Juggling between college, extra curricular activities and application

My 3 day holiday is coming to an end. I need to go to college tomorrow. My deadline for submitting the case study for ET Prodigy contest is tonight. So I need to give my finishing few touches to that and submit it before time. I will be contesting with b school candidates on the like of IIM's. Also this week is an entrepreneurship awareness camp launched in coordination with ecell of IIT Kharagpur and I need to spend a lot of time for that. Choosing to submit my applications in round 2, I feel is definitely a good choice given my work load. Only worrying factor for me are my recommender's as, I am a college senior and most of my classmates go for an MS or a PhD, the way of writing recommendations for me would be quite difficult for my faculty members. It will be while before I write my next post (you can probably expect it on Oct 2).

Prior to application of HBS 2+2

My application to HBS 2+2 program meant for the college seniors started about a year back. Ever since I started it, I started going through a variety of websites, blog, contacting alumni etc. I started to draft my essays only around april this year. During the same time, my classmate and I co-founded "The Entrepreneurship Development Club" in our college. I am the President of that club and my friend/classmate Jeremiah (a.k.a Jerry) is the CEO.

Before assuming the post of the President of Entrepreneurship Development Club, I was the student executive member of SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) for a period of one year and one of the two college representatives to the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN). Entrepreneurship has always interested me and Im have a strong passion for it which led me to lead a 5 member team to participate in the Youth Business Development competition conducted by Oxford Said Business School. I have also done 4 internships in a few countries.

I thought I had a good shot at getting in HBS due to my high GPA around 3.7/4 (I am ranked first in my department) and my reasonable extra curricular activities. The reason why I got rejected to the HBS was probably because I didn't analyse myself thoroughly. However, the entire application to the HBS was a self realising process through which I learnt a lot about myself in terms of who I am, where do I want to go, what do I want to do in life and so forth. My internship in the US made me realise my strengths and weakness and also how much and why I wanted to do an MBA. My strong analytical skills combined with my desire to learn new things and my excitement to make substantial and lasting change to a business client makes me an ideal candidate for management consulting. Applying to HBS was the best decision of my life as I would have not known why and how strongly I wanted to be a management consultant. So to every candidate for an MBA program who happens to come across my blog my advise to you is to apply as early as possible to the MBA program so that you will know what you want to do in the future and be focussed in achieving that task.

Having said that, I am off to edit my essays for the stanford application.

The First of many posts in my journey to an MBA degree

Hello. My name is Lokesh and I have started applying to business schools (I turned 20 a couple of months back!). I had always wanted to apply to business schools ever since I was in 6th grade and I have been working towards it. Now, I am in my senior year of my college. Not a lot of students apply to business school with no work experience. But, I thought, I want to be one of the few who gets into a business school with no or very little work experience. After all, Harvard and Stanford are trying to get younger and younger students. I did apply to the HBS 2+2 program. I was 1 in 800 odd applicants for that program. Even though I got rejected, or dinged as many people say, my confidence level has never gone down and I will be applying to at least 2 more programs this year (Yale silver scholar program and to The Stanford GSB). It has been over a year since I started drafting my essays and almost 3 months since I submitted by HBS application. I applied to HBS with my GRE score which I think was a mistake. Now having taken my GMAT and having received my AWA scores, I will submit it for the other b schools. I will be applying before the second round for both Yale and Stanford. Stanford is a school which I would like to get into due to the entrepreneurship culture that prevails there.

My ultimate career goal is to become the CEO of a management consulting company. I would also like to start a venture capital firm and provide help to other entrepreneurs. For this, as of now, I do not have the sufficient work experience and education (in terms of thinking what I would do in different cases for which the case studies thought by the b schools would help me tremendously and also interpersonal dynamics is another course I am looking forward to learn). My short term goal, assuming that I get accepted to a deferred program in a b school, is to work in a consulting firm, earn an MBA, go on to work in the same or another consulting firm and get as much exposure and experience in as many fields as possible to eventually rise up to the position of a CEO. The first step of working in a consulting firm is more or less achieved as I been selected to work in BEROE as a research analyst.

The reason that I want to do an MBA very early in my life is due to the fact that I have very big dreams and to achieve my long term career goals, an MBA is absolutely necessary and the sooner the better.