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Please evaluate my profile - 7 years work exp - 740 GMAT

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Please evaluate my profile - 7 years work exp - 740 GMAT

by ravisoft8400 » Fri Oct 14, 2011 9:51 am
GMAT Score - 740 (50 Q, 39 V) first attempt.

Target Colleges: - Harvard, Stanford, Chicago Booth, Wharton, Columbia, Darthmouth, Kellog, Inseed, MIT Sloan or LBS.

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS & ACHIEVEMENTS:
Degree Major Courses Year of passing Institution/University Percentage/CGPA
PMP Certification PMP 2010 PMI Pass
B.Tech. Computers 2004 HBTI/UPTU 70.68%
Intermediate PCM 2000 C.B.S.E. 85%
High School N/A 1998 C.B.S.E. 75%

"¢ Got 326 rank in UP-Seat 2000 exam - This is entrance exam at state level for admission in the Engg colleges in Uttar Pradesh, biggest state of India.
"¢ Got 371 rank in the DCE entrance exam 2000- This is entrance exam for one of the topmost Engg College of Delhi, capital state of India.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERTISE:
Tools : Turbo C, Visual C++, Source Insight, MPP
Languages : C, C++, Java, Java Script, VB and HTML
Technical Domains : Telecom domain
Languages: : Hindi - Proficient (mother tongue)
Kannada - Beginner (Out of interest).
French - Beginner: attended the starting course at Alliance Franchise.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Total work Experience - 7 years
"¢ Organization : Subex Limited, Bangalore - 4 years- Project Manager - Got award for management of customer project
"¢ Organization : LGSoft India Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore - 1.5 years - Software Engineer- Got Performance recognition award in LG.
"¢ Organization : Sasken Communication Technologies Ltd, Bangalore - 1.5 years - Software Engineer

"¢ Onsite Experience: Canada (5 weeks)
South Korea (3 Months)
China (1 Month)
Sydney (1 Month)


PROFESSIONAL TRAININGS:
"¢ PMP Certification completed in Dec 2010.
"¢ 2 days of Pegasus Team Building exercise (Subex)
"¢ One week training on Business Etiquette, Software Engineering Process, Software testing process. (SASKEN)
"¢ One month vocational training as a part of our curriculum in Summit Information Technologies, Gurgaon. During this training I made the LIC Management project
"¢ Two weeks training on Embedded System - VxWorks, Linux concepts, interprocess communication. (SASKEN)
"¢ Two weeks training on Cellular network concepts, communication concepts, GSM, GPRS and UMTS. (SASKEN)
"¢ One week training on C++.
"¢ One week of GSM/GPRS training (LG)


PROFESSTIONAL ROJECT DESCRIPTION:

SUBEX - Management contribution:

Roles and responsibilities: I am working as Project Manager and responsible for the successful delivery of the project. I am SPoC from Engg team and interact with client as well to make sure the deliverables to the customers are delivered within agreed constraints and on time. Following are the high level roles and responsibilities at my work.
1. Requirement response to customer.
2. Full Project Life Cycle including Kick-Off, Planning the project, Execution & Monitoring & Closure:
3. Maintaining following during the course of project
a. Configuration Management:
b. Risk Register
c. Communication Management register
d. Cost, Scope, Time and Quality Management
e. Process adherence.
f. Keeping team motivated to deliver the high quality projects.
Project delivered: I have successfully delivered many different projects for different customers including Swisscom, Telecom Italia, Telstra, and Centennial. I am currently handling Tata, a leading Telecom operator in India.

Before Subex - Technical contribution:

Roles and responsibilities: I was working as the developer in my previous companies and projects contributing significantly for the technical area assigned to me

Project delivered: I have worked on different projects before while contributing as a technical expert including different GSM models of LGSI, including famous chocolate model, Order Management system to SOUL, a leading service provider in Australia


PERSONAL ACHIEVEMENTS

"¢ Worked as a representative of Placement Cell (Student Coordinator) in the college for full final year. Started the concept of preparing the CDs demonstrating our College culture and expertise and sent to many companies, which finally came for on-campus interviews.
"¢ Class Representative for 2 years and has performed & organized various events in the College fest.
"¢ Contributed in winning of one of friend for Sports Secy position during the third year of college. I was one of the key people involved in campaigns and in deciding the strategy.
"¢ Carom Champion at College Level during first year of my college.
"¢ French classes from Alliance academy - Did not complete the course though.
"¢ Joined Kannada classes held in Bangalore to learn the language at the place I am residing, even if it is not my mother tongue


PERSONAL CONTRIBUTIONS:

"¢ Contributed to Gujarat flood relief during my college days, collected funds over 2 days going house to house to collect the funds.
"¢ Worked as the volunteer organiser of the SMASH 2003, a sports fest in our college.
"¢ Participated in the IIT-Roorkee technical presentation.
"¢ Have run 2 Sunfeast 10K runs in year 2009, 2010 to the cause of CRY, a NGO.
"¢ Started my passion for running in January 2008 and then went on to run 10K Sunfeast 2 times. In this process, I lost around 20 KGs of weight:)
"¢ Contributed to avoid the pollution. Started going to office (around 6 kms one way) on bi-cycle to avoid the pollution. Had to stop because of the flyover construction.

PERSONAL INFORMATION:

"¢ I had love marriage - inter caste, inter state and had to convince my parents, a long story.
"¢ I am a big time traveller and have visited many places nearby Bangalore and around it. I have been to many treks as well including night trek.
"¢ A big fan of Cricket as every Indian is.


RECOS
I can get recos from my managers, Colleagues and client.
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by essaysnark » Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:02 am
Hi ravisoft8400 - congrats on that awesome GMAT score!!! It will open doors for you. We'd need to see how your university record translates to the American 4.0 GPA scale in order to evaluate your academics but it looks like you're strong there too (we basically understand the Indian system - and all the bschool adcoms most definitely do - but it's always easier to have an apples-to-apples translation with the U.S. GPA equivalent). Note that your high school records are irrelevant at this point, the bschools care only about college and beyond.

You've got more work experience than is typical at Harvard - and in fact we cannot really assess your profile much for HBS or anywhere else without knowing why you want an MBA. What are your career goals? It's important to be able to present hardcore stories of leadership to HBS and other schools (but especially to HBS). Your challenge of course is how do you differentiate yourself from all the other IT guys in technology from India who will also be applying?

The fact that you've worked in all those different countries definitely helps - you should look for ways to highlight that in the stories you present in your essays. The language skills are also good. Your college activities are a little less important than what you've done more recently. The fact that you started to ride a bike is a nice little tidbit but that's probably not enough to build a full essay around! :-) Most important will be presenting evidence of impact and accomplishment, and to show how your background has set you up in a specific way for the next-step career goals. So, if you want to let us know what you're thinking in terms of why you want an MBA, then we can better assess which schools might be a fit for you.

The truth is that you can go to any top school and do most anything - but the reality is that you cannot get IN to any top school unless you have a strong pitch that shows the adcom why, specifically, you need an MBA in the first place!

It appears that your basic stats are quite strong, and you are basically qualified for any of the top schools, given those strengths. So, your next challenge will be in crafting a compelling story to "pitch" the adcom on what you want to do, and why you need an MBA from their school (and especially from an American school) to go do it.

If you want to give us a very quick statement of what those goals are, then we can perhaps continue the conversation!

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by ravisoft8400 » Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:21 am
Thanks for the quick reply. I definitely have good stories and learnings from my onsite experience. I know I need to write the essays on why MBA and why from "THE" college. I will be preparing for the same in coming days.

I am a person who usually do things step by step. I have been focused on GMAT till now as first step. Now first step is taken, I am fully concentrating on further steps.

In a nutshell why HBS and why MBA. Studying at HBS is my dream from childhood. It is mecca for MBA and I want to be part of this, rankings/reviews does not matter. Regarding why MBA, I genuinely feel I have in me what it takes to be successful leader. I know I manage things well. Most strong point is I relate the things to ground level realities and never leave them.

My long term goal is to be CXO of a company and to make it grow under my leadership. To reach there and to polish my skills I definitely think I need a MBA from HBS. Regarding, what I can contribute to HBS, I think my USP is my commitment and passion in whatever I believe. I am a lazy person in general but once I decide for something, that is the aim for which I aspire for without any second thoughts and ready to do whatever it takes. Be it my passion for running, to make my project successful or scoring good GMAT score.

All these are my initial thoughts and I know I need to work on them to stand a chance to make my dreams come true but then nothing is free and easy in life. If you can aspire and have courage to sustain and work hard, I believe you can get it, no matter what are the circumstances.

I am definitely interested in more guidance, please let me know what are next steps and how can we proceed with our talks further.
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by essaysnark » Fri Oct 14, 2011 10:43 am
Hi again ravisoft8400--

The most important step that anyone can take in the pursuit of the MBA is to define the career goals. The stuff you have below is perhaps interesting but it's far from an answer to the career goals question. This needs to come well before you would ever start thinking about a career goals essay - it actually should inform the entire process of actually CHOOSING THE SCHOOLS. No offense or anything, but we've had lots and lots of people claim that going to HBS is a life-long dream etc etc - unfortunately that won't get you an offer of admission! :-) It sounds like you're just beginning the process so we are by no means trying to criticize, we're just offering up a statement about how truly important it is to define your goals and understand why you want an MBA, before you can really make headway on preparing a strategy for your applications to bschool. Being a CXO is not a goal, it's an idea - you would want to nail things down much more concretely than that.

We've got a variety of posts on our blog about this and other matters - here's one to start with:

https://essaysnark.blocked/2011/05/ ... -life.html

You can also review some of the career goals essay critiques (though they may be less useful to you since you're not at that stage yet).

Don't know what "USP" is but if you're saying that you want to be an entrepreneur, then certainly HBS is a good fit for that. As stated in prior post, you're older than most students at HBS and we've seen older applicants have a tough time (not even get invited to interview). So, just managing expectations. Lots of other schools have great entrepreneurship programs as well and many are more open to the older candidate. You could have a better time of it with schools that typically accept applicants with more work experience - INSEAD and LBS would be particularly good choices (again, it does depend on what you want to do with the MBA - sorry to be such a broken record on this!!).

Anyway hope this helps - as already stated you clearly have lots to leverage, and it'll be about defining the future objectives and then packaging it all up. You have come to the right place with all the great resources here on BTG, plus you may find some useful posts over on our blog https://essaysnark.blocked

Hope this helps!
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by ravisoft8400 » Tue Oct 18, 2011 11:52 pm
Thanks a lot for the reply,
It really helped in understanding where stand. I am thinking about applying for ISB and INSEAD because both are 1 year.

What do you think my chances are for LBS or MIT as well?

However I want to come back to India after my MBA course and hence thinking about the financial aspect of the same. I did some research about the US & UK colleges. Do you think I should apply to Imperial, Oxford or Kelley, tuck and Duke.

What do you think my chances are to get the scholarship and how much because without that I will not be able to study there as I intend to come back. Also do you think that once I come back to India these colleges will have the weightage which will help me in getting good job?

Thanks again for helping.
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by essaysnark » Wed Oct 19, 2011 7:15 am
Lots of questions, ravisoft8400 - if we miss one, let us know!

With your strong profile, the door is open to you to try for most any school -- the trick will be in developing awesome essays! That's where a lot of people with high GMAT scores get hung up. You will need to spend way more time than you ever expect on the essays. Most people have their hands full with doing three applications per round, simply due to how much work the essays involve. You should definitely be getting started now on your applications -- especially if you did not apply to any schools yet!! The first application you do is the hardest one. (The good news is that EssaySnark will be announcing a very exciting opportunity to support Brave Supplicants like you with their Round 2 apps and essays - check our blog https://essaysnark.blocked in the coming days to hear about it!)

You really cannot count on getting any scholarship money as part of the admissions package. From the schools' perspective, there is a very good ROI on the MBA degree, and scholarship money is not nearly as plentiful for the MBA as it is for other types of degrees. Unless you're an underrepresented U.S. minority (African-American, Hispanic, Eskimo, etc.), or a woman, or a U.S. veteran, or a few other special categories, you just can't expect getting financial help. There are lots of loan packages available but you need to check with your home country for that first. There's just too much competition based on your demographics (Indian, IT, etc.).

If you want to go into nonprofit or social service, some schools offer loan forgiveness programs since those occupations pay so little. Stanford (and Tuck? uncertain about that) and a few others offer this upon graduation.

If the cost of a foreign education is an issue, you should probably focus just on the Indian schools - we love ISB and there are other great options there too as you know. It can sometimes be difficult to get into an American bschool if you're just going to go back to India right after anyway; the schools may not understand why you need a U.S. education if you're not going to use it here. Your profile looks great for ISB - with good essays of course! It always comes down to the essays. :-)

EssaySnark
EssaySnark has MBA application guides for HBS, Stanford, Booth, Wharton, NYU and pretty much any other school you can name - including a fully revised and expanded 2015 Columbia essay guide!
https://essaysnark.com/bookstore/
* * * * * * *
The Indians' Guide to Getting In maps out everything you need to evaluate your own profile and select your schools. https://essaysnark.com/ssguide/quicksnar ... ans-guide/
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by ravisoft8400 » Wed Oct 19, 2011 8:59 am
Thanks a lot.. it really helps. I have understood in 1 week that GMAT preparation was easier than the application :)
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by PrepMBA.AlexLeventhal » Wed Oct 19, 2011 8:26 pm
Ravis

I read your posts and just have some practical suggestions for you.

First, the Indian IT engineer profile is one that b schools see a lot, and only so many will be admitted to the top schools. Those applicants who can, beyond a high gmat score, show that they have strong leadership and general management instincts (backed up by stories) will have more success than individual analytical contributors. Keep this in mind as you attack your essays.

Second, I am guessing you are in your late 20's. As there is some age bias in the MBA process, particularly as you hit 30 for some schools, I would encourage you to perhaps broaden your MBA choices to some lower ranked schools if you really want to get an MBA. Of course take a shot at some top programs, but you don't want to find yourself without an acceptance and having to go through the process even older. Of course what I am saying is school specific so check the age distributions for your target schools and see what other schools you may want to add to the list. Some schools like Carnegie Mellon are most accepting of an engineering background.

Good Luck!

Alex
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Harvard MBA, 1998
Prep MBA Admissions Consulting
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by throughmba » Wed Oct 19, 2011 10:28 pm
What do you think my chances are for LBS or MIT as well?
You are good to go for both.

There will be a lot to be done to deny you an interview call. You have excellent everything. Just dont jam your essays with achievements. Applicants jam their essays with every positive point they have, for fear that whichever one they omit will be the secret key that turns the lock in the gates of admission. There is no such key. Essay stuffing hurts you because it does not allow you to develop a clear portrait of yourself, or a memorable message, or to make a cogent argument for your admission, or to demonstrate any real self-understanding.

Do extensive profile evaluation.

Best of Luck
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