How Nilesh cracked three top MBA programs with a $58,000 Scholarship?
The MBA application process can be a rollercoaster. Sometimes you could know just the right stories to tell, and the other times you won’t even be able to convey why you want an MBA.
Nilesh was also going through these motions when we first started working.
Starting his MBA journey with no concrete goals, to scoring three admits, to Kenan Flagler, IE Spain, and Rice University with a significant scholarship ($29,000 for each academic year)
we are really proud of Nilesh for sticking it out even when the process felt harsh or difficult.
Nilesh’s goals story
The first feeling one would get on reading Nilesh’s goals story was confusion. At first, we weren’t sure what he was trying to convey through his goals story. After a second read, we figured out what he was trying to convey.
Nilesh had chosen investment banking as his goal. However, he had confused it with the use of technology in investment banking. So basically, he did not really have any goals after the first draft of this exercise.
After heeding our feedback, and watching a few relevant videos from the Interviewninjas library, Nilesh decided that consulting was the most suitable post-MBA choice for him. More precisely, tech consulting.
Since Nilesh was already a software engineering analyst, he was able to create a seamless link between his past, present, and his short-term and long-term goals.
Once we had a clear idea of what his goals were and had a plan to approach it, we decided to move forward with the next steps in the application process.
The effect of networking on Nilesh’s goals
Since networking can be the most time-consuming part of creating an application, we believe in starting applicants on the same pretty early in the process.
Networking had a very strong impact on his tech consulting story as a short-term goal. He wished to go into consulting after going through the resources that we had provided him, and within consulting, our key job was to help him show a strong connect with Consulting in a technology-related vertical. He started asking related questions on calls to most of his contacts at schools and found that the visa issues, international exposure, and language barrier are major factors for Indian students wishing to make a career in consulting.
He, after further networking calls and exhaustive research, found that the friction created by the aforementioned factors were quite low in tech consulting, a field he hadn’t explored much prior to this.
After we had a detailed talk about the same, he decided that tech consulting was the perfect post-MBA function for him.
Nilesh’s application essays
The first issue arose in the accomplishment essay. What a colleague of yours might think is impressive, might not be valuable to an admissions committee member. The reason for that statement is when applicants write about an achievement from their professional work experience, they tend to write as if someone with complete knowledge of their job function would be assessing it.
After seamlessly completing his goals assignment, networking, essays, we started working on the essays, and recommendation letters. Before we could even finish with all the applications to various schools, and start with the next step of interview preparation, schools started reaching out to call Nilesh for an interview.
This was exciting for us, as we knew that our stories were resonating with what schools had in mind, and we could anticipate success.
Without any further ado, we started on the various interview resources and guides and got ready for mock interview sessions. After grilling him with every possible question that the schools could throw at him, we were confident that he would have a good interview experience.
