I attended the infosession in mumbai yesterday, had 4 alums and Mr Menon from the admission committee taking a 2 hour session. Very informative and nicely done.
A key takeaway mentioned during the session for shortlisting of candidate.
There is a 3 bucket criteria, within a bucket you can compensate for an individual performance parameter but you cannot do it amongst the bucket. Let me explain with mentioning what these buckets are.
Bucket 1 Academic performance, your scores from 12th grade ,graduation, transcript and GMAT, now you can compensate lower grades in your acads with a very good gmat score, or if you have an ok gmat score and very high academic performance then you will be a potential candidate depending in your other buckets.
Bucket 2 : Leadership Qualities, now if you cant describe a role wherein you have portrayed leadership qualities, describe a situation where you used some qualities you consider can be equivalent to a leadership quality.the individual parameters in this bucket are Roles and Responsibilities, LOR, accolades, now if you feel the role played by you is not significant enough, this can be compensated by LOR or some rewards etc.
Bucket 3 personal attributes, now this one is tricky,interest, extra curricular, social work, varied interest. Now remember people if you haven't done social work till now don't start it 3 months from ur applications time and mention it cuz then it wont matter, it will reflect an attitude of doing social work with an end goal of mba degree, that is not a personal trait of someone who wants to gives back to the society. But with your varied interest and extra curricular activities you can compensate if you haven't done any social work.
Now, coming back to the point you cannot compensate among the buckets. If you have a low overall acad bucket you cannot compensate with your brilliant leadership bucket, so hopefully its clear now.
Moving on, start working on your essays immediately even if you are an R2 candidate have not given your gmat, i know gmat studies are more important but daily you can give 30-45 minutes to collect your thoughts for the essays(i am not able to do it yet
). Anyways that was the key thing according to me for applications.
Besides if there is an infosession in your city please ensure you do attend it. Website information is nowhere equivalent from what you learn at an infosession.
Posted from GMAT ToolKit _________________