Aatman cracks a Top 30 globally ranked business schools, SDA Bocconi

As an engineer with just 3 years of work experience, Aatman fit right into the oversaturated MBA pool of Indian Male Engineering applicants. An applicant pool which makes it very difficult to stand out and create a remarkable story. But we were determined in helping him dig deep and create a goals story that wasn’t just unique and impressive, but also authentic and honest.

It worked as he got into his dream business school, SDA Bocconi!

Here’s his MBA journey.

Aatman’s Goals story

Aatman was not fully realizing the potential of his goals. He was writing them from a very short-sighted perspective initially. Since he wanted to move back to his father’s business eventually after an MBA, his goals story wasn’t able to convey the optimal utilization of his MBA education. Now, this can be a problem with a lot of applicants that have entrepreneurial goals in their MBA applications. Fortunately, Aatman wasn’t just shooting blanks with his attempt at a goal of working at his family’s business. He had worked in operations and could use that to his advantage to show transferrable skills from his past. All he needed was a mentor to help him navigate the process of creating a goals story out of them.

Aatman’s essay analysis

Before starting with the essays, we provided Aatman guidance on pre-MBA networking and asked him to start on that as the information would come in handy during his essays. In his first essay to his target school, Aatman was writing a very school-oriented story, i.e. a story he though the school admissions committee members would like. But his resume did not mention any achievements that pointed to him having the skills his essays focus on. The other problem in his essays was that he had written very superficial accounts of incidents. He was trying to explain how he had learned that leadership was an important skill but failed to give the specifics of the incident that had formed his opinion. When applicants make such generalizations, the impact of their conclusion, in this case, the importance of leadership, gets watered down. But, Aatman was quick to pick up on the feedback and you already know the result. He cracked a globally top-ranked MBA program at SDA Bocconi.

Here’s a glimpse of what Aatman thought about his journey with PythaGURUS.