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Thursday, March 29, 2007

ISB Admission cycle - Step by step timelines, part 2

In my last post I have detailed the steps up to taking the GMAT. Till this point it is generic and would be common for most B-school aspirants. Some other things that were very useful at this stage were - A word document passed on by ex-colleague Ritu, having a PC with broadband connection, my boss's advice, and the coaching centre.

After taking GMAT, the journey took a different turn. Till now the path was pretty straight forward and I could get lot of guidance. Different concerns started cropping up. Some of them were - would I even get shortlisted by IIM and ISB, is 690 good enough, what would be my AWA score, how would I justify a low AWA score if it is low, is my profile good enough and so on.

Step 6: The next step is to start working on the application. Immediately after reaching home I submitted my IIMA-PGPX application. The PGPX application is very simple in the first stage, you don't need to write any essays. Only the short listed need to write the 5 essays, 500 words each.

The whole GMAT thing drained me so much that it took me a month to recover and focus on ISB application. The key learning is that have lots of buffer time between GMAT and the application deadline. I have registered myself on the ISB online application site immediately after they activated it. I have filled in all the basic details like personal details, experience, education etc. I didn't touch the essays before GMAT at all. The main tasks that were to be done are Essays, four of them, Evaluations, I decided to get three instead of two minimum required, and getting copies of the necessary documents.

Step 7: Writing Essays for ISB application
The topics were little twisted and you have to present your point in a different way. At this point something very funny happened. I posted my profile on the isb-pgp yahoo group to get a general feedback and I did get some positive feedback. Apart from that one of the replier suggested that I can take external help in getting the essays right. To this another applicant by name Prashant Agrawal, based out of London, reacted very strongly contending that it is not ethical to take external help in writing the essays and the whole thing snowballed till the time that the group moderator intervened and forced Prashant to stop from further posts. Funny, ain't it, people have so many faces.

My essay writing started around 30th August and ended only by 25th September. I had done about 4 to 5 revisions before pressing the submit button. Initially I just wrote whatever came to my mind in a word document and each essay was going up to 800 words, min and the word limit was 300 words. Next I tried to cut down on sentences, repeats etc and could cut them down to 400 - 450 words. This took almost 10 days. After this I invited one of my junior colleagues. Mr. Rohan Kashyap, to review them critically. He bought out some very good points and highlighted the weaknesses.

In the next phase I rewrote the essays and forwarded to them one ISB alum, whom I knew a bit closely and to another friend of mine for review. They suggested few changes and finally I took the essays to my verbal coach for GMAT and took his help to check the grammar and style. He helped me in finalizing the essays. Even after that I made some minor changes but more or less finished them.

Around the same time I got a shortlist from IIMA and I used these same essays with some minor modification. To be honest, I was not so keen on IIMA but I couldn't just leave it like that and another point was that I was fully drained by ISB essays. Fortunately IIMA's word limit is 500 words and I happily expanded the shorter essays.

Step 8: Evaluations
This is one area I had a certain advantage. My current boss then, and my previous two bosses were very close to me and I had a good relationship with them. The relationship was very professional and was built mostly on work related interactions but at the same time i had put in effort to be in touch with them and help them wherever possible. It helped that I never moved Hyderabad and I could be in touch with them regularly. I spoke to them first and them send them the soft copies by mail. It was pretty simple with my then current boss. One day I went little early in the morning and waited for him to come in. As soon as he was in, it was 9:00 AM in the morning, others would come in only after 9:30AM, I took a print out and quickly went in. He finished the whole thing in about half-an-hour and showed me the whole thing before sealing as directed by ISB. I was happy as he could clearly rate where I was good and where I needed to improve. With the other two I had to push a bit and before the deadline got both of them. Both of them also showed me their ratings before sealing. There was no specific benefit of seeing your own ratings but it gives you some comfort. Also all three of them were honest and I in no way influenced their ratings. The ratings were no goody-goody.

Step 9: Submission of the application

This was the easiest of all. Just keep your credit card with you for online submission and collate all the documents for hard copy submission. I submitted the hard copy on 2nd October as it was the day of Dasera and anything that is started on that day is supposed to be successful and indeed it did :)

For IIMA it was far more simple, all I had to do was rewrite the essays, get a digital photograph and submit it online. No application fees, may be that's one reason I pursued it till the end.

The next phase was waiting for shortlist, preparing for the interview, attending the interview, waiting for the result, and finally you get to know what happened to your dream of getting into the B-school.

My next post follows shortly.

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