Profile Evaluation : Indian Male, GMAT 740

Question

Hi,

I wrote GMAT recently and got a score of 740 (Q 51, V40), AWA - 5, IR - 5.

I am an Indian male with about 7 years of experience. (18 months in IT as software developer, 10 months in an Educorporate as a faculty and content developer, and last ~ 5 years in Research & Analytics in Business Research).

Have worked majorly with Consulting clients from international geographies; however international exposure in terms of being physically present is nil.

Have two promotions in my current industry, of which one i got within six months of joining.

However, I have a gap in workex of about 6 months due to some emergency at my home but i could join back the same company i left and at the exact same position after the things settled. In fact i had to postpone my gmat by about a month for the same reason. Kindly suggest whether this is a big issue and can this be addressed since i find myself in an awkward situation despite a genuine problem.

Undergraduation: BE in Electrical from one of the top colleges of India (NIT) in 2005

Undergrad Acads: Okayish (Not too great). 68.7% (in top 25% of my class)

Extracurriculars : Fine (Regular sports involvement such as Cricket (school, college, company, club (play at semiprofessional level) ), Tennis, and Badminton (winner of championship in school day); Singing; Video blogging; sub head of national level tech festival at my college); Co-creator and the mentor of an innovative mathematical product on India's largest MBA portal.

Community Service: Provide free education through my own online portal, also create and publish educational videos through my Youtube channel, provide free mentoring and private tutoring to students for aptitude tests. Founder of a Non profit venture to promote quality education for free.

I am looking for a post MBA job in management consulting.

I am looking for suitable Bschools to apply in R1. Kindly suggest a few good Bschools that could be classified as "on par", "reach", and "safe" for my profile.

Also it would be great if you can shed some light on the scholarship considerations.

Thanks in advance.

Admissionado · Answer

Hey there my friend, Well, you sure have a fantastic GMAT, you graduated from the next-best school

, which carries a good deal of weight, and you are outside of IT. All of these are excellent and will strengthen your profile. You STILL have to deal with coming from a tough pool, so we will of course take that into consideration. Basically everything I see is excellent... BUT (you knew a bit was coming) I don't yet see where you specifically stand out. Right now for me, there is something a bit "Standard" feeling about your profile - Good school, good GMAT, work in education, a solid career.... but where are your WOWs?? where are the UNIQUE factors that are in your profile that will make your application reader REMEMBER you, so that they can later CHOOSE you???? Now I'm not saying it's not there, I'm SURE it is... but you need to look for it, find it (or them) and exploit it. And at this point your ability to create fantastic unique, passionate, honest essays is what will get you in beyond your profile. I wouldn't worry about your work gap at all. Six months is totally okay, and you can either tell them the story if it's interesting enough, or maybe even elide it, since you returned to the same employer int he same position. I could be more precise if I knew your profile more intimately, but roughly, taking your two main disadvantages (GPA and applicant pool) into consideration, I'd say Top 10 schools are reaches for you. Schools ranked about 10-25 should be your sweet spot and everything below should be a safe school. This is very approximate! And once we talk more concretely about what goals and what schools then we can see what might be a good application strategy for you. Anyhow, think a little bit about what you might be able to leverage to build your profile in the unique manner I suggested, and if you have anything else... anything at all.. just drop a line.

EddyTeddy · Answer

Thanks a ton for you assessment of my profile. Really appreciate it!

I completely agree that i need to exploit certain aspects of my profile and bring those out to make a compelling story, which has a wow factor. Can you guide me on what directions should i think? Also, i have a tentative list of bschools in mind. Kindly help me assess possibilities in the following - Chicago Booth, Darden, Ross, Cornell, Tepper, and Duke. Thanks again.

Admissionado · Answer

Good start... So very roughly... I'd say Booth is a stretch. Duke a near-stretch, and the the other schools on your list should be about competitive. Which means that you should probably add a safe school or two to your list.

As to guide you for how to find your unique point... well everyone has their own unique point (that's why it's called "unique point"

) so if you can throw me some ideas, I can react and tell you which ones work better.

EddyTeddy · Answer

Thanks Jon. I have a few points that i would want to put forth and that i did not highlight earlier. - I was the College Topper (out of 450 students) of an aptitude and technical test conducted by a group known as PEP (on behalf of 15 multinational companies ). Only three people were selected. - I held 33 rank in my engineering Entrance Exam. - The product "Quant Question A Day" , which I ran on India's largest MBA portal was significant because of its appeal to ~20,000 subscriber during 2006-2008 and hence also attracted B school advertisements on the threads where it was carried. In 2011 , Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore came out with a case study that had the mention about this product. If you google this product's name you will find plethora of avenues where this product has since been used. - If you can count it as a community work, i also taught poor children in my college campus who were primarily children of our hostel's mess workers - I have been managing projects since last 3.5 years, and have supervised over 20-25 people, including analysts/ senior analysts / associates / senior associates across key business research projects - Major chunk of my assignments have been with consulting clients in Telecom or Automotive space Do you think i can highlight something out of these points more or can you spot some kind of uniqueness coming out? Thanks in advance.

Admissionado · Answer

Well I think the project management stuff is really good to develop your profile, but this is not really "unique", it's just very good. The other stuff (tutoring, doing well on exams, etc.) although all nice, is not really unique either. We need to think of unique in terms more of something qualitative than one good story. Ask yourself for example: What can I tell the AdCom that they have NEVER heard before.... and we are talking "saving a bus of school children from a burning fire" "invented the world's first foldable spoon" ...

... so on. And to find this thing, sometimes it takes a bit of pushing and pulling and thinking and rethinking... so just keep on working on it.

Profile Evaluation : Indian Male, GMAT 740

Prep Toolkit

Top 5 GMAT Debrief Videos

615 to 715 in 15 Days (Ria's Strategies)

More than Quant/Verbal Abilities: Speed vs. Accuracy

745 with Only Self-Prep and GMAT Club

From 555 to 765: 210-point Improvement

Perfect 805 Score Debrief by Julia

My Rewards