Profile Evaluation Request

Hi Kumaran,
You have a lot of great things in your profile -- super GMAT, strong undergraduate institution, and your involvement in the community is commendable. Now, to make you truly competitive for top MBA programs, we need to see more leadership of others, more differentiation from other high-performers in your demographic pool, and more international exposure. Your leadership in the community seems to hinge largely on your own work, but leadership in b-school terms literally means leading OTHERS, and that's where I'd like to see more development. In the workplace, as a senior engineer, I assume you lead teams; that should be the first thing you discuss as an applicant.
Looking at your profile, I am seeing you competitive for top programs at the 15-30 level (using Bloomberg's lists as an example, but excluding NYU & Haas), where your GMAT will be above the median but your lack of international exposure will be less of a challenge to the admissions committee.

Moving forward, I'd want to see you develop a clear set of post-MBA goals, both short and long-term, and short-list some schools for which you would have a strong chance of acceptance. From there, it would be ideal for you to travel to the US to see each campus first-hand and get to know a few current and former students (I realize that this is not always a possibility, so I am speaking simply of best-case scenarios). In any case, having a clear sense of goals will help you identify which programs are best for you, and serve as a foundation for further research.

Hope this helps!
Margaret Strother
Stacy Blackman Consulting