By Satyaki Dhar
The YLP Programme is offered by the Indian
School of Business, Hyderabad to provide guaranteed admission to its one year
MBA Programme contingent on the applicants securing 21 months of work
experience post earning their under-graduate degree. In case you aren’t aware
of the programme, you can always find information about it at – http://www.isb.edu/young-leaders-programme
The application process for the ISB YLP Programme
consists of three stages. The first stage begins towards the end of the
pre-final year of your undergraduate degree. The deadline ISB sets for this
stage is around the first week of March. The second stage will require you to
take the GMAT, obtain two recommendations and write a few essays. This stage
usually has a deadline of around the first week of August. The third stage is
the interview and this is held face-to-face at the ISB Campus at Hyderabad.
Interview slots range from mid-August to mid-September.
The application itself, considered as a
whole consists of the following parts –
1)
Essays
2)
Curriculum Vitae (CV)
3)
Video
4)
Recommendations
5)
GMAT score
6)
Written case-study
7)
Interview
Essays: Essays seek to find out your
perspective on how your life has been. In my application year, the essay topics
were “Describe your two most significant achievements”, “What is your career
aspiration immediately after graduating from the ISB?”, “Describe a past
experience that has shaped who you are today”
and “Please provide additional information that will significantly
affect the consideration of your application to the ISB”.
The last one is pretty standard. You need
to look through your application and see if there is any other important point
that you’ve missed out on due to the constrictions of the online application.
The achievements essay appeared again in
the following year I believe. If it does appear again, my opinion is that in
addition to telling them what the achievement was and how you went about doing
things, you should also touch on why you chose this over your other
achievements.
Other topics have kept changing.
CV: ISB traditionally asks for the one page CV. The difficulty in this
isn’t how to compress everything into a page, but I feel its picking the right
points to put on that page.
The best advice that I ever got in this
area, and I’ll pass it onto you – make a complete list of all the achievements
that you feel are worth mentioning. More
recent achievements are to be given greater weightage and as the time elapsed
since the achievement increases, the impact of the achievement needs to be that
much greater in order for it to feature on your list. Then prune that list
according to the scale of the effort and impact of the achievement. Try to
strike a balance in order to show consistency and diversity.
Speaking about diversity - I’ve heard is
greatly valued for the ISB process. How much diversity should you represent on
the CV? That’s a difficult question, but even if you’ve done a lot of things
you’ll be able to represent only 2-3 adequately well on a one page CV. So you would
end up talking about only your most important ones while the rest would have to
be accommodated through other parts of your application.
So once you’re done selecting the
achievements you want to put on your CV, get down to making it. There’s only
that much structuring you can do for a one page CV, but the standard sections
that most of us who applied kept it to were – Academic Qualifications
(Including academic awards, scholarships), Internships/Projects/Research,
Extra-curricular achievements, Awards (Other ECA awards) and a Miscellaneous
section if required. Some of us created special sections in order to highlight
certain special skills acquired (Such as Writing or Web-design) and that works
as well.
Video: Now this the fun part of the YLP Application. Atleast I had fun
shooting my video. You’ll need to don your formals (Well, I did) and speak
about the topic that they’ve provided for 90 seconds. In my application year
ISB wanted to know if they were to admit one more student to the YLP Batch, why
should it be me. Take some time and plan out the answer. I personally took
around a week and wrote down the whole answer and thought I’d memorize it, but
that didn’t work too well.
My tip, if you aren’t an exceptionally good
speaker, make the extra effort to write down the whole thing. Since its only 90
seconds you’ll need to optimize on every word if you want to pack in the
maximum number of points. Even if you are a good speaker, write it down once
and say it to yourself to see how much time it takes. Editing can also become a
lot easier if you write it down.
Recommendations: Recommendations provide the only third-person perspective to your
application and hence the process of choosing your recommenders must be
carefully thought through. Recommendations can be both professional
(Internships, work-experience), academic ( Teachers, academic
instructors/counsellors) or extra-curricular (Related to any sport, society
activity that you participate in. The single most important point that you
should consider before approaching a recommender is that person’s position (NOT
post) to comment on your life. Choose people that you think know you well and
would be in the best position to comment on your life.
Once you make a list based on that
criterion, you could start boiling it down using the kind of information that
you might want to represent to the school. For example, it can be expected that
an ECA Staff-Advisor will primarily talk about your enthusiasm and work in a
certain activity or a teacher will talk mostly about your performance in
class.
Another factor you should consider is the
credibility of the person providing the recommendation. If the Principal of
your college would roughly write the same things on your recommendations as a
Professor would, the person in the higher post (Professor) would be the better
choice.
Talking about expectations, my conjecture
is that since you’re applying straight out of your undergraduate degree and
aren’t expected to have much prior work experience one recommendation should be
from an academic viewpoint. Since you’re still a student and your profession is
studying , someone should be willing to talk about how you perform there. Most
of the people who were accepted that I know of had submitted two academic recommendations.
GMAT
score: I believe this plays quite an important
role in your application. Getting a 700 in GMAT isn’t really rocket science.
From what I have noticed, your GMAT score is usually a function of how many
questions you’ve practiced. There are exceptions ofcourse. The concepts are
fairly simple and easy to grasp but practice does make a difference. It helps
improve your speed and accuracy, both of which are well-tested during the exam.
It takes a bare minimum of 6 weeks to
prepare for the GMAT. Around 2-3 hours of practice every day during that period
should be enough for a 700. Do plan your study period and continuously assess
your progress.
There is enough material and advice on the
GMAT available on online forums. Lastly, in my opinion, coaching for the GMAT
is really not required. Self-study as long as you’re willing to stick to a
schedule should be fine. I know people who ended up getting as much as 780 with
self-study, so it’s possible.
Written
case-study: Don’t be scared if you haven’t solved a case
before. The cases are very basic and require nothing than a little common
sense. Knowledge of class 11-12 Economics might be considered an advantage, but
is not a necessity. If you’re planning to study though, you might want to pick
up any Beginners Economics textbook (G.Mankiw, may be)
and learn about demand-supply, revenue-cost etc. The first 2-3 chapters should
suffice.
Lastly, the case-study is a an hour long written
one so while on one hand it gives you more time to think, ISB naturally
also expects you to be more precise in your answers. Examples of cases: I don’t
remember the prompts I heard word to word, but they were something to this
effect –
1)
Discuss the viability of a
radio cab service in a metro. How would you go about pricing such a service?
2)
European mobile phone company
wants to enter the US mobile phone market. What factors would you consider?
3)
Credit Card company is facing
intense competition in the industry. What would you recommend for it to
survive.
Interview: The average duration of an interview is between 10-15 minutes. The
Written-Case Study and the Interview process are held on the same day.
The interview began with the generic
question “Tell me a little bit about yourself…”. This is a standard question
for most interviews (I realised that only later) and you can go ahead and
prepare an answer for this. Be ready to talk for a good 2-3 minutes. You could
give a short summary of your CV or alternately talk about things you can’t
mention on your CV (For example: Personality traits). You could talk about how
your life has progressed and how you have become the person you are today. Personally
I mentioned a combination of all of these and how it has led me to apply for a deferred
MBA program. You need to justify why you want to pursue an MBA, and why you
want to take the YLP route.
Post that they tend to quiz you on the
material you’ve already submitted (CV, essays, recommendations) and try to iron
out the inconsistencies. Remember, they’ve got enough experience and have given
enough time to your application before shortlisting you so lying would be a
humungous risk. Be prepared to talk in detail about any activity, any point
you’ve mentioned in other parts of your application. For this you might need
some time for contemplation. Be clear on what your goals are, how you’ve gone
about trying to achieve them and how the MBA & YLP fits into the picture.
All-in-all I felt that the interview
process was meant to be a cross-check. I felt that they were trying to evaluate
if I was capable of being the person that I had represented myself as on paper.
There might be a few subject related questions
Lastly, again looking at the whole
application - in my opinion, try to avoid over-laps. Don’t go to recommenders
who will talk about something you’ve already written about in an essay. Don’t
write about the same activity in more than one essay. Try to represent as much
information as possible through the options available. It gives them a better
all-round picture and helps them understand if you’re the kind of person they’d
like in their class. Best of luck!
Satyaki Dhar graduated from St. Stephen's College (Mathematics Honors, Batch of 2013). He was the President of Finance and Investment Cell and perhaps one of the most active members of college. He got admission to ISB - YLP programme. Currently, he is pursuing Finance at London School of Economics.
Thanks man! This was really helpful :)
ReplyDeleteDear Junior, With Love: Preparing For The Isb-Ylp Programme >>>>> Download Now
Delete>>>>> Download Full
Dear Junior, With Love: Preparing For The Isb-Ylp Programme >>>>> Download LINK
>>>>> Download Now
Dear Junior, With Love: Preparing For The Isb-Ylp Programme >>>>> Download Full
>>>>> Download LINK V6
I am presently at Stage 2 of the YLP application process - these notes will prove really useful, I am sure.
ReplyDeleteYou are from La Martiniere, Calcutta, aren't you?
Such a wonderful post. Thanks for the share. It was very interesting and informative. best private university punjab
ReplyDeleteGreat post.
ReplyDeletehttp://forum.yealink.com/forum/member.php?action=profile&uid=125085
Nice Post. Thanks for sharing. Keep updating
ReplyDeletebest mba college
one sitting Degree
ReplyDeleteGen Ed MBA will be hosting a webinar that is in association with the ISB- Indian School of Business admissions team. It's where you will learn how the ISB YLP (Stage 1) will help you grow your career. The best part is that they are going to allow you to get your questions answered by the ISB team at the end of the session. Registrations are completely FREE! Click on the below link to register yourself as they have limited seats. Link
Dear Junior, With Love: Preparing For The Isb-Ylp Programme >>>>> Download Now
ReplyDelete>>>>> Download Full
Dear Junior, With Love: Preparing For The Isb-Ylp Programme >>>>> Download LINK
>>>>> Download Now
Dear Junior, With Love: Preparing For The Isb-Ylp Programme >>>>> Download Full
>>>>> Download LINK