How Aarti earned Four top TIER MBA Admits with 1.2 Crores of Scholarships?
This is the story of an applicant that bagged crores of scholarships and will now be studying at no cost at a Top school in the US. But her MBA journey wasn’t easy.
She wanted to give the GMAT to improve her score only to have the exam center she had booked refuse service on the day of the test, TWICE!
Despite all of the roadblocks in her MBA application journey, she cracked three business schools with huge scholarships.
Aarti got into Vanderbilt with a 100% scholarship, Georgetown with 50% Tuition scholarship, and Olin.
Aarti started her career as a software developer but soon moved into Product Marketing. She wished to use an MBA to further her career in the same field, now on a Global level.
Aarti’s Goals Story
The first draft of Aarti’s goals story was understandably very rough. After reading a first few lines, we knew what the biggest problem was. Her goals were very brief and needed to be refined. To do so, we identified two flaws in her goals story.
Flaw 1: Her conclusion was an Island! It was floating somewhere far form her goals, with no apparent connection to them. When an applicant connects their past, present, and future through their goals, they know every tiny detail of their journey.
The problem is that they tend to forget to explain the critical moments that made them inclined towards their particular goal. In their head it all makes sense but for the reader, like the admissions committee, it becomes difficult to understand how did the applicant reach their future goal.
Flaw 2: Aarti needed to perform more exhaustive research on her future employability in her selected field. She needed to be sure that the companies she was naming as her probable post-MBA employers actually hired fresh MBA graduates as Product Strategy Heads.
Quick tip: When you name possible employers to a business school, for your post-MBA goal, research a couple things:
- Use names of companies that recruit at your target school.
- What roles do these companies hire for from your target school?
Aarti’s goals story was missing these crucial points.
However, when she came back to us with an updated version of the same, she had taken into consideration every small feedback and had a strong story.
The last-minute networking issues
We can’t stress enough about how important networking is to write an exceptional MBA application. Aarti understood that. She meticulously went over every networking guide or resource we provided her. She also started on time as Networking is a background process for MBA applications.
However, she made a mistake that many applicants unintentionally make. She left a query for the last moment.
Aarti scheduled a networking call with an admissions committee member and had her questions prepared. At the last moment, she started doubting the quality of her questions and reached out to Jatin for feedback. Having wrapped up his work for the day, and left his desk, Jatin could not immediately help her. He could reach his desk in just enough time to do some of his own research and help Aarti out.
This incident is important because had the events transpired any differently, Jatin not being able to reach his desk in time, would have led to a wasted networking resource.
After a long journey of applications, Aarti walked away with three amazing admits with even better scholarships.
- Vanderbilt Owen- $120,000 (Full-tuition scholarship)
- Georgetown McDonough- $40,000 (50% tuition fellowship)
- Olin Business school
