Rejected By Stanford In 2025. Admitted In 2026. Here’s What Changed.

The rejection came on a Thursday or Friday evening in March 2025. Dhairyya Agarwal, a product manager at Microsoft living in Sunnyvale, California, had applied to Stanford’s Master of Science in Management Science and Engineering program – one of the most selective graduate programs in the country. The answer was no.

By Monday morning, he was already back at his desk, working on the essays again.

“It was only three days,” he says. “I got the rejection and then the next Monday I was like, ‘Okay, what shall I do next?’”

On February 27, 2026 – two days before the birthday that only appears on the calendar every four years, because Dhairyya was born on February 29 – Stanford said yes.

WHY STANFORD, AND ONLY STANFORD

Dhairyya grew up in Kolkata – a city he says produces scholars who “learn for the love of learning, with no outcome attached” – and completed his undergraduate degree at MAKAUT (Maulana Abul Kalam Azad University of Technology) before earning a master’s from Carnegie Mellon. He has lived across three countries: India, the United States, and Canada, where he was based when the first rejection arrived.

At Microsoft, where he has worked since 2021, he scaled a product on Microsoft Defender for Office 365 – keeping Outlook and Teams phishing-free – from zero to 100 million users. Good job, good title, good trajectory. But he wanted something the job couldn’t give him.

“CMU gave me the tools of how to build a product,” he explains. “But I did not have the tools to build a company.” He wanted peers who thought beyond promotions and big-tech career ladders – people who wanted to change the world. MS&E, founded in 2000 and housed in the School of Engineering rather than the GSB – which, at the time, wasn’t thrilled about a new department called Management Science and Engineering – was the only program he felt could deliver that. So when Stanford rejected him, applying somewhere else was never seriously on the table.

THE OVERHAUL

The second application was, by his own description, a complete overhaul. New recommenders. A new resume. Three entirely rewritten essays. “I did not reuse anything,” he says.

But the more important shift was philosophical. In his first application, he had led with his professional accomplishments – a polished, credential-heavy narrative. He now calls it “an Instagram reel of professional achievements.” When he shared his revised storylines with current students in the program, the feedback was blunt: we don’t know who you are as a person.

So he started over with a different question: not what had he achieved, but why did he want this, and what did it reveal about who he was? He built a storyline before writing a single word of the essay, then iterated on it more than 30 times. “I could write something on a weekend, come back two days later, and restart,” he says. “I just kept going until I knew this was the best essay I could ever produce in my life.”

The two other required pieces – a Learning Enrichment essay and an Additional Information section for reapplicants – came to him in one sitting, word for word, during one of his daily hour-long walks.

WHAT HE WOULD TELL YOU RIGHT NOW

For students staring at a rejection letter this season, Dhairyya’s advice doesn’t begin with “reapply.”

First, he says, accept the rejection fully. For him, that process took until November 2025, when he finally submitted his second application. “I came to accept the fact that I was rejected, but it wasn’t really done until I submitted,” he reflects. Then, lean on your support system. Then ask whether your “why” is still clear. His was. And then – critically – ask whether your first application was genuinely your best work.

“If yes,” he says, “then I think you should not reapply. Because if that’s the best thing you can ever produce and it doesn’t get you in, there’s no point.” Reapplying, in his view, is only worth it if you can genuinely do better – not just try again.

He also argues for staying in your job while you apply. In a tough market for new graduates, working while you apply isn’t just practical – it gives you something to write about.

WHAT COMES NEXT

Dhairyya starts the program in the fall. He doesn’t see it as a departure from his career so much as a step change within it – from building products to building companies. “I am pretty proficient with products,” he says. “But they’re just a part of building a company.”

For now, he’s sharing his story not because the happy ending is guaranteed for everyone who tries again, but because he knows what it felt like to open that first letter. “Even if one person can get their life changed,” he says, “I’ll be very grateful. I learned it the hard way.”

DON’T MISS THE MBA REJECTION LETTER: THREE REASONS WHY YOU’LL RECEIVE ONE

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.