Which Schools Should I look at?

[SabaLife]

I graduated from a local state college in 2018. My GPA was 2.99 with a clear upward trend, I started at a community college and was dealing with a lot of family issues so college wasn't the main thing on my mind. I transferred to the local college and eventually got it together, had a GPA over 3 each semester and made the Deans List my last two semesters. I worked full time while going to school, worked on two political campaigns, interned at the Lincoln Archives, and now have a job at a Brokerage Agency helping people with their life insurance and annuity policies.

I want to go to school and get a MA so I can get my dream job at UnidosUS as a legislative advocate or their Policy and Advocacy group and work on behalf of Latinos. I want to do a lot of things in the world of advocacy and politics. I have been looking at GWU - Latin Hemispheric Studies Program and Northeastern's program. 

I guess I am just wanting to know what schools I should look at with my credentials. I know Fletcher is probably out of the realm of possibility. Any tips would be appreciated. Should I take the GRE? How can I get into these schools? I am Latino, first gen student, not sure if that helps. Thanks!

[SketchesOfSpain]

Here's a dirty little secret, unless you're talking about the Wilsons and Kennedys of the world, the GPA isn't a total killer. This isn't Wharton or the Stanford Business School where a B sophomore year of high school dooms you. But if you want to be considered for those better programs, we're going to need to shore up the stuff around the GPA.

Schools are looking for:

Work: MPAs/MPPs want relevant real world experience brought in the classroom for the most part. You might want to get some more work experience under your belt before seriously applying. Enough experience (5+ years relevant experience) would nearly wash out the GPA.

Grades: Which are subpar for GWU and Northeastern

GRE: Which you probably need to do, I used Magoosh which really helped my quant. This will alleviate the grade concern and cement the next part.

Story: What's the arc you can build around your academic/work career? Based on noting family issues, and being a first gen student, you can probably knock this out of the park. You'll need a lot of spotlights on the upward trend.

Purpose: Do you know what you want to do and why you want to do it? Being laser focused with an obvious why will help set you apart.

 

I'm not an expert, I'm just someone who went through the cycle last year to decent success and wasn't able to attend. It's wrong that not enough schools list incoming student profiles, but that's how they up their application fee collection I guess, so I can't say that you're good at school X or school Y, but schools like Kansas, and the Humphrey school at Minnesota have average GPAs in the 3.2-3.3 range, which gets you in close.

 

TL/DR: Get more professional experience, a great GRE score and maybe some online classes to bolster GPA, specifically in classes like Econ, and the GWU's of the world are definitely in reach.

 

P.S. Don't go into crippling debt for an policy degree