MBA Voices: The Year I Let Other People Decide I Wasn’t Ready

In the span of 18 months, I sat the GMAT, authored and presented two papers at IEEE conferences, and walked a runway as a model. I began the first of two terms as president of a Lions club chapter. At Tata Communications I shipped my team’s first real automation, across more than 350 client firewalls, and was promoted to senior engineer on the back of it. I incorporated a company. I flew to Paris to represent India at an international Lions youth exchange. A master’s degree ran underneath all of it.

I was 21 when that stretch began and 23 when it ended. None of it was arranged that way. It arrived at once, and I never had the sense to put any of it down.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I was told I was too young for business school, and I believed it. Not for an afternoon. For a year.

I did eventually apply to the Cambridge MBA, at 23, in the final round, the one every guide tells you to skip, and got in as one of the youngest in a class of founders, scientists, doctors and lawyers with a decade on me. What follows is mostly about the year in between, and how badly I read it at the time.

READINESS STARTS WITH SOMETHING YOU FELT, NOT SOMETHING YOU PLANNED

Qualification is a checklist somebody else drew up. Readiness starts the day a problem becomes yours and refuses to leave.

Mine began with grief. My grandfather died of cancer in my first year of college, and we did not catch it in time. I was not chasing a publication. I was stuck on one question: could it have been caught earlier, cheaply, by anyone at all. That became my first research paper, on machine learning and microwave imaging for earlier detection, built on the hope that a small device might one day send a scan to a model and return an answer the way a home glucose monitor does.

He never knew he set the direction of my life. What he taught me is that the first real credential is not a qualification at all, but a question you cannot walk away from.

THE PART OF YOUR PATH THAT LOOKS IRRELEVANT IS OFTEN WHAT MATTERS MOST

Modelling found me by accident. Someone at that first research conference told me I carried myself like I should try it, so I did, walking for local brands and boutiques. It looked like the least serious thing I had ever done.

Then it turned. Agencies promised fees and cancelled shoots at the last minute. People took advance payments and vanished. And one day I found a version of my own face online, deepfaked, saying things I never said and earning money for someone who was not me. There was nobody to report it to and no way to prove which face was real.

That is what pushed me into cybersecurity. Not a career plan. A reaction. I wanted to understand the machinery that had failed me, so I trained as an engineer and joined Tata Communications, where I spent close to three years on the unglamorous inside of it: firewalls across half a dozen vendors, encrypted tunnels, the automation that stops a failure before a human sees it. In that stretch I wrote a second paper, on securing digital finance, sketching how tamper-proof records might make fraud and quiet corruption harder to hide.

One part of that world I chose on purpose. The shows I cared most about were built around sustainable fashion, and I once walked in a coat recycled from a bedsheet, prouder of it than of anything with a label. Building with your values rather than despite them is one reason Cambridge felt like the right place and not only the right degree, and through its Institute for Sustainability Leadership the school treats that instinct as a discipline rather than a slogan.

Here is what took me years to see. The runway turned out to be the reason I understood the security work, rather than a detour from it. I had stood on both sides of one problem, the person exposed and the engineer who defends against the exposure, and almost no straight path puts you in both chairs. Range dilutes you only if you let it. Handled honestly, it gives you stereo vision.

COUNT WHAT YOU CARRIED AT ONCE, NOT HOW LONG YOU CARRIED IT

The fear at 23 is that you have not done enough yet. That fear counts the wrong thing. Age tells you how long a person has existed. It says nothing about how much they were holding at the same time.

The world likes a legible story, one thing finished before the next begins. Almost nobody lives that way. I was a student while I was an engineer, building a company while holding a full-time job, on a runway one season and in a research lab the next. I shipped my team’s first real automation, turning four days of manual work across more than 350 enterprise clients into about four minutes, and my manager told me I ranked among the strongest he had supervised, which mattered less for the ranking than for what it was attached to, work done in the gaps between everything else. Earlier, as a student, I ran my university’s ambassador programme and brought in six lakh rupees in sponsorship, the most in the event’s history and my first lesson that a vision travels only as far as your ability to make others believe in it.

On my last day at Tata I watched my work laptop shut down for the final time, my staff card on the desk beside it, and left to go all in on what I was building. None of those years made me older. They made me denser, and density, more than time served, is what readiness is made of.

THE YEAR I STOPPED TRUSTING MYSELF

This is the part I am least proud of and the part I would most want another applicant to read.

I sat the GMAT Focus Edition in March 2024 and scored 695, in the 97th percentile. I sat it for one reason. I wanted an MBA, and I was aiming at Cambridge. Then the feedback arrived from every direction at once. Too young. Not enough experience. Not an MBA profile at all. More than one person told me plainly that a file like mine would not get into a ranked programme anywhere, and that I should stop looking upward. Nothing was said unkindly. But something in me went quiet, and I let an entire admissions cycle pass without applying anywhere.

So I did what felt humble and was really self-rejection with better manners. By the winter of 2025 I was applying to master’s in management programmes instead, and a few technical master’s alongside them. A MiM is the pre-experience version of the degree I actually wanted, which tells you precisely what I was doing to myself. Every one said no. Then the other letters arrived, and these said yes. UCL for an MSc in Information Security. Sydney for computer science with advanced entry. UNSW for information technology. IIT Madras for a research master’s. Serious institutions, any of which would have been a real education.

I read those offers and felt almost nothing. That was the information. The programmes were good. They simply were not mine. I had been turned down by the programmes I chose out of doubt and accepted by the ones I chose out of caution, and neither set was where I wanted to be. The problem was never my timing. It was that I had let other people’s read of my profile redraw my ambition, and then called the shrinking sensible.

So I went back to what I had wanted before anyone talked me out of it and applied to the Cambridge MBA, at 23, in the final round. The list had not changed since March 2024. Only my nerve had.

Every guide tells you not to apply then. Fewer places are left by the last round, the scholarship money has largely gone, and the odds are genuinely tighter. All of that is true, and none of it was the point. I had already spent a year applying safely to things I did not want. Applying late to the one thing I did want was the first decision in that whole stretch that was actually mine. I built that shortlist around the budget I had set, a one-year format, and a place I genuinely wanted to be. Some excellent programmes sat outside that budget and I let them go rather than pretend the number was different. Trying and losing beats never trying. What I would not do again is let another person’s read of my file decide what I was allowed to want.

KNOWING WHAT YOU HAVE NOT SOLVED, AND BEING WILLING TO BE WRONG ABOUT IT

I built my company, ShotOK, out of that deepfake, out of wanting to give people a way to prove they are themselves and hold on to their own likeness. It is early, closer to a first attempt than a finished thing, and it does not have the traction a pitch deck would claim. The hard part was never the app. It was the research underneath, verifying identity and catching synthetic media reliably enough to be trusted, and I have not cracked that yet.

I got plenty wrong. Early on I ran my development team fast and loose, no documentation and no real check-ins, and my vision and their code drifted apart while I was busy elsewhere. Structure is not the enemy of speed, it protects it, and small teams need more of it than large ones because nothing else catches the drift. In the final round of the IIMB-NSRCEL founder programme I learned the other lesson. Conviction is not a plan, and if money does not come quickly a vision has to pay for itself, which is why ShotOK runs a services line that funds the harder product.

There is a harder honesty underneath that. For a long time I could admit I had not built the product while staying certain the idea behind it was right. Lately I am less certain even of that. I believe in the problem, stolen faces and broken agreements and no way to prove you are you, more than I am now sure ShotOK is the answer. Separating those two, believing in a problem and being attached to your own first solution, may be the most useful thing my first company has given me. An idea braided into your origin story is precious, and precious is what keeps people grinding a wrong answer years past when they should have stopped. Part of why I am going to Cambridge is to pressure-test whether this is the right vehicle at all. Readiness is not the certainty that you are right. It is the willingness to be wrong about the thing you built your story on. Accelerate Cambridge, the school’s venture programme, and the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance are much of why the school itself is the right next step. Silicon Fen, the technology cluster that grew up around the city, is most of the rest. If I am going to build anything after this, I would rather do it somewhere the people who have already done it are within walking distance.

KNOWING YOUR ONE THREAD

People ask what I want to do afterwards and expect a job title. Clarity has less to do with holding a single interest than with knowing which of your interests is the trunk and which are the branches.

For me the trunk is one word. Trust. How do you prove that a person, a payment or a record is what it claims to be, when faking all three gets easier every year. The research, the security work, the company, all of it has been that one question asked in different rooms.

My near-term plan is deliberately ordinary. Find strong work, in consulting or product or the fintech and trust problems I already live inside, and get good at how serious organisations run, because you are more useful to a mission like mine once you have seen it from inside. The larger version reaches past one person’s face, towards whether an economy’s records could be made open and tamper-evident enough that quietly gaming them becomes much harder. That road is years away and I will not pretend otherwise. I do not imagine running those systems. I would rather help shape the rules they follow, which is part of why the Cambridge Union drew me in.

NONE OF IT HAPPENED ALONE

Nothing worth building gets built alone, and a real problem recruits people in a way a job posting never can.

I led a Lions Club chapter that reached more than three and a half thousand people. We ran an international hunger-relief campaign across five countries, from Turkey and Nepal to Sri Lanka, Nigeria and India, and a drug-awareness and women-safety marathon that drew more than a thousand people onto the streets, funded by sponsors I brought in one conversation at a time.

I also represented India at an international youth exchange in Paris, working with people from more than a dozen countries. We designed a food-waste app together, and I proposed a more modern way to recognise the work members quietly do.

I gave India’s country presentation there and it was named the best in the camp, and the Mayor of Saint-Cloud invited me to the Bastille Day celebrations, a strange and lovely distance from a runway in Chennai. Later, at a Lions forum for India, South Asia and the Middle East, a past international president of the organisation, Fabrício Oliveira, invited me on stage to speak on growing membership. That kind of moment lands hardest when it comes from people who have already built the thing you are trying to build.

The same was true at work. During one critical incident at Tata, three of us who were off shift joined the call without being paged. I led the diagnosis, we found the constraint, and it was resolved before the client noticed. Rank dissolved the moment it mattered, which only happens when the trust was built long before the crisis. I ran knowledge-transfer sessions for new engineers for the same reason. The projects I am proudest of pulled other people in, because a real problem is contagious.

A GOOD CONVERSATION IS NOT AN OUTCOME

I submitted on 7 May, was invited on 26 May, and went into the virtual interview day on 5 June braced for a room of competitors. What I found was admissions staff and applicants from everywhere, all slightly nervous, all curious. It felt less like an audition than like arriving somewhere.

My interview with Professor Michael Pollitt, who teaches business economics at Judge and heads its economics and policy group, was on 8 June. It was conversational in the way that lulls you until you notice the questions are doing real work. He asked what my company does, then pushed on the obvious hard thing: why one of the big platforms would not simply build it themselves. There is no clever way through that. You either have an answer or you find out, in front of someone, that you do not.

Everyone who had been through one told me the same thing beforehand. It will be conversational, relax, it is really just a chat. That was true of the surface and not of the substance. What was actually being tested was how I think when I have not prepared the answer, whether I could build a case and keep hold of it while somebody pushed at it. None of my rehearsed lines survived contact.

I suspect that is increasingly the point. Almost everything else in an application can now be produced by a machine in seconds. The interview is the last part nobody can help you with, where what you actually think has to arrive live and unedited. Given that most of my work is about proving a person is who they claim to be, there was something fitting about being let in on the strength of the one hour nobody could have faked on my behalf.

The moment I am proudest of came later and was smaller. He asked who I admired in business and what I could not learn from them. I said Elon Musk, and talked about building companies that pay for each other, about SpaceX being carried for a while on the revenue of another company he owned. He pointed out, dryly, that the wealth was not the transferable part but the persistence was. He was right, and somewhere in answering I heard myself describe a much smaller version of the same thing: I had spent months taking on client services work to fund the product I actually care about, without once calling it a strategy. Some things about yourself you only find out when a stranger asks the right question.

Then came the part nobody warns you about. A good conversation guarantees nothing. For the fifteen days between that interview and the decision I replayed it constantly, hunting for meaning in pauses that almost certainly held none.

THE EVENING IT ARRIVED, AND THE PROMISE I MADE

The conditional offer came on 23 June. My friends had, by pure coincidence, planned a trip to Besant Nagar beach that same day.

I told my parents, my brother and my girlfriend. Then I made myself a promise: not a word to anyone else until the visa came through and I was standing in front of King’s College Chapel with a photograph to prove it. Call it superstition. I know exactly what it was. I had spent a year watching my plans get talked smaller, and I did not want to hand this one to the world before it was solid.

So I went to the beach and said nothing. I was, by every account, insufferable, playing in the water like a child with energy I would not explain. My friends knew something had happened and asked more than once. I have never enjoyed keeping a secret more.

WHAT I KEPT THINKING ABOUT INSTEAD

I did not think about rankings that week. I thought about a clerk at the port in Madras.

Ramanujan had no formal training and no institutional backing, and the mathematics he posted out of an office an hour from where I grew up was ignored nearly everywhere it landed. Cambridge read it and took it seriously. That is the version of the place I grew up hearing about, and it has nothing to do with league tables.

Then there is everything that came home from there. Nehru and Manmohan Singh. Subhas Chandra Bose, who passed through the same courts and then raised an army against the empire that built them. Sarojini Naidu. Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, who went back and built India’s nuclear and space programmes out of very little. That is an unusual amount of one country’s history to have passed through a single university, and for an Indian who reads too much of it, the list is less a thing to boast about than an uncomfortable standard.

I do not expect to belong on it, and I would be wary of anyone my age who claimed they might. What I would take from them is narrower than their reputations. None of them seems to have been especially interested in the title. They were interested in the work, and in who it was for. That is the part I intend to copy.

WHAT I WOULD TELL YOU

You rarely feel ready while it is happening. You recognise it afterwards, in your willingness to own every part of how you got there, detours included. For me that came in the round nobody recommends, because that was when I had built something real and finished what I already owed the work on my plate.

I once heard that admissions committees want a jack of all trades, not an ace in one. A friend swore it was the opposite. None of us knows, and the cleanest stories are often the ones that learned the least. So here is what I am sure of. Be a jack of all trades and an ace in your niche. Apply when your profile has grown close to its ceiling with little room left to climb alone, and when the life you imagine after the MBA outweighs the one you would have without it. That is not a round on a form. That is a readiness only you can measure.

My path never added up on paper, and I have stopped wishing it did. The thread was there the whole time. I just had to stop reading it as a list, stop letting other people hold the pen, and start trusting that I was ready, in the only round I had left.

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Sunil Boopalan is a model turned engineer turned founder, and an incoming MBA candidate at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School. He began his career as a professional runway model before moving into cloud and network security at Tata Communications, where he was promoted to senior engineer. An independently published IEEE researcher, he founded ShotOK, a DPIIT-recognised startup in digital identity and AI automation to counter deepfakes, and he represented India as a delegate at the Lions Youth Exchange Camp in Paris, where he earned the Best Country Presentation award and has led community and international service reaching thousands. He holds a bachelor’s degree and a Master’s in Computer Applications from SRM, where he specialised in AI and machine learning with a CGPA of 9.38, and scored 695, in the 97th percentile, on the GMAT Focus Edition.

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