Stick a fork in me, I am done.

My B school application journey 2009-2010 has come to an end. Finally. It is not like I got an admit into my dream school. But it is more of an achievement to stick for so long facing numerous hurdles and learning a lot. I am the old-fashioned type who believes that you always learn out of what you do sincerely and honestly. It was tough to manage work life, social life and to apply to B-Schools. One thing it has surely taught me is to become restless. Not that I was laid-back, but I now have learnt to make good utilization of my free time. Time Management is the cliche here. Another thing that I learnt is to handle failures. I got rejects from 3 major schools after coming so close. I would not call them failures but disappointments. There were a few other things that I learnt but I do not want to bore you all with that.

Coming to the point, here is the list of all the schools that I applied to during my journey and their results:

1. ISB (First round) - Interviewed, Dinged.
2. Duke (First round) - No Interview, Dinged.
3. Haas (First round) - No Interview, Dinged.
4. Foster (First round) - Interviewed, Admitted.
5. McCombs (Second round) - Interviewed, Dinged.
6. Kenan-Flagler (Last round) - Interviewed, Dinged.

So, that is my story in short.
To be honest, I really did not have high hopes from Duke and Haas. McCombs was the most disappointing after a fantastic interview. Kenan-Flagler was dicey since I applied very late but it still gave me hopes after a decent interview. ISB was not that disappointing since, to be honest, I never found ISB that attractive. May be it is their one-year course (which is actually good in a lot of ways) or their large engineer student base (I am an engineer myself). I will write more about that later.

I really missed out on Kelley and Goizueta this time. I would have loved to apply to both of them as well as McCombs and Kenan-Flagler a little earlier. But, I simply could not. In fact, I was so beaten and bruised after my initial 4 (before Foster came out with its results), that I did not have the courage to get up. Some amount of motivation from friends and mentor prepped me up and I finally applied to McCombs and Kenan-Flagler.

Foster is a relatively low profile school (at least in India) that is particularly good at entrepreneurship. Its Accounting and Marketing are also very well known. So, I am excited about Foster and about entering the business world.