The Road to Cambridge!

Reverse chronological order for some reason appeals to the human mind, atleast for some like me, with our memory seemingly having a limited retention capability. So, I will start my application process monologue with this blog post I write on Clear admit and referred a lot of Round 3, 4 and 5 applicants when they requested for some tips. Hopefully, I will follow-up with information on my other applications, why I chose to apply to the schools I applied to and how I attempted the GMAT (I carefully chose attempted instead of "aced", "cracked" or any such eulogies). So, here it goes:

Cambridge / Judge MBA Admissions Interview Questions: Round 2 / Faculty / On-campus

Of adcoms & applicants!

Have you got within 200 yards of Lake Geneva and not walked towards it to take a stroll by it or a photograph, out of sheer over-confidence? 

This is precisely what I did, when I traveled to Lausanne to interview at IMD. I promised myself that I am going to return to do my MBA and so did not click a single picture or go near the shores of the lake although I could see it from the school, the bus, the tram and on the train from Geneva to Lausanne.

As much as choosing and applying to the right college is an arduous and time consuming task to the applicant, there is an equally exhausting & exasperating task on the other side for adcoms. This multiplies when the school decides to assemble a class that is 1/10th or 1/15th the size of a Top business school. I got admitted into one of them - Cambridge, which made me think it is going to be easy and not that bad after all. My opinion has changed after my 5 months of waiting for IMD. 

Being a demographically over-represented lot in the applicant pool, Indians have a tough time applying to B-schools. This, especially, when you are not a gifted GMAT cracker, like me. Fortunately, my story did help me standout of the applicant pool and I was interviewed by IMD on the 26th of March. It was quite an interesting process with a personal interview, case study presentation and group case assessment. The first two parts went well for me, although the third was a bit tricky due to the way the professor ran it, disallowing extensive participation, despite having done very strong analysis. Long-story short, IMD put me on a hold list. 

While time froze as I was waiting for IMD - I paid my acceptance fee for Cambridge (April), got admitted into Kellogg (Mid-May), decided to drop Kellogg (end May) and paid my 2nd installment to Cambridge (mid-June). However my status in IMD did not budge. While the wait is usually very painful for the applicants, I can now imagine the difficulty that adcom have to go through to ensure they have unique candidates in the cohort - especially when there are 90 (like IMD) or 150 (like Cambridge) across 50+ countries. So it was with a heavy heart that I finally mustered my strength to write the below e-mail, today:

Hi xxx, 

Thanks for your mail. I have accepted my offer from Cambridge and you can now remove me off the wait list for IMD as I cannot wait any longer. 

I wish you the best in assembling your class for 2014. :)

Cheers,

Vignesh

My solace lies in the fact that I decided to reject 2 schools (Kellogg & IMD) and accept Cambridge, A school that gives me the best of both selectivity and location (by being in the UK). 

Now all I need is to be offered a job in Nestle HQ to see Lake Geneva :)