Applicant with Engineering background gets accepted to ISB, India’s top business school

When Gargi sought us out to help her with her MBA admissions, she had 5 years of work experience and came from an engineering background. Her dream was to get an MBA admit to the best business school, and we are glad that we helped her make her dream come true.

Gargi got admitted to ISB, India’s top business school!

Here’s her story.

Gargi’s goals story

The initial draft of the story that Gargi had sent was very basic and missed any substance. It was a superficial account of what she expected her post-MBA career trajectory to look like. Her choice for a post-MBA function was product management. Although not as popular as consulting or investment banking, it’s still quite a popular post-MBA function choice for MBA applicants. Thus, making it specific was very necessary to show the admissions committee that Gargi wasn’t just following the herd but knew exactly how her short-term goal, along with her MBA and her past would help her reach her long-term goal. She needed to convey to the admissions committee what motivated her to learn more about the function. She also needed to show the admissions committee members that an MBA wasn’t the first step in her journey to her goal of becoming a product manager. Giving them a glimpse of the research she had done on the function was crucial but also difficult due to the word limit. However, we wanted Gargi to write her goals story as if she was already a product manager and had analyzed her handicaps in the field without having an MBA degree. Gargi took well to the feedback and some iterations later we had the perfect goals story for her.

Gargi’s essay analysis

The major question that Gargi was struggling to answer was, “Why should a business school give HER the admit?”. While Gargi’s examples to portray various skills were on point, she was unable to convert those skills into reasons that showed him as an asset to the school. She had great anecdotes that shed light on her leadership and interpersonal skill, but, did not mention how those skills would be beneficial to the business school. We then asked her to focus on what initiatives these skills could help her take during her time at ISB. Rather than providing a random skill-set she had, she needed to tell ISB her skill set that would help her utilize their curriculum. With the applications completed and submitted, we began prepping for the interviews as we were sure Gargi would get an interview call from ISB. She indeed got invited by the school for an interview which, although she was a little nervous, she was completely prepared for. It wasn’t a surprise when Gargi told us the amazing news, that she had been accepted at ISB’s MBA program, and will soon be starting classes.

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