Top-ranked master's/MBA plan

[PrettyFlyforaChiGuy]

Were you on the gaokao track in high school, or studied at an international school?

If you're 22 now, then you should have either disenrolled at your university this year or last year. What prevents you from finishing there?

I'll speak to your concerns about rank and working in China, since I've been dealing with that here for years. It is generally true that where you earn your Bachelor's degree is much less important than what you hope to do and learn within a graduate program when you apply, at least if it's a competitive admissions process. For local Chinese, UMPI would be very far off the radar. If US News is your preferred ranking bible, the University of Maine itself isn't even within the Top 200 on their annual "Hey We're Still Relevant!" list. UMPI is under the UMaine umbrella and is regionally accredited, which is the highest level and the one you'd want, but in an unfortunate example of poor labeling it is also classified as a regional college, placed in a totally separate tier from national research universities. That doesn't mean it is low quality, nor that you won't learn, nor that it isn't still a strong option for you, but it is much more small-scale than even a liberal arts college. They excel at graduating students with little debt and helping people advance in life. You know, stuff that colleges probably ought to be doing, but factors that aren't always the most valued if you are in an environment that is hyper-sensitive about rank.

I work directly with Chinese students who regularly get offers at those world-renowned universities, but they don't do it by focusing on "rank." I know you've only replied here twice, but you haven't really expressed what any of those graduate programs would give you beyond the fact that other people have gotten together and judged them to be pretty good. The student writing her UC-Berkeley personal insight essays didn't mention "rank" once, but she did discuss who she was as an applicant and who she wanted to be; the Cambridge applicants' personal statement essays highlighted their foundations in their respective fields and reasons for digging deeper into it; the UPenn graduate school personal statement emphasized her views of the field of education and the ways in which her philosophy meshed well with their grad program. The students getting offers at Yale, Dartmouth, Cornell, etc. etc. etc. also shared similar visions of themselves, learning to look at "Why Us?" essay prompts as more like "Why You+Me?" questions where both parties could benefit from the exchange. The ones who wouldn't do this aren't attending.

You're going to want to make that pivot yourself across multiple self-reflective drafts, along with securing letters of recommendation and strong TOEFL/GRE/GMAT scores (around 100+, 325+, and/or 740+ respectively). The rec letters can come from supervisors. Your undergraduate GPA already exceeds their average. The rest is up to you.