Indian Re-applicant's Journey to Business School

A bit about my professional background: I am a computer engineer (male) from a top 10 engineering school from India. I had a GMAT of 730. I had strong international work experience (consulting for 5+ years) but lacked extra-curricular or other experiences outside work.

I was a reapplicant targeting the top 10-12 bschools in the US for the class of 2018. I had applied for class of 2017 but could not convert my interviews. I just concluded my first year and can surely say two years at business school is a transformative journey. Reflecting on the last year, I hereby capture what I believe I did differently while applying to class of 2018 as compared to when I applied a year earlier.

Resume: I decided to use an admissions counselor this time and based on reviews of Admissions Gateway from many people in my college and professional network I joined them. My earlier resume solely focused on consulting projects while applying for class of 2017. It looked more like a resume for a job than for a business school application. The feedback I got from Admissions Gateway counselors was to include more firm specific and practice specific stories instead of project level bullets. I incorporated this feedback by including themes on practice/ business and firm development and leadership roles in a STAR format. Most business school use VMock as a tool to evaluate resumes. It gives a score which considers things like formatting, strength of bullets, word usage, etc. I used my bschool application resume as a first pass once I started school and got a 9/10, which illustrates that this is the right way to craft a resume. So I will be using mostly the same resume to recruit.

School selection: My learning from half the courses in first year – diversify your risk to increases chances of success. I had applied to a limited set of schools (exactly 3 and that too in second round) while applying for the class of 2017 – this I believe was my biggest mistake. I strongly suggest to apply to a larger set of schools, especially as a male Indian applicant since the competition is very fierce for this candidate pool. While applying for class of 2018, I applied to 7 schools, 4 in R1 and 3 in R2 in the top-15 range to diversify my risk. In addition, I conducted much deeper analysis of which schools fit my future professional goals as well as my prior background (For e.g. talking to a friend at MIT, I recently came to know that MIT has the least % of Indian admits amongst top business schools)

Essays: Start early and take a month off from work (in August) was my motto while applying for class of 2018. As mentioned earlier, I focused my essay themes on macro topics such as firm and practice development instead of project level stories. This I believe was the key differentiator between my applications for class of 2017 and 2018. My admissions counsellor, Rajdeep Chimni from Admissions Gateway played a key role in distilling out the broader stories from my professional background. An important part is being regular and building momentum and I was kept on my toes and really made to think at a more mature level.

Letters of recommendation: I sat with my recommenders talking them through my rationale of applying to business school. I reminded them of my achievements, professional annual performance reviews etc. to ensure they could readily recall my strengths and areas of improvement, since these two questions constitute the bulk of content in the LOR.

Interview: Finally, I must say that I fundamentally changed the way I prepared for the interview. With the Admissions Gateway question set, I listed down about 25-30 basic questions which I could expect in any interview. I then supplemented these questions with any school specific questions (collated from clearadmit etc.) I then wrote answers to all these questions in STAR format and practiced a couple of times with Rajdeep and then by recording my answers and hearing them back. I initially thought this may look my answers rehearsed but I strongly believe this helped me a lot by enabling me to include all relevant points within 2 minutes and ensuring I do not ramble long winded sentence but answer in a clear concise manner. We followed the philosophy that once you know what you want to say then you can focus on who you are. This is something I have carried onto business school while preparing for job interviews as well. Career development offices also strongly recommend to prepare in a similar fashion.

Hope the above helps for people considering whether reapplying to business schools is worth the effort. Trust me it is!! And success will lead you to the best two years of your life.