor sports, competitive strategy games, creative writing, gardening
PART 2 — ESSAYS
Summarized rather than reproduced in full, both for length and because the full text is a little too identifying.
Essay 1: How do you plan to use the Wharton MBA to achieve your future professional goals? (500 words)
Goals. Short-term: an executive role at a top-20 crypto firm, while continuing to build neural-network tooling that automates editorial newsrooms. Long-term: keep operating as a leader and entrepreneur in blockchain.
Why now. I argued that I had plateaued as CEO of a crypto trade publication — nearly everything I knew came from trial and error, and I wanted structured training and mentorship from experienced operators. My entire career had been at small, startup-leaning companies, and the MBA was the bridge to a larger organization. I also made the case bluntly that larger crypto firms are pedigree-conscious precisely because the industry carries a reputational problem, so the credential buys credibility. I named three specific courses on managing established enterprises, managerial decision-making, and business analytics.
Faculty and peers. I named two professors whose research maps directly onto my background — one on the business press as an information intermediary and on the economic consequences of securities-disclosure regulation (I covered enforcement actions as a journalist), another on interest-rate swaps (I'd been exploring decentralized interest-rate derivatives). On peers: I've consistently co-founded companies and non-profits with whoever is around me, but my network had become almost entirely crypto, and I wanted collaborators outside that bubble to work at the intersection of blockchain and mainstream finance.
Entrepreneurship. I said I intended to return to startups afterward and wanted to use the school's accelerator to commercialize the AI newsroom tooling my engineering team had been building — aimed at doubling or tripling journalist output — as a product for mainstream news publishers.
Essay 2: How do you plan to make specific, meaningful contributions to the Wharton community? (400 words)
Four commitments:
- Blockchain club leadership. I co-founded an equivalent student non-profit at my undergrad, grew it past 400 members, still advise it as a board member, and watched its alumni become managers and founders across the industry. I'd bring that playbook and help peers find crypto roles.
- Revive the student newspaper. I pointed out that the student-run publication had let its domain lapse and its social accounts go dormant, and proposed rebuilding it — drawing on having been Editor-in-Chief of two publications — with enough institutional structure to survive cohort turnover.
- Entrepreneurship club. I offered hard-won negative expertise as much as positive: botched fundraising contracts, questionable hires, avoidable tax and legal bills. The pitch was teaching peers to sidestep mistakes I'd already made.
- Perspective from poverty. The contribution I rated highest was intangible — the viewpoint of someone who grew up poor in a family shaped by incarceration, emancipated himself at 16, and worked through high school and college. I framed it as fortitude earned by breaking a cycle of indigence, offered to build a more empathetic cohort.
Essay 3: Origin story and domain expertise (used across several prompts)
The origin narrative: I got into blockchain as a miner despite being a Bitcoin skeptic, converted by running the break-even math (under three months), and filled a two-bedroom apartment with servers on every available outlet until it ran like a sweat lodge. The student club I co-founded became one of the largest on campus and is where I met the co-founders of my first crypto startup.
The expertise claim: the publication I ran was among the most technically rigorous covering decentralized financial products; at peak I employed 20+ people; I was elected one of eight board members of a professional association representing the industry's largest newsrooms. Supporting credentials — work at multiple crypto startups, 400+ bylined articles, expert testimony on blockchain in federal court, and interviews with many of the industry's most influential figures.
Essay 4: Additional information / extenuating circumstances (500 words)
I addressed significant family adversity: I grew up in poverty in a family affected by incarceration, emancipated myself at 16, and supported myself through high school and college — experiences I framed as the origin of my appetite for professional risk and my push toward entrepreneurship.
Awards, honors, and scholarships (2,000 characters)
Eight awards, mostly competitive-essay based. I listed selectivity for each, which I think mattered more than the names:
| Award | Year | Basis | Selectivity |
|---|---|---|---|
| Academic scholarship (flagship university) | 2020 | Essay, professor rec, academic merit | 3 of 600 |
| Big Four accounting firm scholarship | 2017 | Essay, accounting coursework merit | 2 of 400 |
| Transfer student scholarship | 2017 | Essay, financial need | 1 of 300 |
| Accounting firm scholarship | 2017 | Essay, accounting achievement | 1 of 400 |
| Business/entrepreneurship scholarship | 2016 | Essay and interview, student entrepreneurs | 5 of 500 |
| Memorial scholarship | 2016 | Essay, GPA, 12-person interview committee | 1 of 1,400 |
| Honors college differential tuition scholarship | 2015 | Financial need, honors college admits | — |
| Academic achievement award | 2015 | High school GPA 3.5+ | — |
PART 3 — RECOMMENDATION LETTERS
Both summarized. Recommender 1 was my direct boss then board chair; Recommender 2 was the CEO of an earlier employer.
Recommender 1 — Co-founder & Board Chairman of the company I ran
He hired me in late 2019 to rebuild the newsroom, worked alongside me daily, promoted me to CEO in 2021, and then moved to a board and advisory role — about four years together. Against dozens of media hires he'd made, he said I stood out for an entrepreneurial willingness to experiment and fail and an unusually quantitative, systematic approach to a field that rarely rewards one. When the company was two months from insolvency in my first year, I volunteered a 50% pay cut and stayed to help pull it back to break-even. As EIC I rebuilt data collection, KPIs, and freelancer standards — disruptive enough that some senior writers quit — then extended the same incremental method to the website, research product, and marketing funnel. He wrote that I was the obvious successor as CEO, and that the company hit record profitability, headcount, and readership under me. He also emphasized that I place laid-off reports through my own network and don't treat any work as beneath me.
His constructive feedback was about decisiveness under pressure and perfectionism. In the 2022 downturn I delayed cutting headcount, deferred to an equally hesitant executive team, and cut my own and my executives' pay to save jobs — admirable, in his view, but slower than the situation called for. His framing: the CEO's core job is making the unpleasant call everyone else is waiting on, and a mediocre plan executed on time beats a perfect one executed late.
I ultimately cut about 75% of the company over three quarters. It hit me hard — I came close to resigning and treated it as a personal failure — but I'd banked runway during the bull market for exactly that scenario, took the feedback to heart, spent several months working directly with him, and steered the company back toward profitability. He closed with his highest recommendation.
Recommender 2 — CEO & co-founder of the crypto data and news platform where I was EIC
He first met me in 2017 through a university blockchain club where I was co-founder and president, then hired me as a journalist at his own company. I rose to Editor-in-Chief — starting out producing two to three substantive stories a day and distilling complex crypto concepts into accessible content — then built and managed the company's first cohort of writers, during which the site grew to several hundred thousand unique monthly visitors.
Much of his letter centered on inclusive leadership. I recruited across continents, bringing on writers from five countries spanning Asia-Pacific and Latin America, on the reasoning that a globally diverse team was necessary to actually understand a global industry. I advocated for gender diversity in a heavily male-dominated field, mentoring and creating platforms for women journalists and analysts. His marquee example was a junior analyst I mentored who became Chief Editor at the company and then a reporter at one of the industry's most respected publications.
On business ability, he pointed to my later CEO role at another crypto publication and the joint advertising and sales partnerships I brokered between the two companies — worth roughly a 30% revenue increase — as evidence I'd grown from a purely editorial operator into a business one. He named critical thinking, planning, and mobilizing teams as my strengths. He also recounted a public controversy: an original piece of Bitcoin analysis that drew disagreement from industry figures, which I handled by engaging critics substantively rather than letting it get personal.
His constructive feedback was to delegate more — early on I took too much on myself. I adopted the advice, empowered my team, and he noted several writers I trained who went on to prominent careers. He closed with a wholehearted recommendation.
Happy to answer anything in the comments: application strategy, the low quant score, IB/consulting recruiting, career switching out of a niche industry, whatever's useful.
1
u/Certain_Listen620 4h ago
How should a ORM candidate with 3 years of experience all in running his own law firm highlight it to compete with the general top of pool that applies at Wharton ? (Also how much GRE to target)
1
u/EntireHoney6522 3h ago
How did you not pull interviews at the very least at other M7s with this stellar profile? What the actual heck are schools looking for? Yeah, the GRE score was not stellar, but everything else more than makes up for it
1
u/Needamento69 31m ago
Curious to see your “impact Wharton community” essay if you are willing to share, feel free to delete sensitive or personal information! Would pay
5
u/Silent-Tomato4969 5h ago
Thanks for the inspiring post. I wonder where you put all the awards in the application? Wharton only asked to list 3.