My wife, my family who have encouraged me and tolerated me these past few months. My friends who had to tear their hair apart because of my constant need for sounding boards, and yet who were still ready to turn around an essay or a resume for me in the middle of the night. Recommenders who have appreciated my past work and interviewers who have endorsed my candidacy. People who appreciated when I did right and even more importantly pointed out when I took a bad step. I couldn’t have done it without any of you and would like to thank all of you for your support.

And now as one journey ends another begins and I hope to use this blog to chronicle my path leading up and navigating through an MBA at Kellogg.

Last you heard from me I was elated by am admit to the Kellogg MBA program for the class of 2014. That was followed by a celebratory trip to the beautiful Malaysia and Singapore. In case you haven’t been there, I would recommend Malaysia as a tourist destination. The infrastructure is great and some of the scenes there are simply stunning. The new year in front of Marina Bay Sands in Singapore was also memorable.

After a tiring and satisfying vacation, I came back to the news that I have also been admitted to the Michigan Ross MBA program. Although not being offered any scholarship made my decision to join Kellogg that much easier. But the 2 admits just go to show that the time spent researching and finding a fit, then honing my stories to present the complete picture is well worth it.

As in Engineering, the maximum amount of time in any product development cycle should be spent in the design phase. A badly designed product would more often than not lead to failures, no matter the investments in manufacturing, marketing or sustaining it. On the other hand a well designed product would require minimum of inputs to sustain it through its life cycle.

I would suggest to all future applicants to take the time and effort early in the application cycle to scope out your targets, get your stories sorted, get a feel for the pulse of the schools by talking to a lot of alumni and current students and finally prepare a blueprint of what would be the focus of your applications while applying to these schools. Even if you manage fewer applications this way, I believe the chances of success would be higher.

For me now starts the preparation phase for my 2 years in Kellogg. I want to go in with clear focus on what I want out of my 2 years at Kellogg to maximize my chances of getting it.

Heart skipped a beat, mind went numb and I stared with disbelief and unblinking eyes. 8 months of preparations, networking, hard-work, bloody-mindedness, creativity and thoroughness had finally culminated in an email I will treasure for ever.

Ahead of me now are lots of decisions – I have an 8 month window ahead of me, with complete freedom. There’s a world of possibilities out there – continue my job, do an internship in another interesting field, backpack across the globe, take those music lessons, train and run a marathon … the opportunities are endless. It is going to be a busy Christmas and new year vacation .

I will take a couple of weeks to let the news sink in, celebrate and then unwind with a trip to Malaysia and Singapore for the New Year. Hopefully by January next year I will have the next 3 years of my life sorted out.

To all fellow applicants, I would like to congratulate others who have been accepted, all the very best to those still waiting for results and/or gearing for R2 applications. May all your wishes come true this new year.

Much water has flown under the bridge since I started preparing for GMAT and researching courses back in April. I completed a major project at work, got recognized and promoted; the travel bug hit with all its might and I have been indulging myself quite a lot over these past 3 months; another candle was added on my cake on my birthday; and the MBA application process itself helped me refocus and prioritize a lot personally and professionally.

And so, I am approaching this final stretch a lot calmer than what I had initially envisaged, but there is this anxiety none-the-less. Will I, wont I … perhaps the Kellogg adcom already know! But I have to wait until Friday to find out.

Meanwhile to all my fellow applicants – All the very best for this result season. Hope you get through the courses you crave for.

In any case, back to my story so I arrived nice and early at our rendezvous point and the alum was sharp on time. Amazingly we had already met during the Ross reception in Paris, which turned out to be a great icebreaker. He went over on how the interval would roll and started with a brief introduction and asked me for the same. I took this to be the cue for my resume walk. He asked a few pointed questions on what I do and what are the challenges involved. Then we moved onto the why MBA? I started pretty well and somewhere in the middle of explaining my long term goal, I just lost the story. Thankfully I did not panic and managed to convey the key points. But I lost the opportunity to show how focused and dedicated I was to my long term goal. Convinced that I had portrayed myself as a person with a fuzzy picture of my long term targets, I moved on to explain my choice of Ross for MBA. I think I nailed this one, being the only question I had really prepared for. The next one took me by my surprise – explain when you had to lead a team which was facing difficulty. But thankfully I had jotted down something like that as an option for one of the essays. Although I ended up not going with it, the story came good here. (It was not well rehearsed but hey I at least had solid content!).

The next question confirmed my worst fears. The alum told me that he was a bit confused about my long term goal and asked me to explain how I would get there. I explained in detail my vision just out of Michigan and tried to clarify the long term goal again. I hope I did a much better job of it this time around. And with that the interview was over. No extra curriculars, no what will you do in Ross.

I put a couple of questions to the alum and we were ready to bid each other farewell. I was just making some small talk while we were waiting to  pay our bills (the alum graciously paid for me as well ), when I found out that he worked where I intended to go right after the interview. So the alum told me that I could walk down with him to his office and he will catch a metro from there. So we ended up discussing a lot of other thing – my passion for traveling, difference in american and european work cultures, life in ann arbor, international placements in Ross.As we finally bid goodbye, I was feeling very good about the interview.

Now in retrospect, I believe with more preparation I could have painted a much better picture of myself and will curse myself for this mistake on the final hurdle until the decisions come out in January.

At 3:05 PM EDT, on 24th October, there it was sitting snugly in my mailbox the mail I had been looking forward to:

Ross School of Business Michigan Ross MBA Interview Invitation

I was elated! I had passed the first screening leg. The adcom did consider my profile worthy enough to want some face time with me. Its a big confidence boost for me.

The interview has to be scheduled within the next three weeks. But I have made a grave error in judgement. Thinking that I will have a mini-break from the applications in this month, I have booked a backpacking trip to Spain this weekend and another to Swtizerland, 2 weeks from now. That leaves just one weekend open for me to schedule an interview.

I hope the alumni I am interviewing with is free on the same weekend, otherwise I will have to cancel one of the trips .  Wish me luck !

Kellogg Interview Experience:
For the Kellogg interview I went through the Kellogg website thoroughly one more time. Watched all the videos from their online events, asked alumni for tips and trawled the mba application forums for pointers. The other part of the preparation involved knowing what stories I am going to present. So I did a first pass on my application essays, rehearsed walking through my resume and jotted down my themes for previous year’s questions. The Clear Admit wiki with Kellogg interview questions is a great resource, and I would recommend going through it for your interviews.

On the day of the interview, I took a wrong turn and went completely in the opposite direction (I just knew this was going to happen!). Thankfully, I had planned for this contingency and as soon as I realized I was lost asked for directions and was still able to make it to the meeting place 5 mins before time. The alum arrived a couple of minutes late, by which time I had selected a nice cozy corner of the cafe and was ready with a coffee. She introduced herself and set a very friendly informal tone for the rest of the interview. It felt more like a conversation than an interview. I walked through my resume, explained my long term goal, why Kellogg, what would I do there, my biggest professional achievement, experience of working in a team, time when I  had to overcome an obstacle. But the discussions just flowed from one topic to the other and it was not a question and answer session. Satisfied that all her questions were answered, the alum invited me to ask a few of mine. I just wanted to know couple of her experiences from Kellogg which were symbolic of the school. And with that the interview was over, the hour had just flown by.

On my way back I realized that my extracurricular activities never came up (I had some very interesting stories!). So all-in-all I was satisfied with the way interview went but believe I could have added more personality to my application if given the chance.

Kellogg Essays:
The Kellogg essay set was very difficult for me. The first and second essays were not straightforward. The first one having the added element of career progression to the goals and why MBA, while the second one wanted leadership experiences and what I would do at Kellogg to become a better leader. The third wanted me to become a adcom student member and extoll my own virtues. I tried to write it in first person and it sounded very cheesy to me. But this was only until I tried to write it in third person to a lot worse effect. So I decided to choose the lesser of the two evils and went with a first person chronicle. I am not very comfortable blowing my own trumpet and I think this is evident in my essay . The essay 4 with its options promised to be easier, but no such luck. I had stories for all three options but did not seem to be adding anything new to my candidacy. So I finally decided to go along with a surprising fact about me, to at least let the adcom know a little bit more about me as a person.

I felt that my Michigan essays as a whole were better than my work for Kellogg, but I don’t think I could have done much better with the prompts that Kellogg had provided. Satisfied with my handiwork I pressed the submit button today and now look forward to the Kellogg admit decisions & Ross interview invites.

The way forward:
Until I have something to report on the MBA application front, I plan to digress and add a few posts for GMAT prep and MBA research. If there are topics that you consider can form interesting posts, do mention them in comments, and I would try to cover them over the next few weeks.

I was pretty happy with my final drafts, and don’t think I could have done a much better job. The recommendations arrived in a timely manner and I waited on the essays for the night of 9th. On the 10th morning I took a print out of the essays for a final proof-read (I just love paper!) and voila, there were 2 mistakes still waiting for me to correct. A through had been spelled as though and there was an incomplete phrase in one of the essays. So all corrections done, I logged in to the online app and submitted my application. This is my first complete application and I have enjoyed the process thoroughly.

I think I am now in a position to add a few words of wisdom of my own to the trillions of bytes of MBA application related tips already floating  on the net.
1. Start early : I think the MBA application procedure itself utilizes a lot of skills the adcom is looking for in potential candidates. You have to be smart, be a good communicator, have focus, possess marketing skills (to sell yourself), be tenacious (its a long loooong road my friend). But more than anything else you have to be planned and organized. Start the process early – start researching colleges that attract you, get in touch with alumni, get the GMAT out of the way.
2. Ask for help : as in an MBA class, don’t be shy to ask for help when you need it. There are no extra points for making it on your own. Ask fellow applicants to form GMAT study groups, ask alumni questions to identify fit, ask your friends about your character traits, ask someone who knows you about your successes and failures, ask people you trust to review your essays.
3. Don’t bite more than you can chew : You are your own best judge. Don’t cram more schools than you can handle in one round. Two good quality apps will have better chance of a convert then five average ones (at least I hope so ).
4. Take a break : I had planned to have rough drafts for essays for both my applications ready by end of September. I worked hard to meet the deadline and then I took a vacation to Greece! I cam back refreshed and was really glad I took the break. I had become too engrossed in my own essays to see their shortcoming, the break gave me an opportunity to step back and look at the complete picture I was presenting. Moreover I had started on this journey way back in May with my GMAT preparation. I took a break just to prevent a possible burnout.
5. Don’t bet everything on it : It is just an application. If you have all the qualities you mention in the essays, if you have all those skills, if you have all those successes behind you, I am sure you will make it to your goal one day – with or without the MBA.
6. Enjoy it while it lasts : Having completed my essays for Michigan, I already feel a slight loss. I miss all those hours thinking about my career, my personality and my ambitions. The constant writing, pondering and rewriting. The research. The anticipation. (don’t worry I will get over it )

Hope you guys are enjoying your odysseys as much as I am.

Sorry for the long silence, but things have been real hectic this past month. Not only were the round 1 deadlines looming, but also a major project at work, and an internet venture of my own kept me engrossed. But rather than feeling overwhelmed, I was loving it. I realized how mundane had life been without so many chores pulling you in all different directions . I am feeling invigorated. Although I realize I am going to be exhausted as hell by the end of October, but I am going to really enjoy every moment until then.

On the mba application front, I submitted my part1 for Kellogg. Forward planning really paid off here as I was almost ready with the resume, which only needed a few tweaks. The reply from Kellogg was really quick and I have already been assigned an alumni for the self-initiated interview. I hope to get an interview appointment for the weekend of 8th and 9th October.

At work, I finished a major personal project which I had been working on since May this year. It gave me a great sense of satisfaction, even more so since I was able to balance it with my GMAT and other application commitments. The project finalization really took a lot of time and hence I had to cut Wharton from Round 1 list, as I believed I would not be able to submit my best work before the 2nd October deadline. So eyes now turn to Michigan for which the R1 applications are due by 10th October.

But before that I am taking a well deserved break to Greece next week. I almost can’t concentrate on anything else right now, but hope to complete Ross essays before setting off. It promises to be a fantastic week off with glorious sunshine forecasted for all of the 6 days I am there. I hope to come back, refreshed and raring to go for my Ross and Kellogg essays and the Kellogg interview.

Best of luck to all my fellow applicants. Do remember to disengage and take a break between things to attack again with fresh perspective.

As I approach the September 1 deadline I had set for myself to start working on the online applications of schools, I can feel the excitement building. Somewhere along the road the MBA admission process stopped being a boring exercise and has become a exhilarating journey of self-discovery and possibilities. I have given ample thought to stuff I will write about, have lined up my recommenders, sorted out my transcripts, talked to current students and alumni and done everything I could possibly do to give myself the best chance of achieving my target.

I wish all my fellow applicants the best of luck as we grapple with the admission process and the essays for the next couple of months.