Saturday, June 17, 2006

Kellogg feedback

I received my first feedback on this year’s application from Kellogg. I had scheduled a feedback session for yesterday i..e Friday June 16th. This was very important for two reasons. One obviously to understand my strength and weaknesses and how I compared to the application pool and second to determine whether I should reapply to Kellogg. I have more or less decided to reapply to Duke and Tepper, not to reapply to Wharton, Kellogg remains a question mark.

Here is the gist of the feedback –
Adcom felt that my career goals were not well defined. I was comparable to average on work experience, leadership, GMAT score and academics. They had no concern on my GMAT score even though verbal score is a bit low and do not recommend re-writing GMAT. From what I got out of the conversation, the biggest concern for the adcom was that my career goals were not clearly defined and I was not specific enough on where I wanted to go post MBA and how Kellogg could help me get there. Also, that there was no distinguishing factor in my application.

This was very surprising for me especially the part about career goals as I thought that I was very specific about that and mentioned that even in my self assessment essay. Another thing I was surprised about was career progress which they mentioned compared with the average. I have really progressed a lot quicker than my peers in my organization and handled lot more responsibilities than others with similar experience. That goes for other companies and geographies too, as growth seems to be quicker in Indian IT companies these days. Maybe, I did not get that across well enough. Certainly something I can work on for this year’s application.

The feedback has given me some good pointers on which areas to work on and how I can restructure my full application. Waiting in anticipation for my Duke Feedback session and I am guessing that would be very useful as well.

3 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Anand, iam in the same boat (reapplication boat I mean)...so wud love to touchbase with u and share any useful tips...wud u mind giving ur contact info...
Iam in the bay area...

Ganesh

Anonymous said...

anand - you need to improve your construction of essays and some of your grammar. your points are scattered and your blog entry ideas don't flow well. i assume your essays were similar. good luck next time around.

UniQpath said...

hmmm, I got similar feedback from Wharton - essays did not indicate clearly what my goals were. I had guessed that after my ding. I have used the feedback plus a lot of introspection to find out what really was missing with my goals. You could me email me and I could give you some pointers ... Nice blog though

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