ISB Done Kellogg Next

ISB Over!!! After so many drafts I finally finalized my ISB essays and now have a much better idea of what to write in essays.

Kellogg essays are much better in terms of word limit. Writing an influential Prizes would have been much easier for Eric Segal than an influential Love Story. The more we get to talk of, the better we paint ourselves. And Kellogg essays give doubly spaced 2 pages. Almost double of ISB. Sigh!! That indeed is a relief. Today I was in mood of writing a draft but am feeling very sleepy now. Read a nice article on Kellogg website about the induction of fresher batch.

Meanwhile I also have to write TOEFL. Any pointers on TOEFL preparation? I bought a book which has 6 practice sets and I guess it should be sufficient.After TOEFL I plan to take up the prized MIT essays.

A lot of action is in pipeline and slowly slowly surfacing. An introduction in form of ISB was a good warm up (well actually more than just warm up).

As I step into the US b-school process, I hope to gain more seriousness. Thankfull workload is super mild.

Need to scan a couple of douments and get one photo done and ISB application would be complete :)

Essays started

Bad that I was out of blogging for so long but it was for a cause. I was drowned into first set of my essays. Did first, second and third drafts and got them reviewed iteratively by some friends. A mix of closest friends to aquiantance one of whom had converted ISB call last year.

And you know what... its important to understand the suggestions but impossible to implement them all... cause they can be poles apart.

Anyways I read somewhere that the essays for first school take the longest and by the time we are into third school, it becomes a lot easier to do the essays. But the first essays take real long time. At times when I got frustrated, I just stepped outside and thought why didn't I join IIM Indore, only to regain the confidence back and get back to applications.

Few days back a friend asked me that in my school selection criteria, I have not selected Kellogg but in my page my R1 schools have Kellogg too. Actually a month back when I talked to my recommender, he asked me why am I not applying to top five. He told me that I must try atleast one or two of them. Well given a choice between HBS/Stanford GSB/ Wharton/ Kellogg/ Chicago, I chose Kellogg as Wharton/Stanford ask for exceptional acads, HBS kinda looks out of reach for a general profile like mine, Kellogg's emphasis on teamwork attracted me. A bit of more research, a glance at essays and I knew that I like Kelloggs. Not so huge class size, emphasis on teamwork, good placement percentage for consulting etc attracted me. Though Kellogg is more known for Marketing, I loved the number of electives they have to offer. I can customize the course in whatever way I want. So I knew that Kellogg was going to be the addition.

Few days back I got an anonymous comment by Holden on one of my previous posts. The reply in itself would be a post. Will write on it when I get to it. As of now I have Kellogg lined up. Will officially start on Kellogg essays tomorrow.

Will be a lot more frequent in next one to two weeks as I have a lot to discuss.

Million dollars or Knighthood

Lemme tell you one thing, no matter how early you start, you'll always face a time crunch for essays and applications. I have been writing essays for ISB these days and boy, its one hell of a task. For the first essay about diverse ISB culture, I wrote some 4-5 drafts before arriving at first rough draft. The word limit of 300 words is too crippling. Anyways I found the third essay about manager's feedback easy. The second essay is still my concern. I wrote one draft for it which was rejected by my friends (I am sending essays to friends for review). I sat yesterday to write it again and wrote a modified draft. I don't think I myself am convinced by it. So let me put my thoughts in here.

A million dollars mean independence from constraints. Its about freeing myself from the biggest need of life. So what would I do if I have million dollars. Now ISB won't have any interest in my dream about spending my life on hawaii beaches. The decision should be reflective of my character. Well, the character which I have shown in my other essays. It can be related to a passion of life. For example, I am from Bihar, a state in India. Whenever I go outside for lunch or dinner, I see restaurants on rajasthani theme, punjabi theme, bengali theme, gujrati theme etc. I have never ever seen any restaurant on bihari theme. There are lots of food preparations specific to Bihar which are very tasty but unknown to people outside. Maybe I would like to open a chain of restaurants which showcase the food of Bihar, the festivals we celebrate and the food specific to those festivals. It would also show the positive side of the state which is already infamous for a lot other wrong things.

Knighthood. Knighthood is also about a passion. But this passion is about a much larger impact. Its about impact on society. Maybe its about setting an example for the world. All of us dream of some ways we can improve the world. Recieving a national honor for the same would mean setting a path for the next generations. Its about bringing that passion out and showing it to the world.

I am not sure if I am right about the interpretations. Please comment if you think it should be something else. Now when it comes to writing about this, it is difficult to take things out of heart into the mind, translate in english and write. I felt the need for a structural approach for the same. To avoid bias, I am not posting any sample structure.

Now the way I look at it is, its about discovering ourselves. Lets do it.

Updated on 18th August 2007

Thanks a lot guys for your inputs. finally i could successfully write the first draft for the essay. Bihar restaurant was just a time pass example I had taken to understand things, perhaps anon2 took it by words. But in the course I have learnt that the essay demands for things about me and my character. The million dollar approach or Knighthood approach what would I prefer to take in a situation. Any example in this essay dilutes the context and limits it to the example which is highly undesirable.

I got my first draft reviewed by few friends who gave some valuable inputs. Things look better now as far as this essay is concerned.

Thanks to all for their inputs. If someone still has some inputs please comment. It might just be useful for those hitting this page.

ISB's Million Dollar Baby

So I started my essay journey with ISB. And I must say this 300 words limit is the biggest problem one will face in ISB essays. I mean when I wrote the first draft of first essay, it was 650 words long with half of the content. I did it 5 times either by trimming off or by writing fresh to arrive at an exact 300 words essay.

I mailed my first essay to three of my close friends (including my brother) for review. And one wrote back suggesting one more instance to add. Boy I still have to understand where to fit that extra sentence.

The 3rd one was smoother. I just had to become my own manager, readout my appraisal form and form it into a paragraph.

The problem is with second essay. Here's what it reads:

A million dollars or knighthood: what would you choose and why? (300 words max)

I want to write about million dollars although all my friends chose Knighthood. I feel more truthful when I think about million dollars. But what to write is my concern. I asked my friends they say what the essay analysts say. Hey btw I found the analysis to this and other essays at these places:
Vibranture
EssayLever
Pulyanithinks

But I am still not able to start off. Chaos gave me lots of suggestions regarding the same. And I understand them all, but its like writing a love letter, you've always known what to write the problem which remains is.... where to start from??? (and this love letter has a word limit too )

Any suggestions...

MBA... Fine... But what in MBA!!!

In the initial days, I always questioned myself, "Why not Investment Banking (IB)? Everyone else is thinking of IB! There's huge money in it."

Couldn't convince myself. Because of IB domain, talks of credit derivatives, securities, CFA, FRM are kinda common in my company. And people talk of IB more than they talk of dot NET or java.

But I wanted to do something else. Something which was more inclined towards business. Consulting and General Management came into my mind. Marketing was out of question since childhood. I am not carved out for marketing. With time, I have developed a special inclination for Consulting. One reason was that I had seen it in action. 2 of 3 years of my work ex have gone while working for a Consulting firm's IT shop. I have had a very close feel of the consulting paradigm of work.

By the time I was done with choosing schools, I was pretty much decided that I want to get into Consulting. Next was to decide between IT Consulting and Management Consulting.

Being in a firm which is the right mix of IT consulting, Management Consulting and Investment Banking, I got a chance to observe these fields very closely. IT consulting goes pretty technical. Even I do it besides writing the code. Management Consulting sounds much closer to business.

In Management consulting the options are Strategy and Operations. I did some reading on Wikipedia, Vault's guide and even bought a book on Strategic Consulting. I think its been the career I've been looking for. Very core to business, case driven, and very challenging.

So now I do have an answer to what I want to do (Strategy Consulting) and not what I don't want to do (IB). This is the time I should start writing first draft of my essays.

Few days back I wrote the first draft of Why MBA essay. Thanks to clear admit for an excellent article on the same. Will share my take on the same.

School Selection

Ok this post has been long overdue. When I started thinking on these lines, I had two things with me, a deep confusion rather voidness in my head, and another huge confusion or maybe voidness in Chaos's head. And by our headless talks, we used to create more chaos in our minds.

Then, because we were not very sure what we wanted to do post MBA, we took financial Aid as first parameter of screening the schools from our initial list of top 20 schools. But when we digged into it, we got to know lots of relevant parameters. We compiled the data on schools in an excel document. The parameters we listed were:

• class size
• financial Aid (for international students)
• Location (or nearest big cit)
• Cost of attendance
• School Focus (finance, general mgmt etc.)
• Engineer percentage in current batch
• Expectations from Applicants

With this data in hand, I knew that I couldn't apply to NYU, UC Berkeley, UCLA and Cornell as they don't have good loan programs.

I am not targeting top notch schools because of an Avg GMAT score and common profile(Indian IT with less work ex).

I was really interested in schools with small class size because of healthy peer to peer and peer to faculty interaction. That gave me options of Tuck, Emory and Darden.

Tuck's closely knit community, single MBA program focus and small class size made me choose it as one school in my list. Darden's case study approach and emphasis on leadership interested me. Emory's location (Atlanta), class size, and feedback from a friend who is joining Emory this fall made me choose it as one of the schools in my list.

I seriously considered Michigan Ross too. But only thing that scared me off is their emphasis on community involvement. I don't have strong community involvment (with no visible strong prospects in near future).

I wanted to apply to one school with rank in 15-20 range as a backup school. I also wanted to keep ISB as one of my 5 schools.

In every band I had these schools to consider.

Band 1: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton
Band 2: Chicago, Tuck, MIT
Band 3: Darden, Ross, Duke
Band 4: Emory, Purdue, UT Austin
Wildcard: ISB

Band 1:
With no big score, no unique profile, and less than avg work ex I had to drop this band. Later when I saw the essays, I was happy that I dropped.

Band 2:
The first thing I was sure of when I thought of applying was that I don't want to do finance. I was sure I have seen finance pretty closely. My brother is in Equity Research, and I work for an Investment Banking Consultancy. So Chicago had to go out of my list.

MIT states it very clearly that no of yrs of work ex takes the back stands when it comes to selection criteria. On top of that a whopping 34% of engineers population forced me to consider it. Boston as a location is also good for consulting (I was dwindling between general mgmt and consulting).

Tuck I've already stated. And I read one blog by Tagad_Tale and got to know a lot more about Tuck. So if you are applying for Tuck, you can refer to this blog for information.

Band 3:
This was the toughest one, so here I had to select one instead of eliminating others. I selected Darden because I could visualize the life at Darden when I went through their website. Their case study method of study sounded very aligned to my interest (consulting). I just went ahead and picked up Darden.

Band 4:
Emory is in Atlanta so the industry exposure is really good. Class size is small which makes it even more lucrative. On Emory's website they have a very good section where they have mentioned how things progress when you are in the school. Here's the link for that. Purdue is I heard good for operations. They have an emphasis on quantitative approach which suits operation profile. UT Austin I heard that isn't such a good experience when you are there. Please correct me if I am wrong but this was a feedback of a friend's senior who happened to be at UT Austin. Emory was the obvious choice.

Wildcard:
ISB is in India. And I anyways want to come back to India when I am done with my loans. ISB is on my list more because of personal reasons than any comparisons.

So here I am, done with selection of my 5 schools (well... not yet my).

Tagad_Tale was in a confusion of IB/Consulting/Trading till he actually got his internship. I think its easy for someone to understand this confusion if he/she is from India. I'll discuss my journey through this confusion in my next post.

Back to Apping

My last one month has been very busy. One thing I must tell you is that working at client location is real fun. There was learning, as I worked very closely with my manager, and there were surprises; for instance, one fine morning on my third day at client office, when my manager was gone on a week's vacation, I was called and asked to explain the things we were going to do for them and how such things justified the time we had asked for.

The first thought which ran through my mind was...

Interesting

Anyways, now I am back to my peaceful world of MBA application. Today Chaos told me that our blogs are featured on Clear Admit as the members of class of 2010 bloggers. So I came here to show the persisting seriousness at my end.

First of all, let me thank all of you who supported me through my indecisive phase just after GMAT. I've gottenn over now and all set for R1 applications.

In next post, I'll discuss my schools (no I dn't own them but it feels good when I say my schools:) ) and why I chose them.

I'll also discuss about the Why MBA essay I've started working on.