I want to thank everyone for their time in reviewing my profile and offering suggestions on how to make me a strong candidate. I’ll try to make a long story short. I pretty much knew nothing about finance growing up growing in our Asian house hold. You are either a doctor or engineer. Since I’m squeamish , I chose engineering.

I graduated from a state school petroleum engineering with 3.2 gpa in 2015 from LSU. Since oil prices crashed, no-one could find jobs. I got my masters and graduated in 2018 with a few publications and a 3.5 GPA. I joined Shell Oil Company as a reservoir engineer and worked on shore assets for 3 years. But during those years even though I was classified as “high flier” ( put myself on a lot of projects, built new tools, was the first to be offered new opportunities) I felt un fulfilled.

I discovered banks were recruiting reservoir engineers and started interviewing for associate level technical roles at banks such as RBC, Greenhill and wells. Unfortunately I made it to last rounds but wasn’t chosen.

I somehow managed to land a role at an A&D advisory firm that’s the best in middle market . (Big fish in small pond). It was a blessing in disguise because we do both the engineer work and NAV/DCF modeling where at a big bank, i would have done M&A also but only technical.

I discovered I really want to join a mega fund PE one day. Mainly due to not wanting to be strictly technical and I know if I go to a bigger bank or a small PE shop, that’s what I’ll be doing . I wouldn’t mind staying in energy but strongly interested in leaving.

By the time I hopefully enter the MBA, I’ll be the firm for 1.5 years. By then I should have around 1Bn transactions. Do you guys think this experience will be enough to get me in with a decent GMAT and get into a PE firm? I'm leaving consulting as fall back but the travel worries me as I want to have a family soon.

My main worry is low gpa from a non top Petroleum program. Not any extra curricular or volunteer. I’m first gen but my older bro went to college. Standard Asian story parents came from VN, gave up their jobs and did nails to provide us with a good opportunity.

Thank you everyone again for reading all this and providing feedback!!