Achieving dreams

I Got Rejected From My Country’s Top B-schools. And Then I Got Into One Of The World’s Best.

The road to success is unique to each one of us. Never identical or linear.

During my bachelor’s degree in India in the early part of this millennium, I developed a deep desire to get into the country’s top-notch business schools (b-schools) for my master's degree.

The Indian Institute of Management (IIM) with its four campuses was the most coveted b-school in the country. Graduates from these hallows got mouthwateringly high salaries.

No wonder that every year 200,000 students appeared for the exam for only about 1600 seats. That’s roughly 1 seat for every 200 applicants.

Made of the hardest nut, the competitive exam to get into the IIMs was believed to be one of the toughest in the world.

Only the brightest had a chance.

And my college grades were nowhere near to what one could be proud of.

My grades were a thing of constant and extreme frustration. And there were reasons behind it.

• I majored in Accountancy which I was not interested in.
• I was terrible at learning things by heart. The education system mostly rewarded those who were good at rote learning.
• I was able to finish only 60% to 70% of all my papers thanks to my Writer’s Cramp — a neurological condition that affects writing speed (discovered years later).

Simplicity and ignorance can be bliss

The fact that my grades were mostly below average did not drive me to think that I should settle for anything less.

It did not stop me from desiring the best for myself.

My dreams were still flying innocently high; undeterred, unhindered, and unaware of a very visible fact hovering around me — that my academic performance was near my bootlaces.

The interesting thing was that there was no conscious effort on my part to be in that kind of mindset.

I was, in fact, not even aware that I was carrying around a kinda stupidly positive mindset.

It was me and just my goals in front of me. That was it.

My simplicity, ignorance and naivety were proving to be bliss. Despite the setbacks, my self-worth mostly remained unaffected.

But not for too long.

I enrolled myself into a coaching institute that prepared students for the competitive entrance exam and soon realized how bizarrely tough the exam was.

The IIMs suddenly started looking like sour grapes.

I lowered my target. My eyes moved down the list, past the IIMs onto the next ring of top-ranked schools.

And then a curveball got thrown at me.

My bachelor's degree’s final year grades came out.

They were so bad that I did not qualify to apply to any reputed B-schools in my country.

So, even if I were to perform brilliantly in the entrance exams, none of these breeds would have accepted my application in the very first place because I missed the minimum college grade criteria set by those schools.

There was an exception though.

Four top-ranked schools did not believe in that criteria and thus were open to accepting my application.

They were also the most exceptionally difficult ones.

They were the four IIMs!

After 2 years of preparing and appearing twice for the entrance exams, I did not make it. My percentiles were far below the cut-offs.

Many advised me to join other not-so-reputed B-schools where I was easily getting admission. But my heart just did not agree.

At the same time, the two-year gap was making my CV uglier.

So, in February 2003, after a walk-in interview, I joined a bank as a door-to-door salesman.

At that point in time, this is how I looked like:

The guy with poor college grades, who did not qualify to apply to 99% of the b-schools, who failed twice at entrance exams with a 2-year gap and zero experience in his CV and who took up a modest door-to-door sales job paying a starting salary of Rupees 2500 or $58 per month

I found myself millions of miles away from where I wanted to be.

And my self-worth and dreams were both dipping.

What I never realized was that this modest sales job was going to give me one of the best experiences of life and would turn out to be my ticket to one of the world’s best B-schools!

For 3 years, I continuously featured in the top 5 salesmen.

For 3 years, I took bold first-of-its-kind initiatives that became trendsetters in the organization.

For 3 years, I handled countless rejections, failures, demotivation, embarrassments, and on rare occasions insults (some customers were rude).

For 3 years, I traveled widely in the region and met diverse people - the poor, the rich, the kind, the ugly, the culturally different, honest police officers, corrupt politicians, and passionate terrorist-turned-businessmen.

The experience had changed me from the inside.

I wanted to explore the world, broaden my horizons, meet people from different countries, and understand different ways of doing business.

Thus, this time I eyed schools outside of India.

I sat for the GMAT and went for my MBA at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Bangkok, a highly reputed institute in Asia.

I slogged and thrived in AIT’s participative, thought-provoking, and encouraging culture.

AIT had a dual degree partnership with a b-school in Paris, called ESCP.

ESCP was consistently featured by the Financial Times as the Top 5 B-schools worldwide, for its master's program.

They selected only 10 students from AIT that year for the dual degree based on their academic performance, essays, and work experience.

And God knows how Saturn, Mars, the rings of Jupiter, stars, moon, Venus, etc. all aligned with my fate, but I ended up being one of them!

At that point in time, this is how I looked like:

The guy with poor college grades, who did not qualify to apply to 99% of the b-schools, who failed twice at entrance exams with a 2-year gap and zero experience in his CV, who took up a modest door-to-door sales job paying a starting salary of Rupees 2500 or £58 per month to which he devoted himself fully, developing excellent skills and experiences and finally ended up going to two highly reputed international b-schools in two different countries.

And guess who were some of my classmates on the Paris campus?

Students from the IIMs and other top Indian b-schools who had gone there for their exchange programs!

In a surreal, long twisty, and turny way, life came full circle on another horizon.

Looking back, these would be my 3 takeaways

Takeaway 1

The road to achieving success is neither linear nor standard. It’s unique for each one of us as per our strengths, weaknesses, and circumstances.

My experience clearly shows that there is no one way to achieve our goals and dreams. There are multiple doors to reach the same destination.

In our world, organizations and universities use grades, ranks, and brands as screening tools. Thus, they end up playing an important role in our lives.

But they can’t define us or our destiny. The human spirit is way too big.

Takeaway 2

Our today is the most important. Unless we do not focus on the now, we can’t build our tomorrow. Overthinking and complaining about our today, no matter how bad it is, only takes us further back.

That’s what happened when I was doing my sales job.

Apart from some on-and-off frustrations, I devoted myself to it completely without being bitter about past rejections or my current state. Being a productive salesman helped to maintain my self-worth which in turn kept me working hard at my job.

And when you keep on working hard at something, unknown doors, and opportunities start appearing.

Takeaway 3

Hope.

Without hope, nothing would have been possible.

Be it scoring low grades, failing in competitive exams, or earning a good name for myself in my job, I never settled and stopped being hopeful that someday I would go to a reputed B-school.

I can be criticized as stupidly positive, ignorant, or a simpleton.

I will happily accept them if Hope is what I get in return.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — -

Note: Getting into top-ranked universities is in no way an indication of a person’s ability to succeed in life. It is not to be treated as something of high prestige. Consider my story as an example or metaphor for any dream that you may want to go after. In my case, it was a good business school at that point in my life.