Dear Sir/ Madam,

I am short listing schools and programs for second round. I have a dilemma of applying Full-time MBA v/s EMBA as per my experience. Could you please provide your input? Below is summary of my profile.

Current designation / Industry: Senior Project Manager in IT
Overall Experience: 11 Years (12 by the admission time 2012 Fall)
Company – A well Known and big multi-national IT company (Based out of India)
Bachelor Degree: Bachelor of Engineering from National Institute of Technology (NIT) in India (Second Level immediately after IIT) in year 2000
GPA/Percentage: Honors (Greater than 70%) Marks – Top 10% in my class.
GMAT Score: 710 (Q51, V35)
Nationality: Citizen of India (7.5 year experience in USA)
Extra activities: Board of Director in $2M Non-profit organization for more than a year.

Full time seems to give better opportunity in terms of job placement but it looks risky as well. EMBA on other hands looks to be an MBA for sake of MBA as no EMBA school providing placement services for EMBA and it obviously has high price tag along with pressure of study, job and personal life.

One year full time MBA also seems to an option but all of those are in Europe while my first preference is to do MBA/EMBA from US (if good options are there). Could you please let me know which category of school and program should be more suitable for my profile and what are my chances in those schools/programs?
Below are few major categories which I have shortlisted and I want to finalize 1 to 2 schools from each category OR avoid a category totally if that does not make sense for my profile.

Full time (US) -
Category 1 (Seems stretch to me) – Wharton, Booth, MIT Sloan,
Category 2 (Competitive?) - Stern, Yale, Kellogs
Category 3 (Relatively safe?) –Darden, Duke, Tepper (Carnegie Mellon),

Full time (International) -
London Business School, UK(1.5 year)
IMD (1 year)
INSEAD (1 year)
Indian School of Business (ISB) – (1 year)

EMBA
Category 1 (1 year fulltime ) - Stanford Sloan –MS in management or MIT sloan Fellow
Category (2 year part time) - Wharton EMBA, Kellogg, Booth, Columbia

Thanks,
IT Manager

Well, sounds like you have given all your options some thought, which is good. My gut reaction to your profile is that the EMBA is the correct choice. You might find some of the full time programs biased against the amount of experience you have vis-a-vie your classmates. Depends on the program of course, but some favor younger applicants. As for job prospects, you should check with your target schools' policies on handling EMBA students who are planning to switch jobs or careers. Many are getting more accomodating and opening their career services up to EMBA students just like their full time and part time students. On the other hand, the rankings boards count the full time job stats and not the EMBA stats, so getting the FT MBAs jobs will likely always be the priority as long as that's the case. I think you would be pleasantly surprised at the kind of access to jobs you would get with EMBA programs--especially if you stick to the kind of quality programs that you list in your profile.

Thanks ! Could you please let me know level of my competitiveness of my profile for the program which I have shortlisted for both FT and EMBA (1 yr as well as 2 year)?