A Beautiful Mind

My MBA journey this year has been both – tiring and interesting. I had some surprises, some funny moments and some disappointments. Fortunately, I managed to capture most of my moments on this blog. I initially started this blog to note down som of the interesting moments in my daily routine but ever since I started my MBA applications, most of my time was taken up my the application process. I came across almost all different phases of an average MBA application life-cycle. With this post I have just tried to summarize my MBA application journey so far:

• The Beginning
• Hectic Schedules
• Some Funny Moments :) (Don’t try this by yourself)
• Some Time to Relax
• My First Interview Call
• More Interviews: Olin (WUSTL) Interview, Kenan-Flagler and Johnson (Cornell) Interview
• First Success
• First Reject
• First Wait-list ( , no-no may be its time to )
• Yippeeeeeee: Getting nominated for BoB awads

After facing all different aspects of the MBA application life-cycle, today I am just happy to hold admits and a wait-list. I am just trying my best to convert my Johnson waitlist into an admit. Wish me luck please.

BTW … here are some useful links for prospective MBA applicants: Selecting Schools and Recommendations. I hope people find these useful. I have benefited a lot from MBA blots and hope to help out future applicants. If any of the future applicants out there have a query, just drop me a message or a comment and I will try my best to help you out.

This is another post meant to help future MBA applicants. If you are about the apply for the Fall 2011 season and are yet to identify your schools, you might find this post useful. For now, here is some information on how to go about one more very important part of your application. An important part of each MBA application is the Letter of Recommendation (LOR). It’s as important as the quality of the essays, the GMAT score or the interviews. It not only acts as a testimony to your capabilities and achievements but might just also reveal a different perspective on your personality. Moreover, the questions in the LORs vary from school to school. The variety as well as the length of the answers sought can vary drastically. There can be just 3-4 questions in case of one school or 7-8 questions in case of another school. There will be questions on your professional performance for sure. But many times questions on personal characteristics of the applicants personality are also asked. Hence it is very important to choose the correct person for your recommendations. Here are some tips on identifying the best person to write your LORs and on submitting your LORs:

• An ideal recommender is a person with whom you have worked on a regular basis (if possible, on a daily basis). This person should know you throughly in terms of your achievements till date, your capabilities, your weaknesses, your future aspirations and [to some extent] your personal background. This is very important because the recommender is supposed to provide some examples of your work. Examples on your strengths, your weaknesses or whatever. These examples are crucial to add value to your application. Otherwise the recommendation will be nothing but a cosmetic essay with a lot of adjectives to praise you.
• Avoid peer recommendations. Many (well almost all) business schools do not accept or prefer peer recommendations. A person who has supervised your work in detail is the best person to write your recommendation. Your immediate manager/supervisor or your client (if you are self-employed).
• If your current immediate manager is not a person who would be happy to see you applying for an MBA, do not ask him for recommendations. Do not jeopardize your employment in order to secure your recommendation. Ask a former manager at your firm or your previous firm. Make use of the additional information section in your essays to explain your choice of recommendations. In any case, if your chosen recommender doesn’t fall under the preferred choice of recommenders given by the school, make use of this section to explain why.
• LORs are demanding in terms of time and energy. Do not rely on the same recommenders for all of your applications. They might not have enough time to do all of your LORs. Try to identify three to four people who can write your LORs and then split your recommendations for each school depending on the situation.
• Many times offline formats of the questions in the LOR of each school are available on the school websites. Check the questions and brief your recommenders on these before asking them to write it. This way you can suggest some examples of your work (in case they need to be reminded ).
• Send the recommendation links (for online recommendations) to your recommender early. If its off-line, send the forms to them early. By early I mean as early as possible. Make sure they have enough time to fill the LORs. If they don’t do after a long time since you sent them the details, remind them on a regular (but not very frequent) basis.
• Try to choose a recommender who has good writing skills. I don’t mean a person who can write winning essays for competitions but someone who can write professional letters in an articulate manner.

I hope the future MBA applicant find this information useful. If in case anyone has some specific questions, just put in a comment here on my blog. I will try to answer your queries to the best of my ability.

Its been a long time since I posted any updates on my blog. I have been super busy with many things at my end and I am still not done with half of it. The past one month has been just crazy and the coming month is likely to remain so. Anyways, coming to what has been going on:

• I managed to submit an additional recommendation for my Johnson (Cornell) wait-list. I had to chase down the recommender for this but now this recommendation is in. I received a generic email from the school stating what all things I can do to improve my candidacy. I didn’t find it much useful as it was very generic in nature and came in a lot late (about six weeks after I got wait-listed). Anyways, my next plan is to send a follow-up letter with information on what all has changed/improved on my professional front. I am planning to send this to the school in this week (if I manage to get it done in a neat manner soon).
• On the work front, things have been just crazy. My current project is on full steam and into production. Any new updates now take weeks to move into production due to all the new approvals that we are required to take first. Some of these approvals were suggested (and implemented) by me but now looking at the number of approvals, it feels like we need to re-organize this process now. So time for some more meetings, suggestions and negotiations.
• On the personal (and MBA) front, I have started to look into some accounting courses for my Johnson (Cornell) wait-list. These appear to be good in terms of the course coverage and content. But now I need a course that I can cover in a short time so that I can update the school on it.
• I also volunteer for an NGO and we managed to organize a huge open-bus city ride for some child cancer patients in Mumbai. We manged to make a day for about 200 children and at the end of the day, it felt really nice to see them smiling.
• I also got nominated for the ClearAdmit Best of Blogging awards for 2009-10. It feels nice to be on the nomination list. I guess people are finding my posts useful.

More updates will come soon. Its time to get back to some urgent things that I still have on my plate.