This is a presentation by Raviraj Jain, Harvard Business School class of 2013 on the parameters needed to get into a top MBA program.

1. Getting into Business School
by
Raviraj Jain
MBA Candidate, Harvard School of Business

2. What do Business schools analyze in
your application?
Diversity Intellect
Focus and B Schools Work Experience
Passion
Self-Awareness Leadership Potential
How do you rate yourself on all these
parameters?

4. MBA App Process – Blue Print
• Getting Ready
• GMAT
• Selecting which schools to apply
• Essays
• Recommendations
• Interview

5. 1. Getting ready
• Find out if doing an MBA will really help
your career
• Clearly set your expectations from your
MBA
• Figure out how you will finance your
MBA

6. 2. GMAT
• GMAT is not as important for
international B-Schools as CAT is to
IIMs
• However of all the aspects B-Schools
look at, GMAT is the only one which you
can improve in the short term!
• High GMAT score can also help you get
a scholarship
3. B-school selection
• 1 year/2 year
• Geography
• Costs of doing MBA
• Geography of post-MBA job
• Realistic potential to get through

7. 4. Essays
Essays are a way for the admission
committee to know the person behind the
accomplishments and understand your
thought process
• Great essays are:
– Coherent
– Written from the Heart
– Have a wonderful starting and an
excellent ending
– Each essay tries to highlight different
quality of yours
– Uses simple language and employs
very few technical terms (if at all)
– Goals Essay: Goals should be
feasible and should display why you
are best suited to make that happen

8. 10 Mistakes you should not do in an
Essay
1. Fail to answer the question
2. Write essays that lack a point or underlying
thesis
3. Sound negative, whining, complaining
4. Use clichés or superficial ideas
5. Write a résumé in prose
6. Write what you think admissions officers
want to hear
7. Fail to catch grammatical and spelling errors
8. Leave out the passion
9. Not showing different aspects of yourself
10. Omit the lessons learned or takeaways

9. 5. Recommendations
Used to have an external view about the
candidate. Also used to validate candidate’s
claims about accomplishments and
performance
• How to choose the right recommender?
– Someone who has been your
supervisor during the experiences
you described in essays
– Someone who knows you closely and
for a long period of time – so that
s/he can use anecdotes about you
which are beyond the normal course
of work
– Seen you grow and is confident of
your abilities
– Choose recommenders from different
organizations if possible
• It is important for the recommendations
to be coherent to your essays

10. 6. Interviews
• Alumni Interviews:
– Generally conducted by alumni of
the school in the region. Such
interviews are mostly blind
• Ad Com Interviews:
– Admission Committee members fly
down to a city in India. The
interviewers would have read your
application thoroughly.

11. About CrackVerbal
Established in 2006 in Bangalore, CrackVerbal has successfully
mentored over hundreds of MBA aspirants. CrackVerbal
comprises entirely of people who are
extremely successful in their fields and who are in this venture
purely out of a love for teaching.
CrackVerbal founder Arun Jagannathan started out teaching at
India’s largest training institutes for CAT – IMS, and
CareerLauncher, at the start of the decade, before moving onto
teaching GMAT at two of the largest in that space – Kaplan and
Princeton Review, over the next few years. Finally in 2006, after
many months of frustration at teaching out of course content
designed for students of an American educational system, he
started out CrackVerbal. Arun has meticulously designed
CrackVerbal’s test prep curriculum and has developed fresh
strategies that students will not find in traditional GMAT tutoring
courses. He still teaches classes and is the Product Manager-at-
large at CrackVerbal. He loves participating in online forums and
has been a member at Pagalguy.com for over seven years now,
where he is deemed a distinguished veteran ‘puy’.
CrackVerbal is the first institute in India to start a program that
focuses on the GMAT Verbal module and has tailored techniques
and strategies that are exclusively designed for Indian applicants.
With its unique delivery mechanism, CrackVerbal let’s YOU take
charge of the GMAT. With eight interactive and intensive sessions,
spread across four weeks and a personalized focus, CrackVerbal
leaves no stone unturned in your quest to be a successful MBA
graduate.
To complete the circle, CrackVerbal also offers three workshops
on the GMAT Quantitative module, wherein all aspects of the
module are covered, with a focus on practice rather than on
pages of formulae and jargon.
www.crackverbal.com
www.facebook.com/CrackVerbal
www.twitter.com/askcrackverbal