Applying to an MBA as an Indian IT professional: how to stand out

I applied to business school as an Indian male IT professional, which is honestly the most overrepresented group of applicants there is. I got into INSEAD, LBS, HEC Paris, Cambridge, Oxford and IMD, and I chose INSEAD.

A lot of the people who message me are in exactly that position. Some are from IIT. A lot are from tier two and tier three colleges, and they're worried that's already decided it.

It hasn't. But I'm not going to pretend it doesn't matter either. Here's what I'd tell you if we sat down for an hour.

Why the same profile can be a reach for you

The ranking tells you how a school is regarded. It tells you nothing about whether you'll get in.

Two candidates with the same GMAT and the same job title aren't in the same position if one is a Brazilian woman in energy and the other is an Indian guy in software. The second pool is many times bigger, so the exact same profile is a target school for one of them and a reach for the other. Rankings don't know this. You have to.

So when you build your list, be honest about which group you're in. Schools want a class from many backgrounds, and they're comparing you against everyone who looks like you on paper. Your job is to stop looking like them.

What business schools look for

This is what I tell every candidate. There are five things.

1. The pedigree. Did you do well at school, have you done well at work, have you worked at good companies, have you been recognised for anything?
2. Who you are outside work. Are you passionate about something, and how far have you taken it? Not "I play cricket at the weekend". Did you start a club, compete, win something?
3. How you give back. Do you teach, mentor, volunteer? Schools read this as a hint of how you'll give back to your class, and later to the school as an alumnus.
4. What you're planning to do afterwards, and why business school. How well have you thought it through, is it achievable, and will this particular school help?
5. Whether you'll be a good piece of the puzzle. In a class from so many backgrounds, will you add something to the mix, or just take a seat?

Notice that only the first one is about where you went to college. And even that one is mostly about what you did after.

If you're an engineer, it's tempting to put everything into number one. That's exactly why it won't separate you. Two to five are where you win.

The GMAT: push it, then stop worrying about it

Every school has its own cut-off, and in general the US schools sit higher than the European ones. If you're an Indian candidate from a traditional background, the sheer number of people applying from your pool means it's worth trying to maximise the score.

Just don't confuse that with a guarantee, because a high score on its own doesn't get anybody in.

What the score did for me. In my pool (Indian, male, engineering) a 95th percentile score didn't make me stand out. It made me safe. It answered "can he keep up" and then got out of the way, and the essays did every bit of the differentiating. If I'd scored higher with the same essays, I honestly don't think a single decision would've changed. If I'd scored a fair bit lower, I think some would have.

My own numbers: I started studying in September 2022, working full time in Tokyo. First attempt in a test centre in November, a 680, around the 85th percentile. Not good enough.

The people around me typing and clicking through their sections were a constant distraction, and I never got into my rhythm. So I took another four weeks, studied the weak areas, and sat it online in the first week of January. That one came back at 710, around the 95th percentile. That's the number I applied with.

I sat the old GMAT. The new GMAT Focus runs on a different scale, so don't go chasing a "710" on the new one. Chase the percentile. My 710 sits around a 655 on Focus.

For reference, INSEAD doesn't publish a GMAT average at all. It gives percentiles instead, roughly the 60th on verbal and the 66th on quant and data insights, on its MBA FAQ. LBS gives one Focus number, around 645, with a typical range of 555 to 805.

If you're from a tier two or tier three college

I'll be straight with you. It hurts at first, and you can't change it. What you can change is everything else on the list, and most people from tier one colleges don't bother, because they've never had to.

What got me through it wasn't a technique. There were stretches where nothing was working, and at some point I decided that the college on my certificate wasn't going to be the thing that stopped me. Every decision from then on was made on that basis.

Nobody else had to believe it for it to work. I did, and this is what that looked like in practice.

• Optimise for impact, wherever you are. A name people have heard of helps, and I had one at Match Group, the company behind Tinder. But a tiny cog at a big company loses to someone who ran the whole thing at a startup. A committee asks what changed because you were there.
• Get recognised for something. An award, a promotion ahead of schedule, a project that got written about, a talk you gave. One concrete thing beats a paragraph of adjectives.
• The GMAT is your equaliser. A strong score is the clearest signal you can send that you'll keep up, and it's entirely in your hands.
• Have a plan that only you could have. A specific, believable goal outweighs a college name.

Take something further than you need to

Most people go to work, come home, watch TV, and if they've got a hobby they do it on the side. The question isn't what your hobby is. It's how far you've pushed it.

What "somewhere" looked like on mine. Archery went from a thing I tried in Tokyo to membership of the national association, which is a line a committee can check. Three years in a community service club became forty-five projects and a year running its international work, which is a number. Origami stayed a hobby, and it still went on the page, because five-hundred-fold models say something about patience that no bullet point does. None of it was picked to impress anyone. It was picked because I'd taken it further than I needed to.

When I look back at what went into my application, it was: co-founding a startup in my final year and running thirty workshops, teaching myself to code and interning until I got the job I wanted abroad, three years in that community service club including disaster relief work, the archery, and two years on a helpline.

None of that was a strategy at the time. Every one of those started years before I applied, and every one was me taking something a bit further than I needed to. That's the whole trick.

Don't hide the gaps

A lot of engineers have a gap or a detour they're embarrassed about. Write it as what it was.

The gap on my CV. I left the startup in late 2017, taught myself to code with online courses, and my first internship didn't start until the following May. On paper that's a hole. Cambridge has a prompt that asks you to explain gaps, and I wrote it as what it was: the months I spent turning myself into someone who could get the job abroad. A gap with a reason and a result is a story. A gap you hide is a question you didn't answer.

Pick a theme, and cut the office stories

Decide how you want to be perceived, and make every story prove it. Mine was an emotionally intelligent, adaptive and ambitious change maker. I didn't pick those words from a list. I asked a few people close to me how they'd describe me, and kept the ones I could honestly identify with.

What I cut. I had a stack of work stories: difficult colleagues, a time I had to let someone go, projects that went sideways. Most of them went, because an application made only of office stories would've shown one side of me. The volunteering and the archery went in instead, and that rounded the picture out. Deep on a few, yes. But not all from the same room.

This matters more for engineers than for anyone. Your resume already proves you're technical. An essay spent proving it again is an essay wasted.

Write sentences only you could write

The committee reads thousands of applications, and they can usually pick up on what's a lie, what's ChatGPT, and what's your real story.

"This experience taught me the importance of resilience, adaptability and effective communication in a fast-paced environment" is a sentence a model writes. A committee has read it a thousand times this cycle.

"I arrived in Tokyo in January with one suitcase and couldn't read the sign for my own train station" is a sentence only one person could've written. The details are what prove there's a real person behind it.

Know why you want the MBA, now

Be able to answer three things without hedging: what you want to do afterwards, what you're missing that the MBA gives you, and why now.

Mine. Afterwards: consulting on public and social sector work in Asia-Pacific, and eventually an AI-driven social business. What I was missing: I could build the systems, but I'd never run a business, priced anything, or sat across the table from a government client. Why now: the next step in my job was the engineering lead role. If I took it, I was on the technical track for the next decade, and every year the switch would've gotten harder.

"I want to move from tech into strategy" is what everyone in your group writes. The specific version is what makes yours believable.

Talk to the people who made your exact move

None of the nineteen schools I researched publishes what its class did before the MBA. So if you want to know whether someone with your job title gets in, the class profile is no help and an alumnus is.

For my own applications I spoke to over thirty people, and more than half of the people I messaged replied.

A filter that works. School page, Alumni tab, type "software engineer" into the search box. Set "Where they work" to the two or three firms you're aiming for. Set "Where they live" to the city you want to end up in. What's left is usually ten to twenty people, and every one of them made the move you're trying to make. Message all of them.

The message is what gets you a reply. "Hi, I'm applying to INSEAD, could we chat?" gets ignored. "Hi Priya, I'm a backend engineer in Bangalore applying to INSEAD for next year, and your move from engineering into consulting in Singapore is exactly what I'm trying to do" gets a reply, because she can see in one sentence that you've done the work.

Money set aside for Indian applicants

Being from the biggest group has one upside. Some schools fund places specifically for Indian students.

• LBS runs the Ajay Arora Scholarship, £50,000 for one Indian student a year, and every eligible candidate is considered automatically.
• LBS also reserves five of the ten BK Birla places for India. You compete with other Indian candidates for those five, with no separate application.
• INSEAD runs the Kalipatnapu Scholarship, ₹24 lakh each for two Indian students a class with financial need, and the Indian Alumni Scholarship, up to €25,000. You can apply for up to four INSEAD scholarships once your round closes.

Do this now

Go through the five things schools look for and give yourself an honest mark on each. The lowest one is your work for the next six months.

Then find five people on LinkedIn who were software engineers three years ago and are now where you want to be, and send them a message today.