Pleasant Surprise

I was pleasantly surprised around 2 days back when I got to know that I have received 3 IIM calls for CAT 2008. After 3 years of trying to crack CAT unsuccessfully, now I have finally managed to excorsize the ghosts of the past 3 years.  My 99.40 percentile does make me smile though of course, I dont plan on joining the IIMs this time.

Anyway, I will be attending the IIMB interview, just to go to the campus and tel myself that I can study here too if I want to.

Stanforded!! at the last minute

Put in Stanford R2 in the last minute. My app process is hereby complete with this.
Fingers crossed for HBS R1 results on Jan 21st!!!!

HBS interview update

Baring the london weather, I landed up at Berkeley Square house at 1.30 for my interiview at 2 PM.

The ad-com member who ushered me inside was very professional and began by thanking me for coming all the way from India.  The interivew as a whole was very conversational and according to me, went quite well.

Some questions-

1. What were the notions that were dispelled (taken from my essay)

2. Why HBS? How will you contribute at HSB? Which clubs? what after HBS?

3. How do you go about handling teams? How has ur style evolved through the years?

4. Describe the profile of an Ideal classmate that you would like to meet at HBS?

5. Describe India in general and Chennai in particular to a foreigner.

6. Is there anything that you would like me to ask you?

and a few more that i cant remember now.

Keeping fingers crossed. Lets see what happens.

ISB pictures

These are the pictures that I took of the campus when I went for the i/v. Could not go upto the student village. So these pics are of the main block. It consists of their library, Prof’s rooms and some conf. rooms.

Admitted at ISB

Ok, was kind of expecting this but still its a great feeling to be admitted. My first admit in my MBA journey. Feels great. Now have to keep around 2 lacs ready to pay and secure my seat.

Will soon post some of the pics that I took at ISB during the interview on campus. Maybe next post.

Meanwhile, my visa for UK seems to be taking its time. i hope it comes on time. Dont want to bother the HBS adcom for a change in interview date now!

In other updates, have decided to pack INSEAD R2. Cannot handle preparing for HBS i/v and INSEAD at the same time. Anyways, having a solid admit in ISB now makes me a lot more selective in choosing R2 schools. I am still undecided between Stan or Wharton or both. Anyways…will see. for now, its london dreams

Invited to Interview at HBS!!

The feeling is something that I cannot even describe right now. I knew that with my background and experience, its not totally impossible but the fact that they took only 750 candidates is really promising. I have heard that Harvard is really serious about an applicant if they call him/her for an interview.

In terms of achievement and feeling, it even beats IIT.

I thought that I will choose a personal interview as I am not altogether confident of my telephonic skills. As there are no centers in India, looks like I am going to London!!! This call makes my interview conversion for R1 100% 

Will update rest later. Btw,  the letter as I got it pasted below-

Dear L…,

Warm greetings from Harvard Business School!

After careful consideration of your application materials, we are

delighted to inform you that you have been selected for an interview

with a member of our MBA Admissions Board. We look forward to the

opportunity to get to know you better through our interview process.

We use an online scheduling system to manage our interview process.

Since we know that many of our interviewees expect to travel to either

our campus in Boston or one of our global hub cities for their

interview, we are sending this message in advance so that you are

aware of where our Admissions Board members will be traveling and

when. We hope this advance notice is helpful to you as you plan for

your interview.

 

 

 

Interviewed at ISB!

Had my interview for ISB today. very short notice. got the holy mail just 3 days ago. hardly had any time to prepare. Anyways, went well overall or so I think

Questions-

1. The average no. of years of experience in ISB is 5. Arent you a little early for an MBA program

2. Walk us through your career since graduation

3. Discuss a difficult time you had at work with a team and how did you resolve it? (did not sound very convinced with my response in this )

4. What do you do apart from work (Spoke about blogging and reading)

5. What is the name of your blog? what do you generally right about? (had a brainwave yesterday to take print out of a few of my blog entries. promptly handed it over to them )

6. You have written about a marketing project that you have done. can you elaborate? (they asked me to use the board for this)

went on for about half an hour and then ended. no questions on why mba or why isb or anything like that. bit strange!!

Anyways, overall feeling was good as i came out of it. lets see how it pens out. Fingers crossed for Nov. 20!!!

R2 schools

Have decided upon the following schools for R2

INSEAD- Nov 26

Wharton- Jan 6

It also looks like Stan is going to be pushed to R2. hmm…’What matters most to me and why?’ has now started haunting my dreams. If words could kill, I would be dead a 1000 times by now

In a lot of ways, ISB seems to be my best bet in this huge non-citi assist, chancy H1-B, Financial melt down. If only the results would come sooner. the wait is killing me.

have started working on Insead essays. so many of them. This would by far be the lengthiest application in my list. Also need to send them a set of official transcripts which i dont have at the moment. Lots of work for Insead…..

Harvard Submitted!

Have finally submitted the app of HBS about 3 days before the deadline. It came very close to being postponed to R2 thanks to my 1 week writer’s block before the career vision essay. Finally got everything in order and my recommenders also did me a huge favor by finishing all their stuff on time.

Overall, I am pretty happy with the way it has shaped up. The career vision essay seems a little unconnected to the rest of the app, but that cannot be helped i guess as they did ask for a vision and therefore had to gaze a lot into the future before unfolding the essay.

Am done with my R1 apps and now have to have a dekko at my R2 schools. And of course, the wait for R1 results starts.

Updates

The ISB site finally says- Application complete and shows that my GMAT score has been received. What a relief!! The earliest intervew calls are on oct. 3…the shorlist should be out a week before the shortlist which means…in another week!!!

Meanwhile, Harvard application is going on in full swing. Essays should be done by this week. Now , have to start the painful process of recos. Need to warm up to the recommenders again.