Grit,Perseverance & Faith Pt 1 - Admits from INSEAD,IESE,ISB(GMAT 680)

This post turned out to be longer than I had planned and also took longer to get out there. But I wanted to do justice and encourage a lot of you that are in my shoes and dealing with the crushing feeling I did. IF I MADE IT THROUGH THIS EXPERIENCE, SO WILL YOU. This post is not about going from GMAT Score x to y because I don’t have much to boast with a 680 but its about staying driven to my goal and persevering despite the difficult times.

Before getting into it let me tell introduce myself –
• Indian, Female
• Education – Under Graduation in Commerce at Delhi University (1st Division)
• Work experience – 6 years at a Big 4 Consulting Firm working with the Tech team to help roll out analytical and digital solutions to enhance clients’ internal audit functions
• GMAT Score(s) – 640 (2020), 630 (Nov’22, Canceled), 680 (Jan’23)
• International exposure – Bifurcated below –
o Professional – 1 business conference in Barcelona, Spain. Rest was all remote work (working on global projects, international client deliverables etc.)
o Personal – Traveled to USA, Europe, SE Asia for leisure
• Hobbies – Verified GIPHY artist with 15M+ views, Mentor to College graduates
Did I always know where I wanted to go for my MBA? No. Did I know I wanted to go to a premium institute for my MBA? Yes. Which is why a large part of my journey was struggling with the GMAT (which reflects in the scores I’ve updated.) So I’m going to break this into parts for your ease 

GMAT Attempt 1 – 640 (V 33, Q 45)
My first GMAT attempt in the COVID year was mostly with the intent of taking the exam and utilizing my time spent working from home. I enrolled in various self-help courses and even took a sabbatical from work to focus on studying. The result – a poor 640. But I knew I prepared for the exam half-heartedly and I knew it wasn’t my best shot.

Learnings & Key Takeaways
- Despite being very comfortable with English as a language and rather reluctant about referring to myself as a ‘Native Speaker’ I realized I had taken Verbal too lightly and the GMAT Verbal is truly difficult, no matter what your proficiency is.
- For Quant, while the questions seemed easy, I knew I had to approach GMAT Quant differently than I had approached Quant as an Indian student. Why do I say this? Because the GMAT Quant is strategic in nature. I believe you have to learn the art of working smarter, not harder with GMAT Quant.
- Understand the key strategies and ways to approach each section. Eg: Understand the importance of breaking down the question stem in Quant especially for DS questions and spend your time analyzing the scope of the question (should you be considering integers, fractions, negatives, positives, even or odd numbers, think of the role 1 or 0 have to play etc.)
- Be honest with yourself and determine your potential and efforts. I decided to muster up the courage and prepare for the exam again because I knew about my potential and I knew what extra efforts I wanted to put in. It took me a whole year to muster up the courage to start my preparation again but I was mentally ready to get back to it when I did start.
- Finally, my advice to everyone is that your score is not a reflection of your aptitude and do not pull yourself down because you didn’t do well. The GMAT really is a combination of multiple factors and a complex exam by nature.

GMAT Attempt 2 – 630 (Canceled)
My second attempt was and its prep was with a completely different mindset. This time around, almost 2 years after my last GMAT attempt my focus was to take the exam, aim for a 700+ and apply to my target business schools.
My prep was more streamlined, with emphasis on difficult topics and my weak areas and revolved almost a year of preparation while also juggling work. I had taken intense personal tuition classes to prepare myself and really worked hard to get the ideal score to apply to my dream business school – INSEAD. I was determined to apply in the R2 intake to most of my schools and didn’t want to lose a year or any more time to pursue my MBA. I admit, I was probably too determined and too stressed about the importance of the GMAT score I needed to obtain. I had already sacrificed a few years in this process and no longer wanted to settle for any other business school but my dream school.
Over the last 2 years, while I focused on my GMAT score, I worked hard to build other aspects of my life – professional and personal in order to build a complete application by the time I applied. So I worked hard at work and received awards, out of turn promotions and took on more leadership roles. Personally, I spent time on activities that fulfilled me – such as mentoring activities, helping college grads understand the consulting field and also grew my own GIPHY channel that has over 1.7 million views today.
I took the 6 official mocks in prep before my final exam and saw scores 700, 660, 670, 710, 710, 690 and was finally prepared for my exam day.
Sitting cool in front of the desktop suddenly the weight of the world was on me. It was important I ace this attempt as I had already paid for an admission counsellor to help me in my application journey, I had spent 2 years preparing for this and I could not lose another year. It was imperative I apply in round 2 and this score was the only thing holding me back.
Probably not the best idea to my stress myself out to this extent because when the score flashed I was numb. 630. Lower than my score 2 years ago? Impossible. WAY off my mocks range. How can 6 official mock scores be so different? How was this happening to me? All my plans were put on hold and all my efforts were in vain.
The feelings
I remember crying and howling the entire way back home to a point I scared my family and had my boyfriend rush home. I remember them telling me to throw in the towel because of the amount of pain this process had caused me. I was dejected and exhausted and didn’t have the courage to go through this entire process again. GMAT was my sworn enemy. I hated it, and it hated me. All my friends were already studying or pursuing their courses and I had decided to take an extra year to apply to one of the best business schools in the world. And reality just had different plans.
I write about this point in my journey in considerable detail because at first I was embarrassed to a point where I wouldn’t even talk about this to anyone. And it took all the courage in the world to get back on the path to even take the exam again. My family was telling me to throw in the towel, the feedback I had received from friends in the past was to stop if I’d peaked and honestly that wasn’t bad advice considering I had ‘wasted’ 2 whole years and here I was again out of the running for Round 2. There was absolutely nothing different from my 640 situation 2 years ago to now.

Here is where you would play the upbeat training soundtrack in a movie where the main lead takes control of their life again -
But after all the time and effort I had put in, it was too hard to walk away now. INSEAD was my dream and I still wanted to apply – albeit in Round 3 when my chances were the lowest but I wanted to put my best foot forward. I remember discussing options with my counsellor about considering schools with my 640 score and I remember him encouraging me to keep my options open as he was confident I had a bad day and just needed to get out there again and smash the GMAT. I knew what my potential was and still felt like this wasn’t it but getting back out there to taste failure again is a lot worse.
And so while my family started encouraging me to think of different plans, I decided to drown out all the noise in the background and trust my gut. My gut said I deserved to be at INSEAD and that I just had a bad day. So I decided to listen to only one person – myself - so I never had any regrets. The only person rejecting my admission to INSEAD would be INSEAD itself. I wasn’t going to pull myself out of the running because I knew I had a sh#t score.
So I got into it again, and prepared for another attempt but this time the road ahead was tough because I also had to start working on my applications for the business schools to apply in time for Round 3.

Learnings & Key Takeaways
- Juggle my time and multi-task to manage work, application prep and gmat.
- I made an excel with the application questions and fields for each of the schools I was applying to and started planning. I highlighted the essay questions that were similar to the questions that other schools also had, so it saved me a bit of time.
- I also started working on building the themes/ storylines/ pointers for the essays and then started typing out my material.
- Focused on my GMAT with a different set of eyes – built on my strengths and got my weak areas to a level of normalcy.
- I had done so many mocks, I made elaborate error logs and tracked the concepts I was doing incorrectly to focus on those topics. Focused on the approach and strategies of a few favourites of mine on GMAT Club when reading through the solutions. I credit them for making the explanations easy to comprehend and learn from.
Special mention - Bunuel BrentGMATPrepNow (ALL TIME FAV) ScottTargetTestPrep GMATNinja (ALL TIME FAV) EMPOWERgmatVerbal EducationAisle CrackverbalGMAT EMPOWERgmatRichC
- Build mental strength – however you do that – have faith and tell yourself its okay if it doesn’t work out atleast you tried your best. I read a lot of debriefs on GMAT Club and they were truly my main source of motivation. Will be happy to share links if you require but there are some wonderful compilation posts here in GMAT Club.
- GMAT Club got me through this and has been my only constant for every possible step in this journey and I cannot credit it enough to where I am today. bb


I feel the journey up from here deserves its own post so watch out for a part 2!! And feel free to message/ comment and I’d be happy to help