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ayonde · 5 years

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How I researched and shortlisted Business Schools? (Blog #2)

After getting rejected from every one of the 12 MBA programs I applied in 2009, I thought hard about my career goals. I worked in various engineering functions in Telecommunications spanning from multiple projects to managed services. These fell under the umbrella “Operations” as function. I wasn’t in Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain, HR. My industry was Telecom, and my function was somewhere in the intersection of Operations and Consulting. This clarity about my industry and function made me realize that I was a Career Switcher.

I wanted to acquire skills that I currently lacked - a formal education in management - that would enable me to view a problem from multiple lenses. At present all my formal education, work experience was in technical problem solving. Using my MBA to bridge the skill gap would allow me to meet the criteria for employment immediately post MBA. My target jobs was Strategy & Operations in Deloitte, and Operations Manager in Amazon. For the first time during my MBA application process that spread from 2008 to 2013, I had a clear goal on which I could focus.

As a backup, my target firms were the Telecoms, the likes of Verizon, AT&T. T-mobile. “I would be a prized catch for any teleco organization given my background” I thought.

LinkedIn: After having my post MBA goals written in a format that was an action item. I used LinkedIn to search extensively for people who had a similar background like mine, and who graduated from schools I had applied to see what there were doing in 2010/11. At the same time I searched for people who were working in those job profile at my target companies and backtracked their journey through their MBA. I focused solely of Indian students as my path navigating through B schools and admissions was going to be very similar.

Rankings: Next I started to look at various rankings that comes out every year.

Financial Times

Economist

Businessweek Bloomberg

Forbes

US News

Eduniversal

Each ranking focuses on a different set of criteria e.g. Forbes gives more weightage to ROI. I read the Economist and Businessweek rankings at length specifically school reviews. Forbes rankings were helpful as it gave some schools that I wouldn’t have considered otherwise such as University of Connecticut.

Almost all schools that ranked high had a class profile with higher average GMAT score. I now knew that my chances of getting an interview would be higher from a school whose avg. GMAT score is in the 600 - 620 range. It will be impossible and almost futile for me to apply to higher ranked schools unless I can improve my GMAT score.

GMAT: I knew with my GMAT score of 610, I was a mediocre candidate at best. So I started working on improving my GMAT. I purchased The Manhattan Guide, those came with an online code that I could use to give mock tests. For my job at Nokia I had to travel across the city using the Delhi Metro (subway). I would use that time to study and course material on my way to the office, and then on the way back home. Weekends were reserved for taking mock tests.

In 2010, as I was preparing for the GMAT, I thought it would be a good mental exercise for me to take CAT and XAT. few weeks later based on my XAT score I applied to the 2 year MBA program (PGDM) at SP Jain at Mumbai, India and at Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada. While I got rejected at both the programs, few months later I was contacted by their respective adcoms. Schulich asked me if I’d be interested in being considered for their new launched Schulich India MBA that have students spend the first 6 month in India and the final year in Keele campus. Since I had close to 5 years of work experience by now SPJain asked me to apply for their 1 year full time executive MBA PGPM. I applied to both and got in. My first admits!!!

Diversity: Meanwhile, I had the opportunity to spend two months in a Baltic country because of my work. This exposed me to people from various spheres of life with whom I might have never interacted if I was still doing the same old same old. I met students playing guitar, flute and drums on the cobble streets of old town. I spoke with them and they were so happy studying music. One fellow gave up his job as an IT engineer to go to Amsterdam to play guitar. I met a student of arts who wanted to work as a cartoonist. All these interactions widened my horizons, and I started to see the power of diversity.

I now paid close attention to diversity in the class profile. I would get the percentage of international students in a cohort by viewing class profile online. Some schools would have a higher percentage of international students, and within international students a higher percentage of students would be from India and China. Having worked with in Huawei, I already had exposure to working with Chinese. And it seemed cost inefficient to pay in dollars/euros to have a class where I mostly interacted with people from the same background.

After all the work I had put in I was happy receiving two admits that arrived few months apart. I thought finally luck was favouring me. However, due to my new found love for learning from people around me. I now put great importance on diversity. I knew that I wanted to be in a program that exposes me to different things, people and experiences from different background, language, and countries. Schulich and SPJain are both big brand names in their respective countries of Canada and India.

Going against conventional wisdom, I did not enroll in Schulich Inda MBA or the SPJain PGPM. My MBA admission journey hasn’t ended yet.

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