Mayank cracks Cornell with an average Indian engineer profile

Getting into a school like Cornell is already a difficult task. But with a profile that comes from an oversaturated pool of Indian applicants, it becomes even more difficult.

Mayank came to us with 4 years of work experience and a 720 GMAT score. his profile had all the qualities that the profiles that Indian engineers have while applying to business schools.

But he still cracked Cornell, a US top 20 business school.

What did he do differently?

Mayank’s goals story

In his first draft of the goals story, Mayank did not indulge in the technicalities of his goals story. His reason was that he might not end up sticking to the story after all, which is understandable. He managed to write up an impressive goals story even though it was his just first draft. however, it was not perfect.

Mayank had been part of the Engineering background for a long time and planned on moving to General Management post his MBA. His whole story was dependent on AHA moments. An AHA moment is the incident that makes an applicant realize that they’ve hit a plateau in their current professional situation and exposes them to a different job function that promises to be more professionally fulfilling.

The other thing that Mayank’s story required was the names of organizations that would hire him. Being an Indian student abroad, Mayank would require a Visa to work internationally. He needed to name organizations at his target schools, that hired international students and provided them with Visa.

Mayank also needed to specify his reasons for all of his decisions. If he said he wanted to target certain markets, India and Latin America, in is job function post-MBA, he needed to clarify why.

With such things taken care of, Mayank almost had a perfect goals story.

Mayank’s essay analysis

The biggest problem arises when applicants don’t utilize interesting stories from their past in their essays. While Mayank’s essays were quite generic at times, we weren’t too worried about that as we knew some feedback and guidance would solve that issue.

However, the fact that he wasn’t able to pull amazing stories from his past was quite a bit of an issue. He was picking up stories that he had already mentioned in his resume. Imagine this, you go on a date with someone you met through a dating app. You have already read a few details about them and their life on their profile. When you meet with them, they keep telling you the same details as on their profile. There will probably never be a second date.

The same is with business schools. your resume is a very formal document and reveals very factual information about you. This is why business schools have essays to get to know the applicants better. But if you choose to keep repeating the same information from your resume, the schools will only come to regret providing you with the space to tell more about yourself.

So, we pointed it out, and he began listing important stories and instances in the next iterations of her essays.

The result was that Mayank received an admit from Cornell, a top 20 US business schools.