Mr. Skin Care

Well you have the honour of being the first national level roller skater I have ever come across in 20 years working in admissions! What a brilliant (and fun) sporting interest to have on your profile. As a first generation graduate from a great Indian university I admire your drive to achieve both academically and through your sports. With the skin care market estimated to be worth $189bn by 2025, yours is an interesting profile and one that could capture attention. You have some wins to highlight – the 40% cost savings, the creativity and the understanding needed to bring products to market – but your challenge will lie in ensuring your story is compelling to the Yale committee. You’ll have to make that commitment essay really count given you’re up against a very tough demographic and perform well in the video questions. Make your personality shine. If you can do that, you’ll lift yourself above the pool and help round out that strong GMAT score. Please click the free consultation link below to discuss further!

In addition to the requisite educational and test score achievement and being in the sweet spot for age/experience, you have some really compelling and differentiated material in your background: roller skating excellence, clear and impactful/quantifiable accomplishments in the CPG sector, cross-geographical leadership which has curated a global business lens.
Your pedigree is enough to compete for a spot at Yale SOM and MBB, though you should know that your non-IIT alma mater and your 740 GMAT score does put you at somewhat of a disadvantage for your competitive Indian male demographic. While a 740 GMAT is a very strong score and indeed higher than Yale SOM’s overall average, it will be low for your demographic for SOM and for MBB coming from SOM from your Indian male demo. Still, an immediate post-MBA goal of MBB is still reasonable for you with your current score and work experience, especially given the reality that you will need sponsorship to work in US/EU post-MBA and MBB can reliably do that (while CPG’s generally don’t for US/EU placements of international employees). You could talk about doing CPG immediately post-MBA if go back in-country (India), that’s believable and doable but probably not preferable given the relatively lower salaries and MBA debt that you will be servicing and wouldn’t necessarily build the strategic skills you’d hone in MBB. You should know that MBB post-SOM would be for generalist roles – you might have a defacto focus on CPG because of your interest/background, but MBB won’t specialize you in CPG right away, and that’s by design. AdComs know this, so it would be prudent not to talk about CPG focused consulting immediately following MBA, unless you are targeting niche marketing consulting firms that are themselves CPG-focused (which you probably won’t want anyway since these firms are less likely to sponsor internationals, pay less, and are less prestigious with worse exit opportunities than MBB).
Another area of caution is your highlight of your first generation college status. For your demographic, coming from an under-resourced background is not going to be differentiating. If you were a US domestic applicant who was an underrepresented minority applying to a US school, it might be differentiating to talk about being first gen, but focusing on this element given your Indian demo will appear trope-y in a way that won’t help you. AdComs are inundated with personal statements about heroic parental sacrifice and against-the-odds personal achievement from applicants of Asian/Indian origin. Most of these applicants end up being rejected. It’s just a sad truth that an overrepresented story doesn’t really help you so you don’t want to submit one. A brief nod to your humble origins (in passing, less than one sentence), would probably be fine and would advance your cause, but a whole paragraph on your unlikely success given your underprivileged Indian upbringing and everything your parents did to help you succeed against the odds is going to get tropey really fast and won’t help you.
Overall, I’d peg your odds around 25% given the richness (on top of being an obvious leader and go-getter, you also seem FUN and ATHLETIC and CREATIVE) of your profile. Best of luck to you!