WHat could have gone wrong?
First of all, it may have been the essay.. In essay, I wrote about my actual social impact goals, which were in education sector. However, this was different from my professional goals and I intended to pick these up as non-work activity. I guess the schol-committee didn’t like the idea. Further regarding the quality of essay. Even I myself was not that happy with the final product. EVen before I had started an idea, I had to move to the next one, thanks to the stingy word-limit. I was hoping that may be they’ll get impressed with the honesty of the ideas, but that didn’t happen.

So what next??
Stan is put of my list.. It pinches to drop your dream school out of your list. But I don’t think that I can make it to Stan when I couldn’t make it to top 50 from India. (I agree that the criteria maybe different, but still..)Also Stan and California are far too expensive for me to afford without a schol..

That creates a spot in my final list.. Which school will take that spot? Or wil i use it to burden myself a bit lesser and app to one less school..  Not really sure about it.. Will decide in two days time and update the blog accodingly.

However, I managed to get in one more component to select schools:: the essays!! I remember somebody big (perhaps Senapati at Pagalguy) saying “Thou shalt not select schools on basis of essay Qs.” But I don’t find myself completely agreeing with this. Though selecting schools purely on basis of this would be sheer idiocy, but when confused between two equivalent schools, the essays can be used as an effective tie-breaker:: Based on your profile and experience, how answerable the schools’ Qs are or do the Qs allow you to project the best of you through your answers.  On this basis, I had eliminated MIT Sloan long back;I don’t have answers to most of their Qs..

So based on all this, here’s my (almost) final list in no particular order::

• Stanford:: All depends on Dhirubhai Fellowship. If I get selected as a finalist, Stan will be my top choice. If I don’t, I’ll drop it.
• Ross:: Loved their action-based learning.. Interesting essays, helping me to project the best of me.
• Fuqua (Duke)::  Looks very good. Need to dig more and contact a few students as well.. Qs totally changed from the last year and are quite different from other schools.
• Tuck:: Fierce alumni-loyality. Would love to be a part of such a closely-knit community. My only two concerns were:: Tuck brand in India and the rural life @ Hanover. As I dug in, the second doesn’t appear to be too negative and the first is mostly compensated for by the fact that the strength of the community matters more than mere numbers.
  Essay Qs quite answerable..
• Darden:: As mentioned above, initially I was very apprehensive about 100% case method. Am still not fully convinced about using this method for some subjects.. Still the strong curricullum and the tremendous opportunities in consulting make it too hard to ignore.
  Still waiting for the essays. (I’m expecting some changes from last year.)
• Emory::  the Pagalguy thread on current Emory students taking Qs was very useful.. I read it to the full and at the end of 4 hours, I had finalised Emory in my list.
  Essay Qs look good. (Last year’s; this year’s Qs not released yet) 
• ISB:: The one school taht has never ever left this list:: In fact, it was the only school with which the journey had started 18 months back.It’s almost sure that I’ll be applying to all the seven schools above, though I still need to divide these into R1 and R2 schools. Will try applying to minimum five schools in R1. I do think I can manage that.. Let us see how it goes.  AFAIK, All the schools above offer good program in General Management, provide loans upto costs of attendance without an cosigner and offer decent to excellent opportunities in consulting.  Blog-readers, please let me know if you locate any discrepancy here.

  In addition to above, I’m also considering HBS and Yale. But the latter is very,very selective with its small class size and the former is almost prohibitive with its exorbitant fee (I’m not expecting any schol, even if I pull-off a miracle ad get an admit). The Qs of both are very good and I’ve good answers to almost all of them.. lemme see, if I need to drop any of the above seven or if I need to expand my list for R2, then I may consider taking a chance at these two.

So much to write, so little space :: No, I’m not talking abt the essay yet.. I’m talking about the size of text-fields for certain entries..At places it  was quite irritating. I’m sure many of us struggled while mentioning the name of our employer or the educational institute as in many of the cases, the full name would exceed the size-limit. So there wasn’t any option other than abbreviating those..Couldn’t they have kept bigger text boxes?

One-page resume, what’s that!! Some years back, when I was appearing for the campus-placements, I thought a longer resume implies a longer list of achievements. So I had a 3.5 page long resume at that time. When I got to know that at most of the places including all B-schools, one-page resume is the norm, I was very upset.. How can I condense that 4-page mini-epic to just one page.. Then I read this somewhere:: ” If your resume is exceeding one page, that means there’s something you what to show to your prospective employer (The adcom in thi case) that he doesn’t want to see!!” I had a look at my resume and found that there surely was scope of chopping down the content to a manageable size. I downloaded some samples from clearadmit and mbagameplan and requested some of my friends to send their resume for an idea..Once I had finalised the template, it wasn’t tough to fit the content to one page.  And now that one-page resume looks so god to me that I just can’t have anough of it.. I keep on looking at that from time to time.

Shape the future of India in 250 words!! And then there was this essay. “How do you aspire to shape the future of India?” Terrific topic! And surely the one that can test one of the parameters on which the fellowship is to be awarded, i.e. commitment to India. But the grandness of the topic doesn’t match the stingy word-limit imposed. It’s close to impossible to write a convincing essay on the topic in 250 words.. When I sent my first draft to one of my close friends, who happens to be a very good writer too, he wasn’t really impressed with my effort..  He said that the essay indicates a plan, but lacks a blue-print to impliment that. Further it shud have included what motivates me to follow that plan and what are my credentials so far in connection to the plan..  Every bit of what he said was right, except that I forgot to tell him the word-limit. And this was when I had sent him just an outline form of draft, which when properly expanded could have easily taken 550 words!!

So finally I had all the plans laid down.. It was time for chopping it down to the desired word-limit. Trimming it to about 350 was easy.. I could locate many redundant sentens\ces or the ones that can be written in a crisper way.. bringing down from 350 to 300 costed me some of the impact that the essay could have.. I had to cut down some sentences that explained my plans better.. Afnd from 350 to 250, it was almost a word-by-word countdown. I was trying to doing all kind of weird things like joining two words into a compound word using a hyphen, making the best use of apostrophe at every point, rephrasing sentences like “Interested in working to improve the scene” to “Interested in improving the scene” even at the loss of the precise meaning that I wanted to convey. At one stage, I was even tempted to use phrases like “I wanna” instead of “I want to” That would have saved me a word-each at least in 4-5 places.

The final essay looked a bit plain.. As another of my friends said, the essay was not that catchy.. Because as soon as an idea starts getting a grip on  the reader, it suddenly ends abruptly. Also the essay offers no lofty plans like starting new industries,no magnanimous promises of taking up a career in social service.. I maintained that I’d be taking up my social-goals as a side-activity of my career goals and listed some of my real dreams in the essay.. Am just counting on the chance that may be the schol-committee can like the honesty of the plans.. Just hoping against hope..

In any case, I’m not pinning much dreams on this. The competition for this is immense.. And my efforts (rather results) do not seem to be that satisfactory.  But as I said, it was a good learning exercise.. At least now I’ve the resume ready.. And experience of writing more than concisely may come in handy when I write the ISB essays.. And as Ahembea pointed out, If I get thru well and good.. Else It’s one school less on my list.. :S  (I’m not gonna app to Stan if I don’t get selected as a finalist in this)

So right now I’m back to rest of my schools.. Coming up next, my final (hopefully) shortlist..

PS: If some of you find that I was a bit verbose above, pardon me.. This can happen when you’re just coming to an open space after a day in a suffocating chamber.. At least here, no one’s going to dictate me word-limits.

Or do they expect us to take a career in social-reforms or something? Now, don’t get me wrong here.. I know a number of candidates pursue career in non-profit sectors, but then the fellowship details clearly mention that you’re free to choose any career as long as you’re ready to return to India in two years.(I surely am!!)

After several rounds of introspection and discussions, I came to a conclusion that none of my apprehensions hold any meaning..  I don’t think that the schol-committee would entertain lofty ideas of upturning the future of the country single-handedly. Perhaps they’d like more grounded, more realistic plans better. Keeping this in my mind (and hoping that I’m right), I decided to pen down the ideas that are my dreams for years now, something that actually intend to do..

My only fear in following this approach is that the application asks you to select your professional goals from a drop-down list and then says that you’d have a chance to explain your goals in the essay section. This suggests that there should be a strong connection between your professional goals and your essay. In my case, my social impact goals are different from my professional goals. And I intend to pursue the former as a side-activity. That doesn’t mean I’m less passionate about these. I’m sure I’d be able to follow my social impact goals alongside my professional goals. (I’m confident as I’m already folowing a part of it.)

But would the schol-committe buy it?

I desperately need help!! Though not sure how much scope I’ve to use that as the time is already running out. And no! I don’t think that I’m confortable feigning about either my professional aspirations or my dreams for India..

Fellow-bloggers, co-applicants, consultants! Any inputs on this??

Right now, my list looks something like this:

So you see after applying the final filter of availaility of a no-cosignor loan upto cost of attendance to a trimmed down list (based on criteria that I’ll list in my next post) of my target schools, not many schools were left in my list.. A look at the list above and you know that I perhaps need to add more schools in my list.. That’s exactly what I felt.. And I decided to loosen some of my earlier filters to accommodate some of the good schools that fit most of my criteria along with the all-important no-cosigner one.
And here’s the list of schools that I’m exploring right now::

Am not saying that these schools r already on my list.. Have started exploring them and may be in a week max, I’d have the answers.

On personal front, I’ve given myself a deadline to shortlist about 7-10 schools that I plan to apply by the end of May.. Will take some more time (may be 2 weeks) to trim down the list to 4 to which I’ll be applying in R1 and another 3-4 (if need be) in R2.. So far the list is:

IIM-A (PGPX):: It’s not even my Dream-school.. (I define dream-school as the one that you’ d love to attend, but you don’t have a strong chance at getting in. ) With its avg experience of 10+ years, it’s totally unrealistic for me.. But still I’m gonna app for this.. No app fee and app deadline is 15th Aug well before the deadlines for other schools.. So apping to this will provide a dry-run for other  schools..

BTW, just got the news that a friend got into Wharton two days back. The guy already had offers from Duke, Tepper and IIM-C.. But W is big!!! Biggest of them all!! I guess I’d need to catch this guy and get some serious tips about apping..  

Meanwhile, fellow-bloggers for fall 2009, keep visiting and leaving comments here..  Anyone belonging to this tribe (Apping for 2009 and already blogging about it ) surely deserves a pat on the back for starting early. Let us start interacting on blogosphere and help each other out in whatever way we can. I’m reachable at my gmail ID: quizophobic

This surely is a great news for me as I’ve always listed Stan as one of my dream schools, but have found it prohibitively expensive. Though the competition for this scholarship is going to be fierce , but still this charges me up to have a shot at my dream school. And in any case, I have my long term plans in India. Hope that’ll help if everything goes right.

With Mukesh Ambani tying up with his half alma-mater (He had to drop out of Stanford GSB due to Dhirubhai’s illness), can we expect the younder Ambani to follow the suite too.. (Anil is an alumnus of Wharton). That’ll be a double bonus for Indians!!