Hello, everyone! My name is Ankush. I recently graduated from IESE business school, in Barcelona and started a leadership role with Amazon in the UK. I wanted to share the path to my MBA as it was one of belief, self-discovery, learning, and gratification. Given that this was my second MBA, I hope that my story will help people not be afraid to take a slightly different path, push themselves and achieve their goals.
The MBA process seems to be complicated in the whole when you think about GMAT prep, networking, college selection, applications, scholarship letters, cv reviews, interview prep and so on. This is all before you realise that the MBA is not the goal but a part of your overall journey to your short and then long-term goals.
The genesis of the MBA idea started in 2018. I had graduated from a Top-5 private Indian B-School and was working with the Indian arm of a US-based hedge fund. I had the opportunity to travel to the New York offices a couple of times spending several months working with teams there to drive projects. I would say that at that moment in my life, I felt recognized, and appreciated for my work, and felt like I had laid out a growth path for myself in my current role. At the same time, all these cultural exchanges introduced me to so many more professional and personal learning opportunities – I felt like there is still so much more out there to learn. This triggered a dilemma: should I hit the reset button on a career and life I had built and take a chance with starting a career that would help me develop further in this new found area of growth for myself.
I explored multiple options by networking with people in different industries and locations. Having spent all my life in India, my network outside India was limited. Plus, by having worked in finance and consulting before that, my network was heavily inclined to those sectors. An unforeseen challenge came in the form of what some members of my society felt a person in their late 20s who has completed their higher education and has a sustainable job should do (read: get married) – the pushback was unexpected.
In all this confusion (and opposing voices) of what I should do with my life and career, I had one friend, who had been acting as my career mentor for years, asked me a simple question, “have you thought about doing a second MBA?”. Just the thought of the time, money, emotional and physical energy investment that an MBA requires made me respond with a response to the tune of the process being too complicated and I also expressed an element of self-doubt about making it to a top program (let alone a global top-10). His follow up, another simple question, “why not?” to which, after introspecting briefly, I realised I had no ”real” answer. To this day, I thank him for asking these simple yet probing questions which changed my life.
Energised with the thought of this, as I sat in my apartment in New York, I ordered my GMAT books and got to work. The GMAT felt like a massive obstacle. I won't say that the GMAT process was easy or difficult, but I followed a structured path to learning while managing 14-hour work cycles. I made it a point to achieve my daily target and slowly got better. Having prepared for the Indian business school entrance test, CAT, I was more than prepared for a lot of quant work that the GMAT had in store. Thus, I felt that was my strong suit and all my mock tests were trending to the same as well. On the day of the test, I started with the quant section to build confidence (as a lot of GMAT guides told me). First question (and supposedly the easiest) was geometry, my area of strength, or so I thought, felt unsolvable. As I went through the first 4 questions, having spent a disproportionate amount of time, I was unsure of 3 of them. It was a little demoralising to have such a poor start to something so pivotal and something I had been building up to for over a year. I decided to go through it anyway and give it my best for the experience (at the back of my mind thinking I need to take the test again). By the end of the allotted test time, I got my score and quant was below my average but verbal surprisingly went a couple of points above what I was expecting taking my score to 720. I was pleasantly surprised.
Now that I had a score I could work with, I began looking into MBA programs. That’s when I felt a little lost. The GMAT was a standardized test experience, but college selection was so diverse and a personal journey with 100s of options. I knew what my short-term goals were but there were so many choices when it came to MBA programs: geography, program length, concentration, alumni presence, and program experience. It just felt like there were so many ways to slice and dice the data set. At this point, I felt the need for someone who could offer me personalised guidance on how to approach the college application process, so, I enlisted
Experts’ Global to help me with the process.
So far, I had started to network with colleges and Adcom to gain knowledge about the programs, but
Experts’ Global started me off on a detailed profile questionnaire. This became an introspective process which helped me figure out and articulate my strengths, experiences, motivations, and challenges.
Experts’ Global helped me structure my thoughts around addressing my need for a second MBA (a question that frequently came up with Adcom) and further also helped me understand how to go about the Scholarship essay.
As I narrowed my preferences to 2-year programs in Europe, I started doing mock interviews. While Alumni mock interviews could provide a college-centric perspective,
Experts’ Global’s mock interviews helped me better craft my stories as they had a lot more background detail on me (as a result of the questionnaire) and could tell me how I could leverage different parts of my experience to pitch myself better.
Through my conversations (and by thinking in depth about what I wanted from my MBA program), I zeroed in on IESE Business School. The program was a global top-10 program and was a top-3 MBA program outside of the US (which was not a geography target), but what was more important was the sense of community and collaborative spirit that I experienced with the Alumni and Adcom (who also were all IESE MBA grads). The student body, alumni and Adcom were insightful, helpful and fiercely loyal. Alumni irrespective of their positions and years spent post college were always available for a chat. The college had a strong alumni presence in the region and did well with job roles in consulting and tech.
I applied to IESE and a couple of other business schools in Round 1. I was happy when I received an interview invite from IESE. As I prepared for my interview, I felt confident of bringing the best version of myself thanks to
Experts’ Global and felt I understood the college will thanks to the alumni and Adcom interactions. The interview process was structured but felt smooth. A unique aspect of IESE’s admission process was the Assessment Day, where selected candidates came to a common location and engaged in a networking and case study-based assessment. It was here that I met many prospective students who would potentially end up being my class/batch mates. Having witnessed the calibre of people who came for the process I felt even more inclined (almost desperate) to join IESE. Then one late November morning, as I sat at home in India having my breakfast, I got a call that confirmed I got in – I was ecstatic. To top that off, I was offered a partial scholarship which made this whole situation all the better.
I could write another essay on the MBA experience but in short, it was a very practical-oriented learning experience, I met amazing people who had amazing life stories, I made friends from all over the globe, experienced so many different cultures, grew as a person and had an experience of a lifetime. This was all in addition to developing as a professional and a manager through the various challenges the rigorous MBA program throws at you through some theory but mostly case studies, practical management scenarios and industry interactions. I spoke with people from different backgrounds, identified a career path for myself, leveraged the help and resources of the alumni network and the Career Development team, and, finally, got myself a leadership development program in the UK with a big-tech company.
All throughout this journey, I took an approach of taking a chance on myself, working towards a smaller incremental goal, getting the right guidance and giving it everything that I had. In the end, 4.5 years after I had that fateful conversation with my mentor, who asked me about pursuing an MBA, his simple innocuous “Why not?” led me to have some of the best experiences of my life and fulfil my personal and professional goals.