Annapurna's Journey: From Operations Management to Healthcare Impact and MBA Pursuit

Annapurna’s professional journey began at Amazon in 2020, where she started as an Operations Manager in Mumbai. She led a massive team of on-site and on-road associates in launching India’s largest delivery fulfillment center. Her efforts improved delivery accuracy and customer satisfaction, particularly during the challenging COVID-19 lockdowns. Annapurna’s innovative approach and dedication earned her a rapid promotion to Program Manager, where she led a multi-million dollar initiative to onboard tens of thousands of local stores as delivery partners across India.

Driven by her passion for healthcare, Annapurna made a significant career transition in 2022, joining Qure AI as a Client Partner in Global Health. Her impact was profound, leading the deployment of AI technology for chest X-rays across primary care facilities in India and Pakistan. This initiative, which impacted thousands of patients and secured millions in grant funding, showcased her commitment to healthcare and her ability to make a difference. She also played a significant role in launching pediatric TB screening camps in South Asia, a project that was recognized by governments and major health organizations as a substantial advancement in disease screening, further underlining her dedication to improving healthcare accessibility.

Annapurna’s desire to further her impact in healthcare led her to make a decision to pursue an MBA. She sought guidance from Admissions Gateway and began preparing for applications to the top 10 business schools.

She is determined to bridge healthcare gaps in technology and resources in underserved areas. Her story highlighted her experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, her commitment to delivering essential services, and her drive to improve healthcare accessibility.

Beyond her professional achievements, Annapurna is an Indian classical dancer with seven years of training. She has choreographed and performed in several national programs. She is also an aspiring author hoping to write and publish a book someday.

Samriddhi, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team, recently sat down with Annapurna for a coffee chat to discuss her application journey. In this interview, Annapurna shared her personal and professional journey, her experience working on MBA applications, and her unique experience converting a waitlisted M7 without an interview! So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Question 1. Hi Annapurna, can you please introduce yourself?

“Hi, Samridhi. Thank you so much for calling me for this. I’ve previously worked in operations and am an engineer at heart. I will be pursuing an MBA from Kellogg in a couple of months.

Question 2. Was Kellogg always your top priority, or did you discover it through the journey?

No, Kellogg was always a focus. I always knew I would apply to Kellogg, even before I started my journey, because my brother and sister-in-law are Kellogg alums. I knew Kellogg was one of the schools I would apply to, but again, it was challenging.

I toyed between making Kellogg my only goal versus a different school, but definitely knew I would apply there.

Question 3. Please tell us a bit about your personal background and your journey so far.

I’m actually from Bangalore, Karnataka, but I did all of my schooling in Ahmedabad. My parents were both teachers.

I studied in the school where both my parents taught all through my life. So that was interesting, but it came with its own tensions. However, in the end, it was amazing.

Given the fact that both my parents were teachers, education was of prime importance in my household. Everything came second after good grades, great colleges, and good education. Compared to most of my friends, it was a multifold focus in my house.

I grew up having a lot of fun, but also serious attention given to education.

At the time, being good at Maths and Science, I wanted to pursue engineering. So I decided to go to BITS Pilani for my undergrad, studying chemical engineering. I then went on to work at Amazon for a couple of years as an operations manager, made the pivot to healthcare a couple of years in, and worked in healthcare operations, doing significant work in remote parts of India where we took our chest X-ray AI to remote villages and set up TV screening campaigns all over the country.

It was during this time that I decided to apply for an MBA. I got in touch with Admissions Gateway and Rajdeep and began the journey last year.

Question 4. Initially what were your expectations, and which school were you targeting?

Apart from Kellogg, I definitely wanted to apply to Wharton. I was really intrigued by their campus,  and spent a lot of time going through any resources to learn about the school. I had done a full Google Earth view of the campus.

I decided it was beautiful and I really wanted to get there. That was Wharton, but I would say the school that I really wanted to end up in was Columbia, mainly because of the whole New York. I wanted to be the one who lived in New York, and went to school there.

That was the dream that I started out with. So I think Columbia was my top choice when I started out, but I’m happy with the choices I have now too.

Question 5. How was the MBA application journey for you, and what were some of the challenges you faced?

I was apprehensive going into the process because both my brother and his wife were from M7 schools. So I had seen them go through the process up close four or five years ago.

I knew broadly what came with it. There weren’t a lot of things about the whole process that surprised me. I more or less knew what was going to be coming because I’d seen it.

But having said that, I was quite apprehensive about a couple of things. One, my GPA from college was not great. It was just shy of seven, 6.99, which broke my heart.

But I knew I needed a great GMAT score to balance it out, given that I was applying in a very competitive year. I did have my doubts.

I wondered how good my GMAT had to be to offset that. That was something I was worried about. And the other challenge arose before I met with consultants. I felt I belonged to an unconventional background. Conventionally, I thought a suitable background meant office jobs. Mine had always been a field job.

Question 6. Which one of your jobs did you feel was quite unconventional?

I was on the floor managing operations, making decisions on the spot. But like I said, in my head, it wasn’t an office job per se. Once I made the pivot to healthcare, this was also a largely on-field job.

I was meeting patients on a daily basis, trying to design TB campaigns or screening for lung cancer. But in my head, it all felt unconventional.

So I wasn’t too sure how I would shape this into my story, something that MBA schools would really understand about where I come from, especially given my short-term goal was to get into consulting and business strategy before opening my own healthcare strategy firm. Considering these goals, I wasn’t too sure how this background would fit into my essay.

These were two challenges I saw before heading into the MBA journey. I did take some work to address both of them.

Question 7. What was your final GMAT score?

I scored 760 on the old GMAT edition.

Question 8. It’s a strong score, that can offset any disadvantages you might have faced because of the lower GPA. Did it take long to prepare?

Yes, 760 was my second attempt.

My two attempts were over a year apart. So I don’t think any prep that went into the first attempt had a lot to say in the second one. The first one, I got a 720 and I had no idea what to expect because honestly, it wasn’t a lot of work that went into it. Not a lot of focused prep.

I did put some work in, but I didn’t structure it in a great way. I didn’t map out what my success areas were and what my weaker areas were. It wasn’t a lot of planned effort that I put into it.

Some effort and random mock writing got me a 720. And then I just lay low for a year.

During my first attempt, I was just two years into my job. I wasn’t going to apply for a year and a half at least. So I just relaxed a little.

I gave my second attempt in March 2023. This time, I knew that if I pushed it any further, I wouldn’t be able to apply this year. I had to get it done this time, or else I would lose an entire year.

This time, it was a lot of focused prep. It took me three weeks of really focused prep. After office, I would spend two to three hours of really focused prep.

I would write a lot of mocks. After the mock, I would just sit down, and map out my mistakes – whether it’s sentence correction or critical reasoning. Quant was never a problem because I think with the Indian engineer background, you don’t really have a problem with Quant and GMAT.

Once I got some focused prep and started tracking all my mistakes, that really got me through. I had hoped for a higher score, I would say.

I didn’t think that a 760 was enough to offset my GPA. I thought I needed a 770-780. So I came out a little disappointed, a little unsure about whether this score would be enough to offset my GPA, especially since I knew there would be a lot of people with eight or nine GPAs competing.

But I accepted that 760 is good enough.

Question 9. So you mentioned you felt like your experience was unconventional. Did you feel that you weren’t doing something different from a lot of other applicants out there? Was this something that you realized before you spoke to an Admissions Consultant? Or just a feeling that you weren’t doing something that amazing or outstanding. When did you realize it? And then, how did you battle that?

This was a feeling I had before I got into touch with consultants, admissions consultants. Because my assumption came from the fact that I was trying to reach out to people, talk to people who had attended schools that I wanted to apply to.

For Kellogg, I had family to speak to. And even within them, the kind of experiences people I talked to had versus the kind of experience I was going to be applying with, was quite different. I addressed these questions with Rajdeep and then Aparna when I worked with her as well.

And during the course of my journey, what I figured out was it is different, but in a great way. Because a lot of work I did, I had a lot more practical understanding having been on the ground and done these jobs myself versus, other roles where people probably would have a more theoretical understanding of how things are done. If you are doing consulting right out of college,

you haven’t really set foot into a client’s, warehouse on field or tried to manage their entire day for them. You don’t know exactly what goes into say an Amazon package, getting to the last mile warehouse to getting to the customer’s house there.

I had a lot of practical learning, insights that I could share in the MBA classroom, once I start working. These were the kind of reassurances I got when I started talking to Rajdeep and Aparna.

Secondly, I think with both these roles, although I got into them straight out of college, they needed a lot of leadership, and stakeholder management.

I was immediately leading a lot of people. My first job within four to five months of me starting my first role as operations manager at Amazon, I was leading a warehouse of over 90 associates that I had to manage. That kind of leadership experience takes years to form in some different role than what I had landed.

So those were two big pluses that I hadn’t thought of before that I realized during the course of my application journey. They were two really strong pillars for me.

I spoke a lot about these experiences, meeting senior stakeholders from the Indian government, the National Health Commission, when we were trying to build out the initial steps of our TV screening campaign. A lot of on-the-go problem solving, presentations to stakeholders, leadership. So like I said, really interesting jobs and definitely not setbacks in hindsight.

Question 10. What was the core narrative you built in your essays, and the stories that you used throughout different school applications? How was the writing process and did you struggle to put your thoughts on paper? Any anecdotes that stand out?

I’ll talk about the goals essay because I think that’s the one essay that’s generally common across all schools. I was pretty clear about the kind of goals I had, discussed them with my consultant as well. And there was a good agreement all across that these goals make sense and it’s great that I had them actually.

So once we built it out, my goals were to eventually work in healthcare, and harness the kind of ops background that I had built in making sure that the technology, resources reach under-serviced organizations and really remote locations where people actually need them because they have lesser health-seeking behavior, but desperately need it much more than the urban settings where it’s all available. Those were the goals that I spoke about. And I was actually really passionate about healthcare because many people of my generation were affected by COVID.

I started working in the middle of the lockdowns. July, 2020 was when I first started working. I moved to Bombay then, where I had to be on field even during the lockdown. I was one of the few people who actually went to office in 2020. So delivering essential services to customers, dealing with random lockdown restrictions or with so many different updates coming in terms of safety, security for people who worked with me, those going on field, going to customers, et cetera. When I dealt with all of that, there was also really personal loss during COVID.

Witnessing such a health crisis unfold around me, I was driven to work in healthcare. This was why I made the shift. After working in healthcare for a couple of years, it was really clear to me that this was where my long-term goals were going to be.

That is the very truthful story that I discussed. I also spoke a little bit about my childhood and what made me want to move to healthcare in the first place. I discussed my challenges while working in healthcare. I also explained gaps I identified in healthcare, like technology and resources that a lot of people needed. But bridging that gap is where the entire world is falling behind right now.

This is the gap I wanted to solve, and it is what I incorporated in my goals essay.

Getting these thoughts onto paper within that 500 or 450-word limit was a huge challenge. So, I remember we started out with my Wharton application.

I worked with Aparna on this, and it took about 22 to 23 iterations to get it to the final stage because the first time I wrote it, it was around 700 words.

Trying to get the entire emotion into it, we started fine-tuning it. You have 450 words or 500 words, but you need to make sure that each sentence packs a punch.

Each sentence has a role here, otherwise it doesn’t need to be here. That was the kind of focus we needed to have. I think Wharton took a good two to one and a half weeks to build out.

I spoke to my counselor everyday for a couple of hours, making necessary tweaks and then back and forth. Once we had that essay ready, we were able to use the same concepts to build out essays for other schools as well.

I feel the first one is always a challenge. Even if it’s not similar to the essays other schools are asking for, once you get the hang of how to write, of how to pack a punch in every sentence you’re writing, it gets easier, even if it is a set of different essays that you’re writing. It’s always toughest to get the first one through.

Question 11. A lot clients share that by the end of the process, their writing skills have improved tremendously just by doing so many essays. Do you agree?

It’s actually weird because in college I was really into writing.

I wrote a couple of plays myself. I’ve even written a short, like a small book, which I keep heavily guarded for some reason, but I always fancied myself to be a writer. And if it took me this long, even when I thought I was really good with words, it’s definitely challenging because it’s a whole different style of writing. When you’re writing stories, when you’re writing plays, you want to be as eloquent as possible. It’s okay if it’s long because then you’re adding more details to it, making it more interesting.

This had to be really concise while being interesting. Those are two concepts that are a little difficult to marry and require a very specific style of writing. You need to be eloquent and at the same time, you need to learn how to self-edit.

That comes in a lot with the resume as well. You need a one-pager. So no matter how many big challenges and obstacles you’ve overcome, you need that document to be one page by the end of the process.

I think additionally, when you make a resume or when you’re generally to apply to jobs, it’s okay to keep some jargon in it because you are likely going to be applying in similar industries where people already understand what you’re talking about. But when you’re applying to a business school, you don’t know what Adcom member is going to pick up your resume or read the essays that you’ve written. So you need to make sure that it’s jargon-free.

You don’t want them to get lost in certain terms and definitions that only people from your industry would know and not a lot of others. Plus, I think jargon, it’s not interesting either. So you really quickly lose their interest.

Explaining those kinds of things in very general terms while retaining interest and impact is really important. It’s possible to miss out on it if you’re not working with somebody who knows this for a fact.

Question 12. Based on your interactions with school alumnus and current students, what key takeaways would you like to share?

Everybody I reached out to, and the entire community is really helpful because they know that they’ve gone through the same process a year or two ago.

They empathize with the nerves you have when you’re reaching out to them. So from the get-go, you can really comfortably chat with them. I am somebody who never did it before this process.

I never had to reach out too much or I don’t have the habit of doing it. So I had to really push myself to reach out to people who I didn’t know on LinkedIn, saying, hey, I’m going through this process, and wanted to talk to you about your school. Would you have some time? Simple message to send, but again, if you don’t have practice doing it, it can sound a little embarrassing in your mind, but everybody was really open to it.

They shared a lot of anecdotes from their time, and really put me at ease. And what surprised me is, in the Indian schooling system there is such a high focus on academics and classroom learning, which I think is different from schools in the US. That was something I probably wouldn’t have thought about had I not spoken to a lot of these alums. I mainly reached out to a lot of students in these schools who are Indian, so they could relate to the kind of experiences I had and who could understand where I’m coming from when I asked them a certain question so the kind of importance they gave to a lot of extracurricular activities, to a lot of club work, and how that contributed to their professional development as well.

I knew about the importance of things outside the classroom, such as the immersion programs that many of these schools had. I was definitely aware of the learning while working aspect, but I did not realize how important the immersion programs, club leadership, etc., were.

The kind of anecdotes I got from there were the key elements that I could use in my essays to really show my interest in schools. Like, hey, look, I know so much about you. I’ve done so much research. And I could be really authentic in saying that this is something that interests me, rather than just some Googling and saying, okay, this sounds interesting, let me put it in there.

The kind of authenticity that comes out from reaching out to people, talking to them, finding little details about the school to add in, adds a lot of value there.

Question 13. Did you find these insightful while writing the contributions essays?

Exactly. Contributions essays that I wrote really reflected a lot of authentic thoughts I had. I really spent a lot of time speaking to alumni, trying to understand what were the different kind of activities that happened.

How did classrooms function there? Because I was sure that you’re not in an undergrad school or even in high school that classrooms function the same way they did before. I was sure there was a difference in the way classrooms functioned. So I wanted to understand how that went.

I wanted to understand how I could contribute in those kinds of setups, in clubs or in the different career treks that took place. How could my experiences play into organizing those things. Where could I add? What were my strengths and how did they play out in the different activities that happened on each of these campuses. So those were things that were completely possible to discuss at length with anybody that I contacted.

It was a really inclusive, really helpful bunch of people that I reached out to and this was across schools. So, I would definitely say do that.

Question 13. Did you apply to all your target schools in round one?

No, not all my target schools. I saved Booth for round two.

I’d initially planned on applying to Booth in round one as well, but I really underestimated the kind of work that went into applying to each school. So by the end of it, I decided to put Booth for round two.

In round one, I applied to Wharton, Kellogg, Columbia, Tuck and Ross. So round one was a little underwhelming for me. I got into Ross with a scholarship and I got waitlisted at Kellogg.

I came out of round one results quite underwhelmed. Very glad that I hadn’t applied to Booth because then I could really put my all and that was the only application I did it in round two. Round two, my waitlist at Kellogg converted and I got an admit at Booth as well.

Question 14. How did you choose between Kellogg and Booth?

It was a really, really confusing decision to make.

It was a toss-up between both schools, both equally prestigious, both equally great in terms of career opportunities and both in the same location as well.

I was very confused, but in the end, I think you can’t say no to the kind of legacy. If I went into Kellogg, that would be three people in the family who went to Kellogg at the end of it. That’s a tough legacy to say no to. So, I ended up choosing Kellogg, although I had a good mind to go to Booth just for the sake of it.

But I think Kellogg, in all honesty, the more I spoke to people from both schools, the clearer it was that Kellogg was the kind of community that I would fit better into. Kellogg provides the kind of community connectedness that I like and can fit well into. That’s the real reason I chose Kellogg.

Question 15. How was your interaction with Admissions Gateway, in terms of Workshops and Aparna?

I tell people planning to start their application journey this year, that you should have a consultant. Since the process is long and important. There are several rules and specifications that only experienced consultants can provide.

I came across Admissions Gateway on Poets and Quants, and seeing the number of positive reviews, I decided to go ahead with them. The workshops were really important since they built the foundation for my application elements. For resumes, LORs, essays, the workshops provided a structure to build on.

The personalization for me was very helpful too. It helped me overcome my doubts related to my background not being strong enough for M7s. Building my narrative around my personal journey was where Aparna, my counsellor, was a huge help. She had a lot of patience while working through the process, and discussing two very similar yet different narratives to choose from. This attention to detail is what got me the amazing results.

Question 16. Lastly, how was the interview prep and process for you? And you mentioned you were waitlisted at Kellogg. So how did you convert that waitlist into a convert?

For the interviews, again, Admissions Gateway had many workshops addressing the kind of questions one can expect from each school’s interview. They explained what each question demands, and how we can create impact for each question’s answer. These are elements that without prep cannot be impactful. I worked with Aparna extensively to build out my answers for the interviews. We practiced a lot to make it more natural rather than rehearsed. But again, just be yourself because it’s a conversation after all. It’s a 2 way conversation where you’re judging if you fit in, interviewers are judging you to see if you fit in.

I had interviews for Ross, Booth and Tuck. For Kellogg, I did not get an interview email in round 1.

For Kellogg, I sent 2 updates about the changes in my work, and my sustained interest in attending. However, I still did not get to interview for Kellogg. It was a no-interview conversion! After converting Booth in round 2, I was happy with an M7 admit, and had given up on Kellogg, since it’s unusual for them to admit anyone without an interview.

However, one day, I randomly received a notification asking me to join a call. It turned out to be a Kellogg admit call. It was a great surprise.

For Booth and Ross, I significantly spoke with alumni and current students, more than any other thing. Since our interviews were to be taken by second year students, I spoke to many students to understand their expectations from us, and what they were truly looking for. It was revealed that they wanted to know if we knew the schools we were applying to, and what it really stood for.

I was well aware of what the schools stood for, and how it would help in my journey. They wanted to know if fellow students would enjoy attending classes with you at Booth or Ross. This affirmation put me at ease.

Samriddhi: Thank you so much for sharing so many valuable insights with us! It was lovely chatting with you. Good luck!

Thank you!

Hope you found this coffee chat interesting and helpful. If you’re applying for an MBA this fall, get in touch by filling out the Contact Form.