Mini Scholarship for October 18 - November 15

[beatthegmat]

Here's the essay topic for this month's mini scholarship, for October 18 - November 15. This question comes from the Stanford MBA application:

Tell us about a time when you had a significant effect on a group or individual.

You can submit your essay response by replying to this discussion thread.

Please review these rules to determine whether you are eligible to participate in this scholarship opportunity. The prize is a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate; one winner will be selected by me and announced on November 16. Please submit your essay by end of day, November 15.

Best of luck, and I look forward to reading all of your responses...

[ajith]

Nice topic eric!..

Will the moderators be able to compete???

[beatthegmat]

Nice topic eric!..

Will the moderators be able to compete???

Moderators can certainly compete. Those who participate however won't have any say on who the winner will be.

[ajith]

I am from a beautiful State called kerala in India; they call kerala god’s own country, thanks to the Mother Nature for making it look so exquisite. You can see the greenery all around so pleasing to the eyes that it will have soothing effect on you. I am lucky to have born in my village; I still remember those days and consider them as best of my life.

Among those, I still remember a day particularly; this was when I was 11. I was studying in 6th standard in a small but excellent school near my home. I had to walk about 2 kilometers from home to reach school; the journey was all exciting with a lot of kids of my age, crossing a river and a paddy field in the way. It was really nice in every aspect I really used to enjoy that half an hour journey to and from the school.

One day, it so happened that I had to stay back 15 minutes because of some academic work after the school. My friends studied in different classes and they were all gone by the time I came back. I had to go alone, as I have done a few times before, I did not mind because being alone never bothered me, who will care when the nature cares and nurtures you.

I started my journey, completed almost half of it, I was walking through a small side road; and I was about to reach the paddy fields, as I walked down a roar of the people was becoming more and more audible, slowly but surely. Suddenly I heard a trumpet! Oh God that was really near. To make my worst dreams true I saw an elephant running with rage at the end of the road.

Elephants have been working animals used in various capacities by humans. However, elephants have never been truly domesticated: the male elephant in his periodic condition of musth is dangerous and difficult to control. Musth (or, alternately spelled, must) is a periodic condition in bull elephants, characterized by a thick, tar-like secretion from the temporal ducts and, far more notably, by highly aggressive behavior.

The road in which I was traveling was a narrow one; it had fences on either side made of bamboo sticks and it was pretty high. I had to back off. By this time the elephant was near me. I somehow managed to start running only to tumble after a few steps. As I lay down elephant was nearing, I thought that was the end.

He was in rage, he was aggressive still he had the traces of sympathy towards a young child. He could have easily put an end to my life, with his enormous legs or with his tusks or hundreds of other ways, instead he decided not to. He slowed down, the road was so narrow that he could hardly pass without touching me, he did indeed that. I still remember he patted me with his tusk on his way.

I was half shocked, half relieved, the crowd behind the elephant came to my rescue, they were so noisy and some of them even had sticks and stones with them, I realized to my pain that it is indeed men who are making him aggressive and he is a poor elephant with heart ten times bigger than a man. That was indeed the moment I was most moved by someone, but he is an elephant.

[beatthegmat]

Just a friendly reminder that the deadline to submit an essay for this month's mini scholarship is less than 2 weeks away! I encourage you all to participate--it's a great way to earn some scholarship money and practice your writing.

Thanks very much!

[cooldude]

I am a part of a three member team who runs a coaching institute in the city for CAT[common entrance test for admiision to six iims and other reputed Indian b schools]
B-school admissions in india are heavily dependent on test scores.All most all the reputed bschools conduct or use some entrance test to short list candidates for the next round but an entrance cleared is a half battle won. And all the entrance exams rely heavily on quantitative logic and aptitude. So no wonder why majority of students who clear the entrance tests are from engeneering background because they have already studied maths of higher level during there entrance exam for engeenering itself.
Even the quant section of gmat is just a cake walk when compared to that of cat paper . That is one of the reasons why almost every Indian student scores a satisfactorily score on quant of gmat. Although now our institute is an established name in the city for cat-coaching, its success is preceded by blues which consisted of very low student enrollment.

In this sector, unless u have a big brand name with national presence, you have to rely upon mouth publicity for success in number of enrollments which in turn means profit. Most of the students join some typical coaching only after a consultation with some friend. It goes like this – a student takes coaching at your institute, gets successful and tell few others and hence making a chain of ‘customers’ . And with acceptance level at iims less than 1%, you may imagine wafer thin room for success.

During our startup years the problem we faced was that we were not having students with potential to crack such tough exams coming to us so we don’t have any success story to tell others so that they could be motivated to join us.
And handful of those students who did joined our coaching actually did so because of our very nominal fees structure. Most of these students were those who had little hopes to clear the exam because of maths.
and most were arts side students who had not studied hire maths after class tenth.
So it was quite clear that if we were to make our business sustain then we ought to get these students, no matter how much potential they had, succeed.

But how ? After all if just practicing maths could make anyone master then everyone studying for same hours could get same percentile ranks. With all the hours of maths coaching they could learn maths but couldn’t apply those basics when it matters most.

Clearly , we needed to boost thought process of the students so that they could be smart enough to learn ‘how to apply’ those basic things at critical times. Here we three friends sat together and created one of the most mavericks of course structure for the coaching of cat. Genuine maths was involved only for 25% of the credit hours ,rest of 75% was devoted to things that could boost thought process and logical ability of a person. As for instance, in the first week of the orientation, we made groups of students and made them try to solve George Summer puzzles.
Work smarter, rather harder was the key. Here I suggested one very important thing and that is ‘vedic maths’ . We included that in our structure because it was futile to tell someone who is scared of profit and loss questions about binomial theorem. Vedic maths played and still plays a key role in our success story by making maths fun for students.

All this hard work slowly started to give fruits of success. Even a few regional universities called for lectures on ‘vedic maths’. Today I am proud to say that our institute is second best in city in terms of enrollment and best in terms of student success rate. Many students have went on to join some of the most reputed Bschools in India and a few are now iim alumni.

In this way I helped our institute to help many students who were initially scared of quants to bell the cat which helped our business to establish itself and the students themselves in their career.

[beatthegmat]

Congratulations cooldude! You are the winner of the October-November Beat The GMAT! Monthly Mini Scholarship! You will receive a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate as your scholarship prize.

A have a few comments about your essay submission:

I really enjoyed the fact that you used your own entrepreurial experiences to answer this essay prompt. I think that this is a strategy that you should definitely leverage in your business school applications--admissions folks would certainly appreciate seeing how your passion/creativity in business made a positive impact upon others.

My primary criticism of your response is that it doesn't tightly answer the original question prompt: "Tell us about a time when you had a significant effect on a group or individual." The question is focused on a specific event--your essay does not focus around any specific event, but rather a period of time where you grew your business. Be VERY careful about making sure your essay responses address the question prompt sufficiently--this is a very common issue among applicants.

Another minor criticism is that I think you could have significantly condensed the first five paragraphs of your essay--you spend a lot of time setting up the situation; your description of your actions and result in the second half of the essay are more tightly organized.

Overall, I think this is a pretty good essay. I was able to learn a lot about your interesting background!

Congratulations!