From Uncertainty to Purpose: Juliee’s Non-Linear Journey
India has no shortage of brilliant biotech minds. What it lacks is the money to back them.
Juilee watched this play out up close. Friends of hers from IIT Kharagpur had built a genuinely promising biotech startup during college, stayed on in the incubator, put in the work. And then, at the stage where it mattered most, the funding simply did not come. Not because the science was flawed. Not because the idea lacked potential. But because the investors sitting across the table did not understand the technology well enough to take the risk. “They just didn’t have the appetite,” she says. “And it wasn’t really their fault. There just aren’t enough people in India who can sit at the intersection of deep science and investment.”
Juilee’s own path to finance was anything but linear. She grew up in Nagpur, cracked JEE, and joined the Biotechnology programme at IIT Kharagpur, a field she genuinely loved. But a research internship in her second year brought an uncomfortable truth: she was not built for the lab. “I gave it a real shot,” she says. “But I just could not see myself doing this for the next twenty years.”
The pivot came from an unexpected place. Goldman Sachs visited campus and selected a group of students for their Women Emerging in Finance programme, a trip to their Bangalore office that gave Juilee her first real look at what a career in finance actually looked like. Something clicked. She came back, started preparing for the CFA, converted an HSBC internship into a full-time offer, and eventually made her way to Goldman Sachs, where she has spent the last four years.
The IIT years were not without their own struggle. Her first year was rough, a GPA that did not reflect what she was capable of, and the quiet anxiety of feeling behind in a department full of people who seemed to have it figured out. She did not spiral. She recalibrated. By the time she graduated, she had topped her department and walked away with an institute silver medal. It is the kind of turnaround that does not happen by accident.
The GMAT nearly broke her resolve.
This is the part of the story Juilee tells with the most honesty. Preparing for a high-stakes exam while working at Goldman is not just difficult in theory. It is the kind of thing that quietly convinces you, over many months, that maybe you do not actually want this badly enough. “There was a point where I genuinely thought, maybe I just won’t do the MBA,” she says. “Not because I didn’t want it. But because I couldn’t figure out how to make the prep work around everything else.”
She kept postponing. The guilt of not starting sat alongside the exhaustion of not having enough hours in the day. She finally committed in April, carved out whatever time she could across five months, and sat for the exam. Her first attempt fell short of where she knew she could be. Two weeks later, she went back. Her second attempt placed her in the 99th percentile.
That was the moment the application cycle truly began.
Finding the goal took longer than finding the score.
When Juilee started working on her applications, she did not have a polished vision ready to go. She had fragments. A background in biotech she had never stopped caring about. Years of finance experience she had genuinely built. And that image of her friends’ startup, good science, good people, no funding.
It took weeks of reflection, working through her past, her interests, and what she actually saw herself doing in ten years, before it came together. Her goal: a biotech-focused venture capital fund in India, built specifically to back early-stage founders working in deep science, the kind of startups that fall through the cracks because most investors cannot evaluate them properly. Short term, a stint in life sciences consulting to sharpen her strategic thinking. Mid-term, joining a VC firm in India to learn the investment side. Long term, building the fund from scratch.
It was a goal that held up under pressure, because it came from somewhere real.
The Wharton TBD was a different kind of test.
Most MBA interviews follow a familiar rhythm. You prepare your answers, you walk in ready to talk about yourself, and the surprises are limited. Wharton’s Team-Based Discussion is built differently. You are placed in a room with strangers, given a business problem, and evaluated not on how much you say but on how well you listen, how you build on others, and whether the group moves forward because of you.
Juilee had no group discussion experience going in. The format was unfamiliar, and the preparation required was unlike anything in her background. She committed to the mock process fully, attending sessions not just as a participant but as an observer, watching how feedback was given and what separating a strong performance from a weak one actually looked like in practice.
When the real TBD came, the room was chaotic in a way even the toughest mocks had not been. People talked over each other. The conversation lost its thread. The collaborative ideal was nowhere to be found. But she had been told, specifically and repeatedly, to expect exactly this. She stayed grounded, played her role, and trusted the preparation.
Her advice, for anyone standing at the beginning of this:
Start earlier than feels necessary. The GMAT does not get easier to fit in as your career progresses. Juilee had planned to apply in Round 1 and ended up in Round 2. The final weeks were genuinely overwhelming, and more runway would have changed that.
On the harder days, trust the people you have chosen to work with. Not passively, but actively. The feeling that your story is not strong enough, or that you are behind, is almost always part of the process rather than a signal that something is wrong. The consultants who have seen hundreds of applications through to the end usually know the difference.
Juilee got into Wharton, Kellogg, and LBS. She is heading to Wharton. And somewhere in India, a biotech founder who has not met her yet is going to be very glad she did.
To read more such stories of folks who got into their dream business schools to pursue their lifelong passion, check out our success stories.