Rajni’s journey to India’s #1 business schoolIIM Ahmedabad with a low GMAT scored

After spending 8 years in the banking sector, Rajni came to us hoping to get a top school admit.

The biggest issue that applicants with higher work experience face is convincing the business schools that an MBA will change their career trajectory significantly. With a low GMAT score of 690, Rajni’s MBA journey became more difficult.

No matter how many roadblocks came, Rajni still managed to score a Top School admit to IIM Ahmedabad!

Here’s her story:

Rajni’s goals story

The first and foremost task at hand was to help Rajni understand how a general Management MBA would change her professional outlook. Rajni knew what her goal was and had her reasons for pursuing them. However, the issue was to convey the same to the admissions committees.

To tell the admissions committee why a General Management MBA was necessary for her, Rajni had to find out how it would change her professionally. What thing about her clients would she start noticing post-MBA that she didn’t notice right now? And What was her AHA moment that made her realize this?

An AHA moment is any moment leading up to your application deadline, that convinces you that an MBA is must for your professional growth.

Along with the “Why MBA?” question, Rajni also needed more comprehensive research on a General MBA and the career prospects of the same.

in addition to research on General MBA’s career prospects, she also needed to find business schools that had high employability in the job functions she wished to target. This is an integral part of an applicants’ goals story. If the business school doesn’t seat recruiters from the job function of your choice, your employability for the school would be close to zero.

With all of the above questions answered and concerns dealt with, we moved forward to her essay analysis.

Rajni’s Application essays

One issue that we faced with Rajni’s application was her anecdotes. Every detail that you mention in your application should be supported by either facts and figures, or anecdotes, as far as possible. If you claim to have achieved certain professional milestones you should provide the figures like turnover, total sales, the valuation of the project you worked on. Similarly, if you claim to have certain skills, providing anecdotes is the best way to back up your claims.

The issue was Rajni was using old anecdotes to support her claims.

While those instances would still hold value, a fresher incident holds much more value.

The second issue is providing all of this information within the word limit provided by the school.

The solution we came up with was to break down each essay into smaller questions that we wanted to cover under each topic.

For example:

“Why this business school?” became;

1. What are all the career choices you have made so far, and why?

2. What are certain academic and social offerings by this particular school which will help you achieve your short-term goal?

Needless to say, these small tricks helped Rajni in creating a rocking profile and score an admit to India’s top business school IIM Ahmedabad.