Events & Promotions
|
|
GMAT Club Daily Prep
Thank you for using the timer - this advanced tool can estimate your performance and suggest more practice questions. We have subscribed you to Daily Prep Questions via email.
Customized
for You
Track
Your Progress
Practice
Pays
Not interested in getting valuable practice questions and articles delivered to your email? No problem, unsubscribe here.
May 1209:00 AM PDT
-10:00 AM PDT
Join us live on GMAT Club's YouTube Channel tomorrow and learn 10 Critical To Dos
May 1212:00 PM EDT
-12:30 PM EDT
Get the inside scoop on what makes Emory’s Goizueta Business School great and how you can present a strong MBA application. Explore the difference between our One-Year MBA and Two-Year MBA programs, talk to our admissions team, and meet students.
May 1308:00 AM EDT
-09:00 AM EDT
Meet Tuck at an informal student or staff-hosted coffee chat in a city near you!
May 1310:00 AM EDT
-11:00 AM EDT
Applying to business school this year? Don’t miss Personal MBA Coach’s Top MBA Application Tips guide- May 14
10:00 AM PDT
-11:00 AM PDT
MBA recommendation letters are one of the most misunderstood parts of the application process. Many applicants focus on choosing the most senior recommender — when what actually matters is specificity, credibility, and examples of impact. 
May 1505:00 PM PDT
-06:00 PM PDT
Inquire for a free profile evaluation and guarantee statement for possible admits and scholarships!
02 Jun 2011, 14:13
Kudos
Bookmarks
After a long long time, just remembered this club. The founder of the club..the people who helped me when I needed the most. Therefore, publishing my essays for the benefit of others. I hope these would be useful to the aspirants.
Take Care You All...
Keep in touch!
Vithal
Check out: www.indianspeakerbureau.com & www.vcSyndicate.com if you want to locate me anytime in the future
Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/donakonda
Essays (not final final, but very close):
Evaluate your application and provide a critical assessment of it. Outline factors that might differentiate you from others from a similar background. – 500
The topology of my life is speckled with both challenges and opportunities, the lessons learnt from meeting these head on have made me a well-rounded individual.
My honesty gave me the courage to speak easily with people since my childhood. Honesty and sincerity are my guiding principles, more so because these were the qualities inculcated in me through early lessons from my father. The lessons were hard to understand. I did not know why I had to break my savings kitty to meet my family’s necessities or why my father, with a job in state government, had to cycle, when most of his colleagues had motorcycles. However, I always achieved my goals. I believed that sweet payoff could be the only result of hard work. I never realized how devastating a failure could be until I failed to clear the entrance exam for admittance to IIT, but this was when I realized my strength - to persist until I reach my goals. One year later, my passion to achieve my goals drove me to secure a place in the IIT. I believe that I can overcome failure through my passion and hard work.
Through the relative grading system at IIT, I understood the interplay of cooperation and competition. My failure to perform, when I tried to compete and the success I got through cooperation taught me the importance of teamwork.
I have successfully applied the above lessons within my professional journey and have further built upon them. Now, I can not only speak to others more easily, but also connect with them. I realize that my integrity makes me stand out. My failures are my strengths and my years of experience working in extraordinary teams make me an excellent team player. With my conscious introspection, I keep learning everyday. For me, pursuit of excellence has been a defined commitment where I strive relentlessly to raise the bar in everything I do.
While at Infosys, global engagements at client locations allowed me to collaborate with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and thus develop a strong international profile. Managing critical projects across several cross-functional units helped me to develop my relationship management skills. Being a part of a global organization has also flared in me a passion to gain a foundation in different domains of business.
Through my volunteer work as a tutor and marketing manager at Project2019, a non-profit organization, I have motivated and tutored adult students to achieve their dream of obtaining admission to universities. This reinforced my belief that my dedication - to pursue what I believe in and my compassion - to work with African Americans from varied backgrounds, can make a difference.
Therefore, more than an undergraduate degree from a premier institute and a quality international work experience with great organizations, I believe that my key differentiators are dedication - to meet challenges head on, compassion – to understand the needs of the needy, persistence – to never quit and maturity – to deal with failure.
Elaborate your career Progression till date and elaborate on your career plans post ISB. – 300
I invested my first year at Infosys to learn the latest technologies, the fundamentals of software quality practices and the skills needed to work in diverse teams. Infosys duly recognized my potential and entrusted me with the responsibility of a client site coordinator for a huge multi-year project at a top US based client location.
An expanding spiral of trust ensued through my contribution in key strategic wins for Infosys against major global competitors at the client site. By the time I celebrated my third anniversary with Infosys, I was the client-site project lead for a $0.5million project with six offshore members. Further building upon my teamwork and vast expertise in client systems over the next two years, I was on track for my next role as an offshore project manager for a team of 14 members. My knowledge and practice of formal project management methodologies has recently helped me to take up the responsibility of onsite project manager to provide project management consultancy at the client site.
As a short-term goal, I would like to broaden my knowledge of finance and strategy, and complement it with my project management and technical skills, to pursue my career as an account manager, responsible for managing all the projects associated with a client in an IT consulting firm. As the next step, I intend to build upon my leadership experience, to take up the responsibility of a Delivery Manager, responsible for building strategic relations with multiple clients. On the same lines, my long-term career objective is to be in a senior leadership role defining or actively contributing to the organizational decision making for a leading consulting firm. Knowing that this is my career direction, I strongly believe that obtaining a PGP in management from ISB will help me achieve my career goals.
It is said that successful leaders learn as much from their failures as they do from their successes. Discuss a situation in which you failed and what you learnt. – 300
My first project as an integration lead involved development of a new online system. This required coordinating the work of twelve technical teams. After substantial planning and testing, I was confident of a seamless switchover. However, the day before the switchover the testing team discovered a new defect in the target environment. As the system was working in the test environment, I was optimistic of resolving the problem without the intervention of the client managers. I did not have enough courage to communicate the issue at such a late stage in the project.
I first reviewed the issue with the testing team and then approached different client teams, separately, to find the root cause of the problem, but to no avail. With three more hours left to freeze changes to production, the client-manager contacted me regarding the issue. He then called an emergency meeting with all the teams to identify the problem. Finally, after a lot of heavy lifting for the next 2hours, we found that one of the teams had incorrectly configured the parameters in the target environment. By the time we fixed the problem, it was already too late and we had to defer the implementation by a day.
In hindsight, I should have thought through the consequences of not communicating the issue earlier to the client-manager. I could have easily prevented this failure had I called an emergency meeting, instead of contacting the client teams separately. I should have been more practical, instead of being blindly optimistic.
The learning from this experience has matured my execution skills. I now keep all the stakeholders informed about any significant factors, which have a potential impact on their expectations. I am more practical in assessing situations, at the same time, enough optimistic to attempt an approach to resolve tough situations.
During the summer of 2003, I was the client-site project lead for a small, but strategically important project. The project involved managing the work of the offshore team, 12 independent client teams and the vendor team.
Two days before the switchover date the testing team discovered that, the new system was unstable in the target environment. Under a few scenarios, the system was not giving the expected results. I reviewed this issue with three more teams and we encountered the same problem. Among the options available, several solutions were formulated, but to no avail. I could clearly feel the weight of the consequences of this failure.
With this in the backdrop, we held an emergency meeting, the next day, with all the teams and came up with a set of action items to identify the problem. Meanwhile, I communicated this issue to both Infosys management and client management. At about 4:00 PM on the day before the switchover date, we found the problem. One of the teams had not correctly configured the required parameters in the target environment. I could have easily prevented this error by delegating the responsibility of reviewing the settings to someone in the team. I had overestimated my potential to review thoroughly the work of all the teams. Soon, we fixed the problem, but we had to defer the switchover by a day. This led to a lot of embarrassment for me before the clients.
Through this experience, I now understand the importance of delegating work. I have consciously tried to use the above learning in all my subsequent projects. I am quick to identify team members who can take ownership and I delegate project control activities to them. This has helped to manage my projects more effectively.
ISB places a lot of emphasis on teamwork. Tell us about your experiences in working as a part of a team. Your essay should talk about the difficulties that you faced and how you overcame them. – 300
Recognizing my excellent teamwork, the senior management of my business unit nominated me to an eight-member team to contribute towards an initiative to come up with new service offerings to our clients.
As a team, we decided brainstorming as the best approach for the task, but soon, we found that each of us was repeating similar ideas. On top of this, three senior members left the team for client-site engagements and of the rest, one of the senior members never attended the meetings and seldom contributed. This was when I took up the responsibility to lead the effort.
I suggested a two-point-approach to make a turnaround
(i)Email Daily Research About Market Analytics (e-DRAMA), wherein each team member had to send out an email with findings from his market research
(ii)Murder board, a board on which we discussed the existing gaps from e-DRAMA and short-listed our ideas on a weekly basis.
I discussed this approach with the team and requested the non-contributing member to present it to our delivery manager. This helped me not only to allay the apprehension within the team of me taking credit for the teamwork, but also to get the non-contributing member involved in the effort. In my subsequent meetings, I initially found it difficult to get the team members agree on any new ideas, but as we progressed, I realized that ironing out the differences in understanding about new ideas created a consensus.
Finally, after a month of painstaking effort, we recommended eight ideas and, more importantly, each of us was passionate about them. After further discussions, we sent six ideas from our group to the corporate office. Our teamwork paid off. I am proud that the board of directors of Infosys considered three ideas from my group as additions to the existing service offerings.
How do you define leadership ? Take the example of a leader you admire (living or deceased), and indicate the traits you like. – 300
Leadership is a concoction of integrity, initiative, resourcefulness, teamwork, communication, optimism and the maturity to determine the right proportion of these qualities for any situation. With these qualities, a leader can turn convictions into a vision, a vision into a set of achievable targets and make the followers take pride in moving towards these targets.
I was very fortunate to work with Samson David within my engagements at the client site. Sam (as he was fondly called) was the engagement manager for Infosys.
Sam displayed all the qualities of a true leader. Be it on a cricket pitch or in the discussions about a proposal for a strategic project, Sam displayed passion in all his deeds. His optimism was truly infectious. The conviction with which he spoke about the goals for the account motivated everyone to perform to the best of his capabilities. Even during the times of recession, due to dotcom bust, he was optimistic in achieving his revenue goals for the account. We all celebrated the success when our account was the biggest in my company. Sam always took time to celebrate every little success with the team.
With his high standards of integrity and transparency, Sam succeeded in building trust both with the team and with the senior management at Infosys. He has since moved back to India to take up much higher responsibilities. However, everyone who worked with him still follows his advice in dealing with difficult situations. We think about what Sam would have done, if he were in such situation. This is what a true leader leaves behind, a set of guiding principles, which stand the test of time.
Type any extra information in the box provided here – 400
I hope to develop a symbiotic relationship at ISB wherein I contribute my learning to my peers at ISB and at the same time, benefit from the research work of the faculty and the perspectives of the other students. With my infectious passion to learn, I hope to gain a formal knowledge of different business domains and thus equip myself to seize bigger opportunities in the journey towards my career goals.
I find the guest lectures, the experiential learning program, the activities within Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurial Development and the nexus of ISB with TiE Hyderabad to be a few of the best opportunities for me to both learn and contribute at ISB. I have interacted with the alumni on whether ISB can contribute to my career goals and to my future aspirations. I have also interacted with the current students at ISB on whether I would fit into the ISB culture. I have received very encouraging feedback from both groups. The above, coupled with the cost-benefit analysis of PGP in management from ISB, are the main factors that have influenced my decision to apply to ISB.
Last but certainly not the least, the close proximity of ISB to my permanent residence makes ISB my ideal choice.
Take Care You All...
Keep in touch!
Vithal
Check out: www.indianspeakerbureau.com & www.vcSyndicate.com if you want to locate me anytime in the future
Linkedin Profile: https://in.linkedin.com/in/donakonda
Essays (not final final, but very close):
Evaluate your application and provide a critical assessment of it. Outline factors that might differentiate you from others from a similar background. – 500
The topology of my life is speckled with both challenges and opportunities, the lessons learnt from meeting these head on have made me a well-rounded individual.
My honesty gave me the courage to speak easily with people since my childhood. Honesty and sincerity are my guiding principles, more so because these were the qualities inculcated in me through early lessons from my father. The lessons were hard to understand. I did not know why I had to break my savings kitty to meet my family’s necessities or why my father, with a job in state government, had to cycle, when most of his colleagues had motorcycles. However, I always achieved my goals. I believed that sweet payoff could be the only result of hard work. I never realized how devastating a failure could be until I failed to clear the entrance exam for admittance to IIT, but this was when I realized my strength - to persist until I reach my goals. One year later, my passion to achieve my goals drove me to secure a place in the IIT. I believe that I can overcome failure through my passion and hard work.
Through the relative grading system at IIT, I understood the interplay of cooperation and competition. My failure to perform, when I tried to compete and the success I got through cooperation taught me the importance of teamwork.
I have successfully applied the above lessons within my professional journey and have further built upon them. Now, I can not only speak to others more easily, but also connect with them. I realize that my integrity makes me stand out. My failures are my strengths and my years of experience working in extraordinary teams make me an excellent team player. With my conscious introspection, I keep learning everyday. For me, pursuit of excellence has been a defined commitment where I strive relentlessly to raise the bar in everything I do.
While at Infosys, global engagements at client locations allowed me to collaborate with individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and thus develop a strong international profile. Managing critical projects across several cross-functional units helped me to develop my relationship management skills. Being a part of a global organization has also flared in me a passion to gain a foundation in different domains of business.
Through my volunteer work as a tutor and marketing manager at Project2019, a non-profit organization, I have motivated and tutored adult students to achieve their dream of obtaining admission to universities. This reinforced my belief that my dedication - to pursue what I believe in and my compassion - to work with African Americans from varied backgrounds, can make a difference.
Therefore, more than an undergraduate degree from a premier institute and a quality international work experience with great organizations, I believe that my key differentiators are dedication - to meet challenges head on, compassion – to understand the needs of the needy, persistence – to never quit and maturity – to deal with failure.
Elaborate your career Progression till date and elaborate on your career plans post ISB. – 300
I invested my first year at Infosys to learn the latest technologies, the fundamentals of software quality practices and the skills needed to work in diverse teams. Infosys duly recognized my potential and entrusted me with the responsibility of a client site coordinator for a huge multi-year project at a top US based client location.
An expanding spiral of trust ensued through my contribution in key strategic wins for Infosys against major global competitors at the client site. By the time I celebrated my third anniversary with Infosys, I was the client-site project lead for a $0.5million project with six offshore members. Further building upon my teamwork and vast expertise in client systems over the next two years, I was on track for my next role as an offshore project manager for a team of 14 members. My knowledge and practice of formal project management methodologies has recently helped me to take up the responsibility of onsite project manager to provide project management consultancy at the client site.
As a short-term goal, I would like to broaden my knowledge of finance and strategy, and complement it with my project management and technical skills, to pursue my career as an account manager, responsible for managing all the projects associated with a client in an IT consulting firm. As the next step, I intend to build upon my leadership experience, to take up the responsibility of a Delivery Manager, responsible for building strategic relations with multiple clients. On the same lines, my long-term career objective is to be in a senior leadership role defining or actively contributing to the organizational decision making for a leading consulting firm. Knowing that this is my career direction, I strongly believe that obtaining a PGP in management from ISB will help me achieve my career goals.
It is said that successful leaders learn as much from their failures as they do from their successes. Discuss a situation in which you failed and what you learnt. – 300
My first project as an integration lead involved development of a new online system. This required coordinating the work of twelve technical teams. After substantial planning and testing, I was confident of a seamless switchover. However, the day before the switchover the testing team discovered a new defect in the target environment. As the system was working in the test environment, I was optimistic of resolving the problem without the intervention of the client managers. I did not have enough courage to communicate the issue at such a late stage in the project.
I first reviewed the issue with the testing team and then approached different client teams, separately, to find the root cause of the problem, but to no avail. With three more hours left to freeze changes to production, the client-manager contacted me regarding the issue. He then called an emergency meeting with all the teams to identify the problem. Finally, after a lot of heavy lifting for the next 2hours, we found that one of the teams had incorrectly configured the parameters in the target environment. By the time we fixed the problem, it was already too late and we had to defer the implementation by a day.
In hindsight, I should have thought through the consequences of not communicating the issue earlier to the client-manager. I could have easily prevented this failure had I called an emergency meeting, instead of contacting the client teams separately. I should have been more practical, instead of being blindly optimistic.
The learning from this experience has matured my execution skills. I now keep all the stakeholders informed about any significant factors, which have a potential impact on their expectations. I am more practical in assessing situations, at the same time, enough optimistic to attempt an approach to resolve tough situations.
During the summer of 2003, I was the client-site project lead for a small, but strategically important project. The project involved managing the work of the offshore team, 12 independent client teams and the vendor team.
Two days before the switchover date the testing team discovered that, the new system was unstable in the target environment. Under a few scenarios, the system was not giving the expected results. I reviewed this issue with three more teams and we encountered the same problem. Among the options available, several solutions were formulated, but to no avail. I could clearly feel the weight of the consequences of this failure.
With this in the backdrop, we held an emergency meeting, the next day, with all the teams and came up with a set of action items to identify the problem. Meanwhile, I communicated this issue to both Infosys management and client management. At about 4:00 PM on the day before the switchover date, we found the problem. One of the teams had not correctly configured the required parameters in the target environment. I could have easily prevented this error by delegating the responsibility of reviewing the settings to someone in the team. I had overestimated my potential to review thoroughly the work of all the teams. Soon, we fixed the problem, but we had to defer the switchover by a day. This led to a lot of embarrassment for me before the clients.
Through this experience, I now understand the importance of delegating work. I have consciously tried to use the above learning in all my subsequent projects. I am quick to identify team members who can take ownership and I delegate project control activities to them. This has helped to manage my projects more effectively.
ISB places a lot of emphasis on teamwork. Tell us about your experiences in working as a part of a team. Your essay should talk about the difficulties that you faced and how you overcame them. – 300
Recognizing my excellent teamwork, the senior management of my business unit nominated me to an eight-member team to contribute towards an initiative to come up with new service offerings to our clients.
As a team, we decided brainstorming as the best approach for the task, but soon, we found that each of us was repeating similar ideas. On top of this, three senior members left the team for client-site engagements and of the rest, one of the senior members never attended the meetings and seldom contributed. This was when I took up the responsibility to lead the effort.
I suggested a two-point-approach to make a turnaround
(i)Email Daily Research About Market Analytics (e-DRAMA), wherein each team member had to send out an email with findings from his market research
(ii)Murder board, a board on which we discussed the existing gaps from e-DRAMA and short-listed our ideas on a weekly basis.
I discussed this approach with the team and requested the non-contributing member to present it to our delivery manager. This helped me not only to allay the apprehension within the team of me taking credit for the teamwork, but also to get the non-contributing member involved in the effort. In my subsequent meetings, I initially found it difficult to get the team members agree on any new ideas, but as we progressed, I realized that ironing out the differences in understanding about new ideas created a consensus.
Finally, after a month of painstaking effort, we recommended eight ideas and, more importantly, each of us was passionate about them. After further discussions, we sent six ideas from our group to the corporate office. Our teamwork paid off. I am proud that the board of directors of Infosys considered three ideas from my group as additions to the existing service offerings.
How do you define leadership ? Take the example of a leader you admire (living or deceased), and indicate the traits you like. – 300
Leadership is a concoction of integrity, initiative, resourcefulness, teamwork, communication, optimism and the maturity to determine the right proportion of these qualities for any situation. With these qualities, a leader can turn convictions into a vision, a vision into a set of achievable targets and make the followers take pride in moving towards these targets.
I was very fortunate to work with Samson David within my engagements at the client site. Sam (as he was fondly called) was the engagement manager for Infosys.
Sam displayed all the qualities of a true leader. Be it on a cricket pitch or in the discussions about a proposal for a strategic project, Sam displayed passion in all his deeds. His optimism was truly infectious. The conviction with which he spoke about the goals for the account motivated everyone to perform to the best of his capabilities. Even during the times of recession, due to dotcom bust, he was optimistic in achieving his revenue goals for the account. We all celebrated the success when our account was the biggest in my company. Sam always took time to celebrate every little success with the team.
With his high standards of integrity and transparency, Sam succeeded in building trust both with the team and with the senior management at Infosys. He has since moved back to India to take up much higher responsibilities. However, everyone who worked with him still follows his advice in dealing with difficult situations. We think about what Sam would have done, if he were in such situation. This is what a true leader leaves behind, a set of guiding principles, which stand the test of time.
Type any extra information in the box provided here – 400
I hope to develop a symbiotic relationship at ISB wherein I contribute my learning to my peers at ISB and at the same time, benefit from the research work of the faculty and the perspectives of the other students. With my infectious passion to learn, I hope to gain a formal knowledge of different business domains and thus equip myself to seize bigger opportunities in the journey towards my career goals.
I find the guest lectures, the experiential learning program, the activities within Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurial Development and the nexus of ISB with TiE Hyderabad to be a few of the best opportunities for me to both learn and contribute at ISB. I have interacted with the alumni on whether ISB can contribute to my career goals and to my future aspirations. I have also interacted with the current students at ISB on whether I would fit into the ISB culture. I have received very encouraging feedback from both groups. The above, coupled with the cost-benefit analysis of PGP in management from ISB, are the main factors that have influenced my decision to apply to ISB.
Last but certainly not the least, the close proximity of ISB to my permanent residence makes ISB my ideal choice.
cheetarah1980
03 Jun 2011, 06:58
Kudos
Bookmarks
Do you have any friends who are in different fields who can read your essays? I think these people would be the best judge of whether or not you are truly conveying who you are and what you bring to the table. I can't say that I got a true glimpse of your personality through these essays. They answered the questions asked, but I didn't feel a connection to your words. Friends can give you better feedback on how to showcase yourself.
When reading your essay about a failure, I got lost in some of the technical jargon. I also wondered about a specific example of how you implemented what you learned from your previous failure and how the new situation turned out.
In the team essay, the description of one of the team members as non-contributing was a bit jarring. While it may be true there may be a more tactful way to imply that this person didn't contribute without blatantly saying it.
Just some food for thought.
When reading your essay about a failure, I got lost in some of the technical jargon. I also wondered about a specific example of how you implemented what you learned from your previous failure and how the new situation turned out.
In the team essay, the description of one of the team members as non-contributing was a bit jarring. While it may be true there may be a more tactful way to imply that this person didn't contribute without blatantly saying it.
Just some food for thought.
