From Small-Town India To Big-Time MBA

Shreya Khandelwal, courtesy photo.

A NEW CHALLENGE

Khandelwal was determined that moving back home would not be the end of her career. With her father back on his feet, she decided her next step would be getting into an MBA program. But with working on her father’s legal cases and running Shreya Enterprises, she didn’t have time to formally study for the Graduate Management Admission Test.

“I did not sleep for more than three hours a night for about a year, since I started studying for the GMAT in late 2015,” she says. “I had to take intermittent breaks from the GMAT studies, sometimes for three to four weeks, when the work pressure got heightened.”

She didn’t take any classes, but for eight months she studied on and off whenever she had a chance. “One thing that I have found through my experience is that most of us underestimate the verbal portion a lot. When we attempt the questions, it seems easy enough, however when we attempt the mock tests, we understand that we need a very, very high accuracy to reach a good score, and that is where we land into trouble,” Khandelwal says.

Finally, on July 2016, she took the test — and scored a 750. It was, she says, a huge relief.

ON TO KELLOGG

Even then, there was still the application process, and it was tough, Khandelwal says. “After a few days of basking in the glory of the GMAT score, I started researching the schools and found out that the application process, that I had initially thought would be easy enough, turned out to be a very tough job,” she says.

She didn’t work with an admissions consultant, but a close relative helped with her essays. She applied to Kellogg, Ross, Wharton, and Stanford, and after writing 28 versions for Kellogg Essay 1, and 20 versions of Kellogg Essay 2, she finally received a call. “It was a moment of great victory,” she says. “All the years of sacrifice, hard work, jumping to unconventional career paths, helping my father, constantly facing people who discouraged me due to my gender, had finally paid off.”

Now Khandelwal is looking forward to meeting the Kellogg community. “I have been interacting with my future classmates via social media, and they all seem diversely talented, very warm, helpful, and friendly,” she says. “I think there is a lot to learn from them and their experiences.”

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