Help me choose a school for MPA

[axay]

Hello people,

I plan to take up the MPA ID considering my interest in international affairs.However, i am a little anxious considering that i have been working in the private sector as a Business consultant for the past 5 years post my MBA. I have been able to shortlist only 2 universities so far being HKS-Midcareer professionals MPA and LSE - MPA ID. Is GMAT / GRE an absolute must for the MPA courses?Also, since i do not have a background on the social side as most of you have (my undergrad was in engineering) do you think my chances will be one in a million chances of getting in? The only social cause work i have been able to do is as a volunteer considering my Freemasonry background past 6 years.Should i understand right, i need to have my SOPs and the references ready and sent by December which does not leave me with much time left at all. Another honest question is , my quant & economics is pretty weak, do you think it might be very difficult for me to cope up with the course study? And finally, can you advise me some universities i can look at where GMAT/GRE is mandatory?

Warm regards,

Axay

[juilletmercredi]

First - you already have an MBA. Are you sure that you need an MPA? I have a friend who just completed an MPA and she said that it's very similar to an MBA; the focus is simply on nonprofits and public institutions. Perhaps there's a graduate certificate you can get that will get you to the same goals without taking up a whole other master's program that's similar to the one you've already got.

With that said, the GRE is required by most MPA programs - some may take the GMAT in lieu of the GRE, but I've yet to run across an MPA program that absolutely requires it and not the GRE. (I'm casually browsing MPA programs myself, as I intend to add it to my PhD down the road).

I don't think you have a "one in a million chance" of getting in because of your background. The MPA is largely a career-changing degree. There are lots of programs (like Princeton's) that are tailored towards people in the sciences who want to do public policy work now. MPA students come from very diverse backgrounds; not all of them majored in the social sciences.

If you plan on attending an MPA program in Fall 2012, it's true that most of your deadlines will be between December and March. But you have plenty of time before December to begin writing and editing your statements. I didn't start writing my statement of purpose until around August of the year I applied to my PhD programs, and I know many people who started a little later. You've got 6 months of lead time, so start around the middle to the end of the summer and you should be fine.

I can't speak directly to the quant question, but I will say that my friend's background was in psychology and her quant background was weaker than mine - she had one undergrad stats class in psychology. She did fine; she just graduated. Most of her classes were not quantitative and econ driven - she wanted to do policy work and so she focused on the more policy-driven courses.