Greetings, hope you’re sailing through the pandemic well!
Demography - Indian Male
Age - 26 years 10 months
Undergraduate Degree - BS in Hospitality and Tourism Management (Top-5 school offering the course)
Percentage - 65
GMAT - 780
Work Experience :
Post High School and Pre Undergraduate Degree -
2.5 years at a small ($5 MM revenue) printing press as a production supervisor plus clerk.
1.3 years at a small ($5.5 MM revenue) chemical factory as a production supervisor and clerk.
-There’s nothing called promotion at these places.
- I was simultaneously working at both the firms.
Post Undergraduate Degree -
1 year at a big brand hotel chain taking care of the front office operations and leading a team of fourteen.
0.75 years at a big brand sports retail brand as a sales leader with supply chain and recruitment as additional responsibilities. I worked within a team of six.
I was a top performer on both my jobs, and it is very reasonable to expect stellar recommendations.
June 2019 - Ongoing : Self employed as a derivatives trader.
Started with a capital of $1,000. As on today my portfolio is worth over $45,000.
Hobbies - Reading (have read over 100 books in the last two years, mostly on economics, finance and trading), mountain biking. I also run a little thing for helping poor kids to get education. I bring in people to finance the schooling of 17 extremely poor kids, got the first kid enrolled when I was 15.
My story - This is probably going to be the most important part of my application. I shall put in the factual side of my story here (my optional essay would be the human side of it).
After I graduated from high school in 2011, I got an admit in a professional course called Chartered Accountancy (it has an admit rate of around 20%). Life was good until the fall of the same year when my sister was abducted and gang raped while she was heading back home from her late evening class. Most days I would go to pick her up, but that particular evening I was lazing off watching a cricket match (and somewhere in my mind I held myself responsible for what happened). Of course, we filed a case against the unknown perpetrators and they were caught within days. They belonged to a family of criminals, and this translated into death threats (my family has literally lived through passing bullets) and making our lives hell through xyz means, like following us at places, shooting stones at our house windows at 2 am in the night, et cetera. My mom couldn't handle all this and jumped in front of a car (I felt responsible for this as well as it stemmed out of my undoing, though indirectly). She went through a surgery in her head and remained hospitalised for 37 days. Even when she was back home, she needed extreme (and expensive) care. My dad didn’t earn much, hence I had to start working on a 12 hour job to keep up with the additional costs of litigation and medication. Amidst all this my education had gone for a toss.
Mid of 2012, the court case was closed and the criminals were sentenced to a life time imprisonment. A month later my dad was diagnosed with cancer in his mouth and he had to undergo an extremely painful (and expensive) six month long treatment which included a surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Consequently, I had started working on another job and now, I was working 20 hours a day. We still struggled really really bad to pay the bills. My mother still lived in the deepest of depressions one can probably live in.
Fast forward 2014 - We managed to pay all what we owed to the people who had helped us with money and now I could get back to study. After all what had happened, I was convinced that my life would never be ‘normal’ and it would be a better call to enroll in a less demanding course (Chartered Accountancy is regarded as one of the toughest in India) that can be dealt with even with xyz major problems in life, and would help me get employed, hence, I wrote the entrance test for admission in Hotel Management colleges and got a national rank of 450 (with almost no study, it’s not as competitive as other Indian main stream exams) and got in a top 5 college that was 3 hour away from my house. I could have got a top 3, but those were far from my place and it was imperative for me to spend time with my family, my mom in particular. So, 2014 to 2017 I travelled six hours a day to attend an eight hour college and worked part time from home for one of the firms (sparing no time for studies/extra curriculars). I got placed at a global hotel chain as an entry level manager. I was a top performer, but didn’t like the job. I quitted and joined a global sports retail brand. Again, I was a top performer, but didn’t like the job. I had been a brilliant student all through my school life and it was only my life situations that had held me back from the typical ‘nerdy’ stuff. I felt terrible at both my jobs as these were not intellectually challenging and the only reason I’d work was to pay my bills. I did learn many new things, but I had a very strong feeling of being underutilised. You don’t need to be very smart to excel at these jobs.
During the last 1.5 years or so, I’ve self learnt (a lot of, but not enough) economics and finance to venture into the derivatives market and have performed very fine. I think that my life experiences have immensely helped me excel at trading, as after a point it becomes more of an activity of controlling the instinctive human emotions than knowledge and I’ve bled enough to learn how to control my thoughts and emotions. My life has been full of uncertainties and that’s how trading really is, you live and thrive in probabilities here. Recently, I’ve started learning quantitative trading as well which includes knowledge of higher order math and programming (I admit I’m finding it a bit taxing on mind as these subjects are very alien for me).
My drive for getting into an MBA program comes from my desire to get on the institutional (big banks) side of trading and thereon pave my way into the hedge fund industry after working for a couple of years. Yes, I know it’s extremely competitive out there and that’s all right.
I do not intend to play the victim's game. I think good academics, job, and extras are proxies for showcasing certain desirable personality traits. I wish to showcase the same through my story and be looked upon and judged rather objectively.
Target Schools -
A List - Tuck, LBS, Stern. I’m very much ‘tempted’ to consider Booth/Columbia as well, what do you suggest?
B List - Haas, Ross, Darden
C List - Judge, Saïd
What do you think about my choice of schools?
I plan to apply in R1 2021, though I’m open to wait for another year if there are things that I should get done to make my profile stronger.
Thank you very much for reading!
P.S. - Last year my sister got married with her school time boyfriend and is living a wonderful life. My mom and dad haven’t been bad either.
No matter what I go on doing in my life, my greatest achievement would still be taking care of my family amid extremely challenging times, where giving up often seemed like the easiest thing to do