MPP

[thegunners]

Hi,

I would really appreciate if someone could help me out with this one. A very good friend of mine wishes to apply to MPP for fall, 2011. She holds an engineering degree from India (not IITs) and a work experience of 3.5 years at the time of aplpying. Out of that, 1.5 years is in a policy focussed NGO in India which are fairly well-known across Indian and reasonably well-known internationally, especially in their field. She has one publication lined up in a reasonably good journal. Apart from that she has a fairly good experience of attending/being a part of energy policy proceedings in India. She has been a part of regulatory interventions on behalf of her organization which is a consumer representative of the state electricity regulation commission. She has been a part of a research team (2 people research and 3 authors) for a report on climate change which went to the European parliamentarians and also to COP15, apart from other international organization such as WRI.

She is also doing an M.A. in Economics while working and has good grades there. Her engg. GPA is 3.5. Apart from the NGO work-ex, she has a one year experience at a consultancy. Overall, I think her work-ex seems solid to me but I would like to hear from you what do you think about this work ex.

There is just one factor (in my opinion) that is going against her case and that's GRE. 720Q, 540V, 4.5AWA. Clearly, these are not the best scores but will her work-ex which is so heavily policy based, compensate for these GRE scores? Also, it's not that she's just hoping for KSG or something. She's targeting programs like JHU and probably lower too. But what I would like to know, on her behalf, is what are her chances at programs like MPP at SAIS or TPP at MIT?

Is her work-ex solid enough to not bother much about GRE? WIll she need to retake GRE just to be on the safer side or even with a retake of GRE other things chances are only slim? And if she does decide to not take GRE again, then which are the reasonably good programs where she has a fair shot?

Thanks,

Edited September 9, 2010 by thegunners