Not all b-school applicants are quant superstars with a few years of Wall Street experience under their belt. If you’re a nontraditional applicant, here are a few pieces of advice.

1. Make sure to demonstrate your quantitative ability in some way.

Lack of quantitative preparation is one of the biggest reasons applicants are denied from MBA programs.  So, how can you show you won’t balk at spreadsheets and graphs? Get some proof you’ve handled similar material before. If you left college without a course in finance, accounting, statistics, or economics under your belt, see tip #4. Next, do everything you can to get a high GMAT math score. While any scaled score in the 40s is superb, 90th percentile is around 49 to 50. This accomplishment speaks volumes and is bound to impress admissions officers, especially if you were an English major. And finally, simply excel at the quantitative parts of your job and try to have something to show for it, whether a promotion or a recommendation letter. If your job involves minimal quantitative work, you might want to build it into your responsibilities (if possible) or look for ways you can showcase your skill in extracurricular activities.

2. Demonstrate leadership.

Be creative if necessary. Influenced management at your company to undertake a successful venture? Led a dangerous mountain expedition? Oversaw a construction site with 300 workers? Started a non-profit that helps businesses become more sustainable?

Odds are that if you’re a non-traditional applicant, you have a knack for leadership; otherwise you wouldn’t be interested in management in the first place. Don’t panic, however, if you feel there are no opportunities to display leadership in your current situation. Leadership is about action, not titles. Here are five lesser known, but real and substantial ways to demonstrate the quality:

• Mitigate or minimize risk for a group
• Influence others
• Achieve consensus across groups
• Recognize opportunity
• Challenge the status quo

3. Press harder on what you’ve got.

Whether you’re a star athlete, a musician, a poet, or an engineer, you likely have special talents and interests that lie outside the business realm. Remember that top business schools are looking for world-class talent regardless of field and that they value diversity. To the extent that you can ramp up your business knowledge and continue to excel in other areas, you should. Remember: you want to build, amplify, and extend what you already have, not replace it altogether.

4. Consider boosting your business coursework.

If you’re an economics major who ended up teaching math in an inner city high school, you’re probably good as far as coursework is concerned. If you’re a poet, you’d be well advised to brush up on the core business subjects including accounting, finance, statistics, and economics. Don’t be daunted by the amount of work you’re facing! You may be surprised at how quickly perceptions of you change once you’ve taken the steps to change them.

5. Know exactly what you want to do post-MBA.

Expect that others will be skeptical of your MBA ambitions. Counter their skepticism by knowing exactly (and I mean, exactly) what you intend to do afterward and why you are suited for it. Practice answering questions like the following: “Yes, but how do you know you will like it? How do you think your current work is going to prepare you for that?” Understand the language, jargon, and mindset of those in your intended field, and be familiar with industry developments. This will ensure that your expectations are realistic.

6. Get familiar with the business world.

This is related to point #5. You can’t fake formal business training, but you should certainly display a keen interest in business. Start reading business publications like The Economist, Businessweek, or the Wall Street Journal. This kind of knowledge can take awhile to develop, so start familiarizing yourself immediately. Don’t try to “cram” or you will be overly influenced by a single book or article and your displays of knowledge will come across as forced.

7. Find role models.

If you’re a nontraditional applicant, chances are you’re not like everyone else from your original field of expertise. It can be confusing, not to mention disheartening and downright lonely if you’re the only one in your circle with business inclinations. Make an effort to find some role models — figures from the business world who started off as artists, journalists, and scientists and whose business careers were enhanced by their knowledge of something other than business. Notable examples include the poet Dana Gioia, former chair of the National Endowment of the Arts who received an MBA from Stanford. For a funny, candid account of business school from a former speech writer and self-named “poet,” check out the book Snapshots from Hell — it doesn’t try to sell the b-school experience, but if you read it and are still determined to go, you can be sure that business school is truly for you.

8. Find mentors with MBAs.

Now that you’ve begun to familiarize yourself with the business world, you need someone to talk about it with. Someone who holds an MBA will be able to offer perspective and contextualize the information you have absorbed recently. Remember: don’t be rigid or defensive when accepting feedback about your essays and your post-MBA plans! Others may not be well-versed in your field of expertise but they may have other domains of knowledge that are valuable to you.

9. Know that b-schools want you as much as you want them.

MBA programs are trying to reach out to people from non-traditional backgrounds. Why? A class full of bankers and consultants is boring. And b-schools want to build connections between the less-typical employers and their own programs, so that students who want jobs in those areas will be able to get them later on. This improves their placement rate and their employer network.

10. Get experiences that showcase other sides of your work personality.

Here’s a question you should bank on getting from admissions officers: “How will you go from being a leader in a creative environment to being a student in a quantitative, metrics-driven environment?” Think about how you will answer that question and if you need to build any experiences that demonstrate your comfort with different professional situations before you start the application process. Remember: admissions officers will connect the dots in your application even if you don’t. Don’t write that you are a great team player if you’ve never worked on a team before. Especially as a nontraditional applicant, your story has to make sense.

This post was written by our friends over at Clear Admit. For more MBA admissions advice, check out their blog.

To follow up on last month’s advice about GMAT preparation and timing, we wanted to offer some general comments about the role of academics in the admissions process. Many candidates considering business school focus on the credentials they will hold and the network which they will be a part of upon graduation, but it is important to keep in mind the academic experience at the heart of any MBA program. Because a business school is, after all, a school, it makes sense to begin your consideration of your profile by thinking about your academic aptitude and track record to date. Your performance in your educational endeavors up to this point will be treated as a predictor of your success in business school.

While this is all well and good for applicants whose undergraduate GPAs and GMAT scores are close to the average of students at their target schools (about 3.5 and 710 for the top programs), things become a bit trickier for candidates who fall below the pack in either or both of these categories. Retaking the GMAT is always an option, but this can become counterproductive after the first two or three attempts, and there is obviously nothing to be done to alter one’s college marks. If the other aspects of your candidacy are strong and you’re only lacking in one of these two academic areas, an effective strategy is often to use an optional essay to acknowledge that one of these numbers is below the school’s average and assure the adcom that the other is the more accurate indication of your academic ability.

Meanwhile, applicants who fall short in both of these measures – as well as anyone who simply wants to strengthen his or her academic profile or falls well below the average in GMAT or GPA – should consider putting together an alternative transcript that demonstrates a track record of As in quantitative coursework (e.g. in basic classes in accounting, statistics, calculus or economics). These classes can be taken at any community college or even through an accredited online program. This is a particularly sound strategy for candidates who focused on the social sciences or humanities in college and do not have a record of demonstrated success in quant-heavy disciplines. Applicants can then point to this as a more recent – and therefore more accurate – reflection of their present abilities in a classroom setting. While one or two classes can suffice, keep in mind that the more classes one takes, the more convincing this argument becomes (assuming strong performance in these supplemental classes, of course).

Of course, these are general guidelines about the ways that one might address a shortcoming in a single element of the admissions process. For a more detailed evaluation of your entire candidacy and more comprehensive advice about your applications, send your resume to info@clearadmit.com for a free initial consultation.