Ask ARINGO MBA Admissions Consulting

Hello Shinri/ARINGO!,
I hope my message finds you in good health.

I am doing my research on LBS (Cambridge,Oxford and INSEAD too) and was hoping to get a profile eval for the programs

Background: Male, Indian, 27(at matriculation)
Undergrad : MIT Manipal( A top 15 University); Class of 2016 CG:7.06. Majored in Computer Science (Strong Advanced Maths Scores, Scored over an A in all the pertinent math courses)
GRE: 325(Q:165, V:160, AWA 4), Intend to retake and hopefully score higher
Work Experience:

3 years 8 months as of August 2020
1. Big Data Engineer at Tesco (Aug'16 - May'19)

A. Designed Pipelines on the company's big data infrastructure(Hadoop Platform) for the company's supply chain
B. Part of team that developed an analytics platform which unified over xxM customer accounts over diverse Tesco platforms to perform efficient forecasting and analysis for targeted promotions to strengthen customer loyalty(left before the results were out).
C. Worked with the company's Thailand business to ideate and led the development of solutions which went on to prevent the loss on XM unsold volumes of items amounting to XXX,XXX$ between 2018 -2019 and also by rating supplier performance for contract renewals
D. Worked with the company's Thailand and Central European business to developed taxonomy for over x million products for enhancing reporting across various levels(store, area, region etc).
E. Point of contact for Thailand's business users on the Engineering issues. Actively identified pain points and devised mechanisms which to address them
F. Tabled Proof Of Concepts' for supplanting the existing codestack with open source languages and frameworks with which upon adoption eventually supplanted 70% of the codebase and almost reduced run time by a third. Developed templates, conducted Knowledge transfer sessions and workshops to facilitate smoother migration for all team members.

2. Big Data Engineer at Groupon(Sep'19 - Present):

A. Part of a newly formed team to re-engineer the entire data infrastructure and migrate to the cloud
B. Designed mechanisms to improve efficiency of traffic attribution and thereby funding for marketing ( End results of this are awaited )
C. Improved efficiency and automated the generation of customer subscription metrics for NYSE reporting.

Target Industries
Product management in the big data space at organisations like Walmart, Tesco, Amazon. I intend to build upon my existing capacities as a data engineer and draw on my experiences of working at retail/e-commerce organisations to transition into a data centric product manager and leverage AI/ML to optimise supply chains and improve customer satisfaction. Need business "know-how" on a variety of subjects like supply chains and operations to enable this.

Extra Curriculars:
1. Elected member of the college core committee and headed a 25 member team for the infodesk and finance categories of the college for a year. Responsible for information dissemination on over 300 events to a 15000 strong student body and the distribution of participation passes to them. Played key roles in developing an online system to handle payments, cash prizes and registrations. This helped boost participation, revenue(over INR 600,000 was collected in participation revenue, a 15% increase from the last cycle) and efficiently streamlined crowds.
2. Work in the community with my parents and a few friends to arrange health camps, school and medical supplies for domestic helps, watchmen, drivers and municipality workers.
3. Play football in local teams and watch a lot of it
4. Organise/Attend pet dog meetups ( I love golden retrievers :p)

I would be grateful if you could also help me with the following queries,

1. Having worked as a data engineer, is my work experience too technical for top MBA programs?

2. How do the universities in question evaluate the male indian IT applicant? ( I dont see a lot of them on the class profile page at LBS)

3. While I have striven to understand the functioning of business and the impact of my work in the larger scheme of things and have collaborated effectively with stakeholders from 8 countries , I dont have the exposure of working across countries. Would this disadvantage me in a big way? ( I have lived across 7 cities in India if that's of any help)

4. Does applying with a GRE disadvantage me in any way? While Universities like Ross and ISB have expressed no preference for either when I had written to them, Universities like Fuqua have advised me to use the score converter to gauge ballpark GRE estimates for the program, whilst also stating that they have no preference between the tests. Now, I feel that the converter is inaccurate(For eg, a 170 on the GRE Quant corresponds to a nonexistent score,53, on the converted scale) and that it reduces the "net score" of an individual (For example, my 325 with a Q/V percentile split of 88%/86% on the GRE corresponds to 690 (Q/V 47/36, percentile split of 63%/81% according to Magoosh's scales(https://magoosh.com/gmat/score/gmat-score-calculator/)) which I feel is way off. Does this mean that the GRE scores are "standardised" to bring them in line with the GMAT during the admissions process? (I realise this is a very ad-com specific question, but I'd be grateful for your views on this)

My apologies for the inconvenience caused by inundating you with so many queries. I hope to get my test(s) behind me and start working on applications at the earliest.

Thank you in advance
Sincerely

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