Thanks for sharing your profile, @Abhishek K S. You have a genuinely unusual MBA profile, and that is both your biggest challenge and biggest opportunity.

The academic history is objectively difficult for top MBA admissions. Those factors will create concern at almost every school on your list. However, your profile does not stop there. What changes the conversation is that your professional trajectory is dramatically stronger than your academics suggest. Moving from Business Analyst to Associate Director in ~5 years, building an 8-member analytics team, centralizing analytics across Finance, Operations, Product, and HR, and earning trust from leadership at a health-tech startup is not an ordinary progression.

Your strongest positioning is someone who struggled with traditional academics, discovered purpose through execution and ownership, and built leadership capability rapidly in the real world. This narrative can work.

Let’s address the difficult part directly. Your academics are a material weakness and schools will not ignore them. The concerns admissions committees may have are consistency, ability to handle academic rigor, discipline over time, and classroom contribution. That said, there are also positive signals:
Diploma performance (top 5 in class), AIR 4 in Manipal lateral entry, GMAT Focus 655, and strong professional outcomes.

Those points suggest capability exists, but performance has historically lacked consistency.

For your profile specifically, I would seriously consider a GMAT retake if you believe 695+ is achievable. Normally, I don’t push retakes aggressively, but for your profile, higher testing materially improves credibility. 655 is good, but a 695+ score can potentially be application-changing

Your career progression appears unusually strong. This is exactly the type of growth schools like to see.

Your resume and essays should emphasize scale, business outcomes, leadership, and decision influence. Not dashboards, reporting, and analytics execution. Translate achievements into business language. For ex, reduced decision turnaround by X%, supported growth from X to Y, automated, reporting saving X hours, enabled revenue/product decisions, built analytics operating model

If applying to 8 schools:
1. Stretch: Stern and Fuqua
2. Target: HEC, ISB, INSEAD, IESE
3. Competitive: ESADE and IMD

I would personally remove one of NTU/NUS unless geography is a major priority.

LORS: Your recommenders could help significantly. A CEO recommendation can be excellent if detailed, example-based, and leadership-oriented.

Things to do before applications: Try for GMAT 695+ (if feasible), quantify every achievement, build one meaningful leadership/community initiative, strengthen recommendations, start school networking, and prepare the optional essay early.

Questions:
Current company size and growth stage?
Revenue or user scale?
Impact of the central analytics team?
Did you work directly with founders?
Have you influenced fundraising or board decisions?
Why consulting instead of the VP Analytics / Chief Data Officer path?
Any international exposure?

In the past, we have worked with several applicants who got into top B-schools despite a low GPA. Here's a success story.

Feel free to read this blog on "How to Justify a Low GPA in Your MBA Application" for more insights.

We would love to learn more about your academic background, extracurricular activities, work experience, and personal journey so that we can provide a tailored profile evaluation and an honest school assessment. Feel free to book an evaluation session.

Cheers!
Shantanu Sharma, INSEAD Alumnus
Founder and Admissions Consultant, MBA and Beyond