Applicant with a Low GMAT score cracks London Business School

With more and more applicants now scoring over 700 on their GMAT, thanks to GMAT coaching centers, Krati’s score wasn’t exceptional or even competitive for her target school. However, this amazing candidate had such an interesting life and convictions for doing an MBA that we knew if we could help her create a profile that justified the same, she could crack her dream school.

After working with Krati for months, we are thrilled to share her success story of cracking London Business School (LBS) with you.

Here’s her story.

Hi everyone!

My name is Krati and I too was an aspiring MBA applicant like you until a few days back. For a very long time in my life, I wanted to do MBA and this plan started to materialize when I got married last year and discussed it with my husband.

What you are going to read ahead is my MBA application journey, which will not talk about how to get into London Business School but about the life-long learnings that I had in the last 14 months.

Getting the GMAT score

I started preparing for GMAT somewhere around September 2018 and opted for classroom coaching to manage studies and a full-time job simultaneously. After preparing for almost four months I took my first attempt at GMAT towards the end of January 2019 and to my dismay, I got a terribly low score. Given that I had always been good at academics I was disheartened. I knew I could do better and was not ready to settle down with the score. On self-introspection, I realized that my preparation was not up to the mark as I completely relied on the study material provided by my coaching classes. I picked up the GMAT books again in May 2019 and prepared on my own. I gave my 2nd GMAT attempt in May and scored 700. After seeing the score, I was not sure if I should be happy or sad about it. On one hand, I made an improvement of 90 marks but on the other hand, my GMAT was below average for all my Target schools.

Choosing an admissions consultant

After much contemplation with my husband & my brother, I decided to go ahead with my score and apply to my Target Schools – Wharton and London Business School. I discussed my profile with 4-5 admission consultants and all of them told me that my GMAT score was low for the schools that I was aiming for hence I should aim for other schools. On receiving such feedbacks, I researched about other tier-II B-schools, but I was not ready to settle down for anything but the best.

When I first approached PythaGURUS and spoke to Jatin, he too advised me that my Target schools were difficult to achieve given my GMAT score but at the same time, he agreed to put his 100% in crafting the best application for these schools.

The application process

During the 4 months period when I worked on the applications, I was provided with a systematic framework to follow. Jatin was the guiding light throughout the process. He was brutal with his feedbacks and made me work on 10-15 drafts for the Why MBA question till the time I didn’t get it right. While I had Jatin to help me with “How” part of the problem, it was the “What” part of the problem for which I had to do a lot of self-introspection. Throughout my life, I have been a very result-oriented person, to an extent that I would often not pay attention to the experiences I have gained. But the careful soul-searching that I did as a part of this process by thinking about all the major life – events made me realize that it is my experiences, irrespective of the results, that have helped me to be the person I am today. This indeed helps me understand a broader perspective of looking at things, a learning that I will take forward with me in my MBA journey.

My advice to MBA applicants

• Myth buster – GMAT is only one of the many factors of your profile. Your experiences, essays, recommendation and interview equally count.
• Working with an admission consultant doesn’t mean he will write the application for you. Your admission consultant will be the guiding light but it is you who will have to put all the efforts for your application.
• Believe in yourself you can do much more than what you think you can.
• Give your best shot! Even if you don’t get your desired result the experience will be worth it.

More Success Stories:

• How Gaurav cracked HKUST with a low GMAT score?
• Kshitij cracks Schulich Business School with a low GMAT score
• Sneha cracks a top US school, Purdue’s Krannert