Five thoughts for IT applicants

When I entered the MBA admission process, I was blissfully unaware of applicant demographics or that I fell into one of the more competitive pools - namely the Indian IT applicant (or as Sorebrek says, the Yetis). Popular wisdom was that "differentiation was key" and I had no idea what that meant. I was what I was - differentiated or otherwise - and I was pretty happy being me (although there were moments of weakness when I yearned to be a wildlife photographer in the Antarctic, but I digress). Close to one year, and much application heartburn later I can look back at my experiences somewhat objectively and offer these nuggets of wisdom (if you can call it that) for the applicants this year struggling to "differentiate" themselves.

Recognize stereotypes and work to dispel them
There are stereotypes that surround being an engineer, especially a software person - which is that such people are highly analytical individual contributors, and somewhat lacking in social graces. Those who've worked in the technology industry will know at least some people who fit this stereotype. Thus when you write your applications its important to try to avoid highlighting achievements or activities that perpetuate this stereotype by showcasing your "nerdier" abilities. The ability to remember the value of pi to the 199th decimal place is cool but will fail to impress most admissions officers. Focus instead on showcasing your achievements where engineers are perceived as weak - those involving collaboration and other people. Which brings us to -

Teamwork (or all those projects you were staffed on)
Since a business degree (and your future career) is often about teamwork, and social ability - its important to show in your essays that you have the ability to work effectively as a contributor in a team, a skill you will need to function in the program and to display to future recruiters. I think, that IT people in general have a huge ADVANTAGE here. Why, you ask? Unless you work in a very small company, chances are that the projects and problems you've worked on involve large numbers of people. Even as a fresh graduate in my first job, I was interacting with architects, project and product managers as well as with my peers. Complex technical work requires close collaboration with people, and an ability to persuade and convince them to accept your ideas and suggestions while listening to their own. Even more significantly, most work done these days is across organizational and geographic borders. That, in other words is great source material for -

Demonstrating Leadership
Several people in the recent past have approached me with a variation of this basic query - "I've worked in XYZ (Big MNC Tech) Corporation for 2-4 years. I haven't really had a chance to be a manager/lead, so how can I display leadership ability in my essays?"
To continue from my previous point - mine your experiences working in teams to discover those instances where you influenced or changed the outcome of a (technical) discussion. Remember that discussion about the design of some new component interface? How did you get your ideas across? What was the strategy you used to convince your boss or peers? I believe that most technology applicants have ample such examples, but fail to recognize that this is potentially great seed material for highlighting your ability to motivate and influence people. However there's one thing that you should be wary of while writing your essays -

Avoid clichés
If your essay has the words "scalability", "reliability" or "innovative" in it, hit delete and start over! OK, that was an exaggeration, but in reviewing essays written by engineer friends I find that we tend to write wordy, yawn-inducing sentences such as - " My future goal is to lead a company that transforms enterprises by creating cost-effective and scalable IT solutions for reengineering". Do you really want to sound like Dilberts pointy-haired boss? Since our essays are really stand-ins for our selves in the mind of the admissions director, wordiness and clichés make us look dull and boring, when instead we should aim to -

Be creative
I didn't mean to suggest in my previous point that one cannot write about scalability or reliability if that is related to their career goals. Just that, if it is then be creative in how you present it to the reader. Wherever possible use pictures or imagery to describe your thoughts. While few have the lyrical ability of a Lake poet, it is not difficult to inject some life and color into essays by using your imagination.

All this is obviously easier to write about than to implement in practice. But I do think that the successful "techies" admitted to bschool are able to achieve the above with some success. Finally, although "five thoughts" has a nice ring to it, the overarching thought that I haven't talked about (but should be patently obvious) is to not look at your IT background as a liability that statistically impairs you, but rather as an asset that has added value and contributed to your development as an individual. That kind of positive approach will yield the best results.


Background note: My career experience has been in telecommunications product development where I've done considerable software work - as an engineer, a technical leader and project manager.

Ends and beginnings...

First off, apologies for not having updated this blog in a while. A blog, like any other writing, requires a muse, or at least a theme to blog about, and for me the blogging inertia (blinertia??) that set in during my long vacation has proven hard to overcome.

I've stayed away from recording what my take on "best practices" for MBA applications is, primarily because I believe this could potentially be misleading. As a successful applicant we can postulate that there were certain things that we did well or badly that helped us succeed, but I don't think that we can KNOW if that was true with any accuracy - especially with the essays. So my caveat emptor word of warning to future applicants is to evaluate everything you read in our blogs for yourself. The learning that in my opinion could be the most relevant to a future applicant relates primarily to application timing, school selection and strategy. However, I do intend to post very soon, some thoughts geared towards those applying with a technology/software/IT background.

As for the future of this blog, I will continue blogging about my life at Tuck. I've heard that being an MBA student blogger is not easy, owing to the various time commitments that students have. I have no doubt that this is true but in the past my blog has served multiple purposes, as a personal experience journal, a place to record observations and as a way to reach friends and family. I think that it will continue to be valuable to me and others, and I thus intend to continue writing it. It'll be interesting to see how I feel about it about, say, 2 months from now.

Many more meetups

I'm happy to report that the number of Tuckies from Bangalore has gone up to a whopping TWO, after N was admitted off the waitlist. N, if you're reading this, congrats and welcome again. We celebrated her success by heading to the Tavern and crashing a Fuqua meetup. (Note: Tavern is a British-style pub crunched in between the first and the second floors of the Museum Inn. It is a very tall-person-unfriendly place.)

I was in Chennai the week before last, where among other things, I met fellow Tuckie and blogger AKS. I also visited Dakshina Chitra, a museum of restored 19th century South Indian homes. Chennai has changed quite a bit since I last visited, judging by the number of new trendy places.

Earlier that week I had dinner with Arwen at the Copper Chimney, a restaurant in Bangalore Central that served excellent North Indian food. During the course of conversation about various MBA and non-MBA topics, Arwen made me remember that I hadn't updated my blog in a while. The question I think, is not of intent, but of material. While several things are going on in my life at this moment, I can't think of anything thats appropriate subject matter for this blog. Like Marina and MBA J, I intend to post a collation/summary/retrospective of my MBA application experiences sometime over the next couple of months, but still need to find a perspective and topics to cover that folks like them haven't already done very ably. Any suggestions will be appreciated :-)

Sometime last week, I also received the "Green Book" and other study material from Tuck. Ostensibly the purpose of this box is to help people (like me) who've not had grounding in some traditional disciplines like accounting and economics (and MS Excel), catch up before we arrive at Tuck. I received mixed advice about this from Tuck first years. Many told me to not bother with this, since according to them, a) the initial learning curve is fairly steep anyway, and b) I may as well enjoy my vacation. Others found some portions useful -particularly accounting.

Finally, a second official meetup of applicants from Bangalore has tentatively been scheduled for this coming weekend. If anyone reading is going to be in Bangalore do email me off this blog.

Thought artifacts

I was talking to my father today about Brigade Road - arguably, the social and commercial center of Bangalore. Today its a hub of activity - with unending traffic, crowded sidewalks, restaurants of every description, trendy looking stores and sophisticated upscale bars and lounges. In talking to him I realized that the interesting thing about the place is that although the individual stores and structures in and around it have changed over the years - the ethos that surrounds it has largely remained unchanged.

Young men in the 60s (such as my father) would come to Brigade Road to walk around, sample the restaurants and occasionally drink a beer at one of the small pubs. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I remember having "hung out" at Brigades although the places that were cool then, are either sad and decrepit now (or look so to my jaded eyes), or have been replaced by swanky stores and ultra-cool lounges to cater to the trendy, internet-age Bangalorean.

This visible impermanence in the physical world, got me thinking about the virtual "places" of our times, such as, for instance, this blog. Do I view this as a transient artifact that will, like my memory, disappear with time? Or should I in fact attach some expectation of permanence to it - i.e. am I going to be revisiting this 20, 30, 40 years from now? I do find it interesting to visit something that I wrote after a while - since it gives me sort of a third person insight into my own brain. (For instance: This blog that I wrote briefly in 2003 and 2004)

Then again, I have no idea what I'll be doing when I'm 60, so maybe the whole discussion is moot. For those interested in viewing virtual artifacts in an evolving Internet try The Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive.

Where are YOU from?

When I got to any MBA student gathering now and meet someone new, three questions are invariably asked. These are - "Where are you from?", "What did/do you do?" and "What do you plan on doing after bschool?". Pretty natural, given the types of backgrounds we have, and the fact that these are as good conversation starters as any. Its the answer to the first however, that can occasionally pose a challenge to people like me whose identities are complicated by multiple associations.

Let me explain. The first and most common way to define identity is by your birth and antecedents. Thus, I'm Indian, and more specifically, am Tamil, by virtue of specific regional and linguistic affiliations. However, I grew up in Delhi and Bangalore, and having spent more time during my childhood in Bangalore - tend to think of myself as being "from" here. But the India I'm visiting now hardly bears any resemblance to the country that I grew up in. If 18 is the age you're considered an adult, then I've spent a majority of my adult life outside of India, specifically in the United States. Should I then say that I'm from California - since I spent 5 years there? (and am a Terminator fan!)

As far as language goes, I can speak Hindi, Tamil and Kannada and understand a smattering of Bengali, German and Spanish. Like many Indians, however, my "first" language has always been English. English is the language that I think, read and write in, for better or worse.

A couple of weeks back, a tourist guide in Bangkok refused to believe I was from India when I told him so (probably thrown off by my extremely short hair and sunglasses) In Mexico, street vendors would assume I was middle-eastern, while ironically in California I'd occasionally be mistaken for Hispanic.

Entertaining moments of confusion aside, I think that my personal experience is not at all uncommon. By virtue of their global mobility, people (and certainly most people I've met through this MBA process) are increasingly difficult to label. I think that this is a great thing, as we become more globally-aware and less parochial minded.

Which brings us back to the question - "Where are you from?". What do you think?

Bloggers Blogk

Yep. Thats what I'm blaming for my long hiatus. That and the melange of pills I've had to take over the past few days, that have been making me too sleepy to do anything useful. Right.

Primarily its been the lack of things to blog about as we seem to have entered the long, comfartable afternoon siesta time of the MBA blogger. Maybe, I should start writing serial novellas, a la MBA Cutie, which in my case will be an entertaining amalgamation of MBA application fact and Arthur Conan Doyle-esque fiction. Titles such as 'The Purloined Recommendation Letter" and "Volunteering in the Red headed league" come to mind. Then again, maybe not.

A couple of well wishers suggested that I make use of this time to do my MBA preterm homework. Even if I was so inclined (which I'm not) I have a good excuse for why I can't. While Tuck has mailed out the prework packages I have yet to receive them since they are at a friends place in the US currently, me not having changed my address in time.

However, since the sight of someone on a three month vacation seems to just bother some people, I got roped in by a publisher friend to review a book. So I expect to be spending the better part of next week reading a manuscript about project management and requirement analysis for large software projects. Exciting stuff.

In MBA news, a bunch of admits from different schools are meeting tomorrow in Bangalore, and I shall represent Tuck. Thanks to the blog reader who alerted me of this. In true future-business-leader fashion, we've (I've) named this The First Annual Bangalore Inter-Bschool Preterm Meet. Most of the US News top-15 schools are represented, although I predict that after the first round of beers, we will develop a new and more sophisticated ranking based on the results of arm-wrestling each other with a suitable beer+pizza intake handicap (Really, is there any better way?)

Its strange how I'm running into MBA admits everywhere. In Bangkok, at an Internet cafe I met a girl from Texas who's admitted and headed to Kellogg after overhearing her group talking about the recent UT Austin cyber breach that led to potential data theft (they had all studied at UT).

Finally, I'm catching up on my reading, something I haven't really been able to do at the pace I've wanted over the last few months. Currently reading, the non-required, but highly-recommended for future MBAs - Liars Poker.

All good things must come to an end...

...sometimes prematurely. Sometimes when you don't really intend them to.

The beginning of this end was on a bright Friday morning at Koh Pha Ngan. The sun was out, the hammocks looked inviting and the birds were all atwitter. However since I'd spent most of the previous day lazing around on the beach, I decided that this would be the day of adventure. So off I went on a rented bike exploring the island.

Now at this point I should mention that I knew about the risks of riding bikes on these islands. In Bangkok I saw quite a few people with bandages on their arms and legs, and warned myself about the dangers of speeding since there is sufficient traffic on the islands for this to be dangerous. But instilled with a sense of misplaced self-belief I didn't imagine anything could happen to me since I was a "careful" driver.

About two hours later, I was trying to navigate a 45 degree slope on an extremely bad unpaved road somewhere in the interior of the island when my bike slips and I lose control and like Jack go tumbling down the hill. Bloodied and in shock, I was lucky that a traveller in a jeep passing by stopped and seeing my condition offered to take me to the nearby hospital. A harrowing 30 minutes later I reach the Phangan "International" Hospital (in quotes because this comprised in entirety of about 2 rooms). Luckily physical injuries require no complicated sign language explanations and the resident doctor straightaway got to work. Damage: a gash on my arm that needed 17 stitches, a torn ligament in my ankle and a further half dozen stitches on my foot. Miraculous that I didn't actually break anything.

Now, the question at this point was if I could continue travelling in my rather beat up state with a somewhat non-functional right arm and leg. An Aussie fellow traveller also encouragingly pointed out the risks of the numerous ghastly infections that one could catch in Thailand and told me the gruesome story of how his mate lost his liver from an accident similar to mine.

Consequently I decided to head home the next day. Like Phileas Fogg I jumped, skipped and hopped from songthaew to boat to bus to taxi to plane and made my way back to Bangalore on the 13th of May. So here I am at my parents place in Bangalore getting lots of good food and sleep.

So am I disappointed? Yes. I really was looking forward to a lot of stuff on this trip. However, the brief interlude in the Phangan hospital has got to rank as one of my more unpleasant memories - not because of the fact that I was hurt in and of itself but rather because of the accentuated sense of being entirely alone in a strange new place. Anyway, like Calvin's dad would point out, I'm sure that this experience has built character.