Colours of Thoughts

When I saw the name for the first time, I wondered ‘What is a cereal name doing on this school’s website?’

The year was 2007 and on a sunny sultry afternoon I was speaking to my Dad over the phone and he told me about this great b-school right in Hyderabad called ISB or Indian School of Business. Well if you have been in hyderabad for a long time you will know that the beautiful cosmopolitan city though a hub for quite a good number of industries has no ‘national’ institutes. As in, no IIT or IIM. The closest we had was a IIIT. Not that I was intelligent or smart enough to get into either of these, it is just the hyderabadi in me. Anyway, today there is an IIT Hyderabad.

And so I visited their website and was pretty impressed. And for the ‘What next?’ question, I had my answer – work for two years, get a taste of life, give the GMAT and try and get into ISB to push my career. Now, I was oblivious of the fact that Harvard and the like were the Godfathers of b-schools and ISB might as well be termed as the Harvard (or Wharton?) of India. All I knew was I wasn’t hardworking enough to bell the CAT and the prospect of being evaluated by the two digits you score over a three hour exam while competing with peers who are giving this their third shot was not attractive. And weighing all these I decided that I was giving the GMAT and applying to a school that looks into ‘me’ and not my percentile and takes my work ex into account. Ambitious ain’t it? Oh yes, it’s just the age.

Then Interaction Design happened and I liked my job and life was all well with the GMAT thing almost taking the backseat until a wake up call which opened up a plethora of questions in the likes of ‘What next?’. Answers to such questions were sometimes evaded, delusional or as blunt as ‘Let’s see’.

And after pushing registering for the GMAT for weeks, I finally pulled my socks and registered and now that I had registered, I thought I should give it my best shot. And as expected I was swamped with work from the next day onwards leaving very few waking hours at my disposal. Banking on my not so great profile and my not so great score I applied to ISB in round 1 in 2009 even before I researched other schools risking the fact that I belonged to one of the most competitive pools of b-school applicants – Indian, IT, Male . Actually, no other school was as attractive as ISB was to me or at least that is what I thought. Result from ISB – dinged without an interview. By the way ‘dinged’ means ‘rejected’.

Meanwhile though I knew other schools existed, some better than ISB, none really were as attractive. Surfing the web, reading blogs by fellow applicants, looking up countless sites, meticulously reading through entire forum threads in pagalguy, talking to friends – all introduced the world beyond ISB to me. Now that ISB had refused to include me in their class, I decided to explore and apply to other programs as well. In the meantime, I discovered the concept of ‘Design Thinking’ in business. Intrigued, I scoured the web for more information on this and landed on couple of articles by interesting people across the world on the edge design thinking could bring to business education. Nailed it – that is something I want to do given that my current work experience does this in a tiny way and this path would be the best possible extension and a great way ahead.

The MMM program was one of the very first such programs I came across. After reading the description for the first time, I knew I was going to apply. All this while I was ignorant of the fact that Kellogg is in the likes of Harvard, Stanford and Wharton in the US. The other school was Tepper School of Business @ Carnegie Mellon University. Now this is again a great school in the US. Their MIPD track is what attracted me. Rotman, in Canada, was another interesting option, since their dean Prof. Roger Martin is the author of ‘The Design of Business’, an interesting take on business and a book I happened to read. And their program had a business design focus as well.

So finally my list looked like Kellogg MMM, Tepper MIPD, Rotman and ISB. ISB, because it was my first (and unrequited) love and is the most cost effective option and plainly because I refused to give up on it. Unfortunately Rotman’s deadlines were too close for me to apply and that left me with Kellogg MMM, Tepper MIPD and ISB.

Before re-applying to ISB, I wanted to improve my GMAT and started off and even blocked my exam dates. While figuring a way out of my very early burn out, I had a call with one of the admissions personnel at ISB and he advised me that I should consider giving GMAT once again only if I was sure to get above 750. Now, that was comforting and so I shelved my GMAT plans and started working on ISBs application. Took me around two months with tones of revision and input from a college friend to submit the application for R2. And the result – dinged without an interview – again! Argh!!

Tepper’s deadline was close to Kellogg’s with just a week in between. And three more essays took me a month and a half to complete with the umpteen revisions and re-revisions. Finally submitted my app in Jan 2011. Kellogg had a two part application and I finished the easier Part 1 even before submitting Tepper’s application. However, Part 2 is the chunk of the application with the essays and within a week after submitting Tepper’s application I closed the essays and submitted Kellogg’s application. The introspection and early versions of the previous essays did help me a lot and I did learn a bit from the many revisions.

Now the wait started and I was invited to interview. Whoa! Finally an interview call. Yes, Kellogg interviews almost everyone who applies and so it was not a great achievement, but certainly a morale booster. And the interview, my first ever b-school interview, went well after being postponed once thanks to Chicago’s worst blizzard in 25 years. ‘Decent enough but not wonderful’ was my first feeling as I stepped out of the tavern. My end note – ‘Could do better’. Anyway it was done and I headed back home fingers crossed.

The next surprise came in February when I was invited to interview with Tepper. I chose to visit campus and interview in campus. I flew down to Pittsburgh and spent the first half of the day touring the campus, talking to current students, sitting in a lecture and understanding more about Tepper. I was impressed and felt this is one great place to live and one great school to get an MBA. The fact that I had lived in Pittsburgh for a month sometime back was only more comforting. The low cost of living and the proximity to the one of the best design schools in the world were a big plus. And then the interview happened – casual, cool, no pressure and very conversational. I enjoyed every minute of our discussion and the interviewer even helped me find my way back to the airport. Stepping out of Tepper, I felt good.

And then Tepper announced its results. Dinged!

Two down, one to go. With a month to go before Kellogg announces its results, I decided it would be another ding. The simple rationale being – ‘If Tepper and ISB rejected me there is no way Kellogg is going to accept me’. So after brooding over this for a couple of days, hitting rock bottom and rising back, I decided to sit for the GMAT again and started preparation too. Shortlisting schools was in progress and I even wrote to a couple of schools getting my profile evaluated and queries answered. CR, RC and PS basics were almost done and preparation for GMAT was in full swing.

And then with a week more for Kellogg’s results, I get a phone call from the admissions office congratulating me on my admission to the MMM program, Class of 2013, at Kellogg School of Management.

Providence.