How This Healthcare Consultant Made it to Harvard, Wharton, and Kellogg

Ashray battled with obesity and poor self confidence throughout his childhood. From being 60 kgs in grade 6, his weight increased to 90 kgs in high school. Things started looking up for him when a peer chose him for a dance performance grooming his moves and practicing with him after hours and helping him break stage fright. Empathy and support helped him grow.

COVID-19 changed things further. Realizing the importance of good health, Ashray focused on building healthy eating habits and invested time in exercise leading to him losing 20 kgs bang in the middle of lockdown. That became an inflection point in his journey.

COVID-19 also taught him another lesson – the Indian healthcare infrastructure is still vastly underdeveloped, seeing how it succumbed to a global pandemic. There’s a massive dearth of healthcare providers, especially in rural India that accounts for 65% of the population.

These lessons proved to be the backbone of his passion to drive change in the Healthcare industry in India.

He pivoted to the Healthcare Consulting practice of BCG and advocated for projects that would increase the access to quality and timely care for suburban population. Some of the key projects he worked on included launching a virtual hospital for diabetic patients, redesigning collaboration approaches between US-India healthcare systems and streamlining supply chain processes for pharmaceutical firms, reducing disruptions and improving the supply of critical drugs.

That’s when he realized his mission – he wants to drive change on the grass-root level in India and increase people’s access to quality and affordable healthcare.

Determined as he is, he immediately started looking into business schools that can support him in this journey and created a list of his target programs. With a respectable GMAT score in hand, he started looking into the application process for each school. 

Realizing the need for a helping hand in this process, he reached out to Admissions Gateway, and the rest is history – he got accepted to Harvard Business School, Wharton Business School, and Kellogg School of Management.

Samriddhi, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team recently sat down with him for a coffee chat to discuss his application journey. In this interview, Ashray shared his experience of working on his MBA applications, some interesting anecdotes from the whirlwind that last year was and things he learnt about himself in the process. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Question 1: Can you give the audience an introduction about yourself?

“Hey, I’m Ashray.

I grew up in Gurgaon. Actually, I did a small stint in Mauritius as a young kid and then practically been within Gurgaon for a lot of my life.

I studied in Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi. I liked Accounting, and Commerce. I went there thinking that I will become a CA, and came out as a consultant. So it was a bit of an interesting journey there. I joined BCG right after my undergrad, where I worked primarily in industrial goods, health care, private equity, before also working with our CEO on our global strategy and our people strategy specifically.

From there, I went on to work with an HR Tech SaaS startup where I was helping them build out their 0 to 1 for their US GTM before returning back to BCG and specializing specifically in health care. And yeah, now I’m headed hopefully to B-School this fall. Excited to be here.”

Question 2: Could you tell me which schools have offered you admission?  

“I got through Harvard, which is potentially where I’m headed. I also have admits from Wharton and Kellogg. So, yeah, those were the three admits I received.”

Question 3: When did you realize you want to do an MBA?

“I think that’s a very interesting question. For me, it came up gradually. So at BCG, I am a Consultant.

The next level of growth for me is to become a manager and manage these teams and deliver outcomes to our clients. And as I was thinking about my career journey and I was thinking whether I feel ready to become a manager. I felt that it was a good time to explore these two things:

First, do I want to come into consulting as a profession?

Second, to become a manager, I need to upskill myself, get a broader set of skill sets and understand how leaders think. Because while as an early tenure consultant, I was majorly focused on delivering pieces of work. As somebody who manages teams, it’s much more about what is the CEO thinking about? How can we really add value to them?

So I felt this was the right time for me to do both of those things, which is to explore my interests and get that skill set enhancement.

So that’s how the decision really came to be.”

Question 4: When you realized you wanted to pursue an MBA, what were your first steps?

“Yeah. So the first thing obviously is to get the GMAT out of the way.

I had a bit of a peculiar journey because I actually had a GMAT, but it expired before I applied. So I unfortunately had to write it again. So yes, I went through that.

Yeah, so I mean, that was fun. Luckily, the good part about it was I actually knew how to go about it. I was not really anxious about the exam.

I was able to quickly pull out old notes, go through old materials. I understood how I reacted to different exam settings. And hence, in a span of about 15 odd days, I was able to get through the exam, which was very helpful in hindsight.

And I got it through pretty early. So, in January of 2023, I went ahead and gave the paper so that I was ready. That was the first step.

The other part was finalizing the support that I needed. I had a very honest chat with myself, which is do I understand the process well enough to go about it myself? I felt that some amount of support might be helpful on that front.

So I quickly went ahead and started looking for the right consultant. Rajdeep’s community referrals at BCG were very strong and many friends had worked with him. Multiple people consistently said good things, which made me comfortable.

Since I was a bit unsure about how I should approach this process, I appreciated Rajdeep’s battle tested process, which is structured and took away a lot of ambiguity. Some of my friends were working with other consultants and I could see the solidity in Rajdeep’s advice and the logic behind why something works or doesn’t.

And then from there, I just rolled into the courses here around March-April, to get my resume and essays and everything ready. So that’s how I learned about it.”

Question 5: Consultants typically have 70-80 hour work weeks. Was it difficult to balance your applications and work?

“Yeah, I think it requires a lot of planning. You don’t want to go into the process blind, but rather plan out as many of the variables as you can.

So, in my case, there were a few things that I could do.

The first thing was to front load wherever I can. So whenever I had time periods when I was switching cases, and hence I had, let’s say, a week off or a few weeks between cases, I would use that time to pick up the application, make sure I get a lot of work done. So that helped me reduce stress closer to the deadline. In fact, I think I submitted all of my applications good 3-4 days before each of the deadlines.

The second thing was to be strategic with my leaves. So the way I went about it was one of the privileges also of a consulting lifestyle is that while you have 70-80 hour work weeks during case time, when you’re ramping down in between cases, nobody really bothers you. So I planned to take a lot of my leaves during that point of time.

And so I had sufficient time in place to get the application through.”

Question 6: What were some of the challenges you faced while building your career story?

“Yeah, so I think if I look at it broadly, you’re using a set of personal stories about how you have evolved as a person and certain professional stories. You’re going to use a combination of the two during the process.

Personal stories were a little easier for me because I understood inflection points in my life that had defined in many ways the decisions I had taken – whether it was choosing my undergrad degree or the choice of, as I mentioned earlier, I had gone in thinking I’ll do a CA but went into Consulting.

So a lot of those inflection points are very clear to me. So that was that easier part of it.

The professional side of it was something that I think was more of a challenge for me. So in my particular case, I was at BCG. Then I went to the HR Tech SaaS startup, then came back to BCG. And while the narrative was very clear in my head, it’s obviously a little tricky to explain that to an AdCom. And how do I get it through and how do I effectively explain that story was definitely something where I really spent a lot of my time, I would say.

Question 7: How did you finally figure out your core career narrative?

“I think, there’s two parts to it. One is how it happened, right? And the way it happened for me was, I really wanted to understand how businesses are built or how tech is built.

Because as a young consultant, I was helping large corporations expand GTM or buy new assets, but I wanted to understand the backbone of business. And that’s what that role allowed me to do. It was a combination of sales and just general management, working with a very strong founder.

And I just felt that that gave me a very strong experience on all of these things. But then the next part of it for me was, okay, what is the big problem I want to solve? And that was where a lot of the personal stories, my personal background came into play, and guided me that, yes, healthcare is the problem I want to solve.

And so that’s why I was very strategic when I was coming back to BCG also that I specifically aligned that I want to work with the healthcare practice. And I made sure that in the year that I’ve been here, I have only worked on healthcare cases, and I’ve gotten both Indian and global healthcare exposures. So that not only from a story perspective, but also from a career perspective, I am able to get the right exposures.

And then from a story perspective, it’s about getting these key messages out, right? It’s about what were your motivations? How did the switch happen? Did the switch help you achieve what you had set out for? And then how did you make the next decision? So those were some of the smaller questions, if I were to say, that get tackled in the story.

But if you know your motivations for doing things, I think they flow, and you’re able to answer them.”

Question 8: Why did you choose Healthcare particularly?

“Healthcare for me is very personal. If I look at it, I went around 20 kgs of weight reduction in the middle of COVID.

And that was a big inflection point for me in my life. I realized the value of good health. And I think a lot of the story really flows from that.

So personally, it’s been a bit of a journey for me. And that has developed the interest for me, which is how do you help people live healthier lives, right? And your whole healthcare ecosystem, whether it’s hospitals, whether it’s pharma, all of these play into that.

So that’s where it started. Plus, I also have a bit of a healthcare background in the sense that my cousin brother is a doctor. A lot of folks in my mother’s family are doctors.

So I have had that exposure as a kid as well. So all of those had bearings combined with my personal aspect that made healthcare the way for me. So, yeah, that’s how I came to that decision, you can say.”

Question 9: Did you ever think that you’d be sharing stories of such personal nature in your applications?

“No, I think that was a very important unlock when I started working with Admissions Gateway. Because if you look at it, a lot of these schools don’t really ask you directly for personal stories.

The Harvard essay is just – what more do you want us to know? The Stanford essay – is what matters to you.

And it’s very easy to get sucked into saying, oh, I have these 10 professional achievements, and I want to talk about them. And I’m different because I’ve done X, Y and Z.

But really coming down to the level of saying what motivates you, what drives you and how those qualities or those aspects of your life affected your decision making, and therefore your career journey and your personal journey. I think that forms a much fuller application. And that’s a lens that I really got from my conversations with Rajdeep.

Before starting any essay, he talks about what a good essay could potentially look like. And I realized this especially during those conversations in terms of the contours of things I should think about.

So getting those frameworks in my mind was very helpful. And it allowed me to think, oh, OK, I can think in this direction also. I can talk about something that happened to me five years ago, but was very important to my career trajectory.

So those were some very interesting conversations that really shaped a lot of my application.”

Question 10: How did you decide on the schools that you want to apply to?

“School selection is always tricky. And I think the simplest way is to look at culture and outcomes. In my mind, I was very clear of what I want and what I don’t want.

So I was not dying for an investment banking role. So I was not looking for schools which would be very focused towards investment banking outcomes, but also, would have a curriculum that gives me flexibility to explore tech, to deepen my understanding of consulting, and understand healthcare. So that was on the course curriculum side of it.

The second part of it was culture. So every school, if you look at the M7s, has a very distinct culture. And I think it is always a good idea to have a very honest chat with yourself to say, do you see yourself thriving in that culture?

So if I look at the schools that I chose, Harvard is specifically known for general management, and building a leadership perspective because they get leaders into the classroom to teach you case studies. So that fit into what I was looking for.

Wharton is known for very strong health care programs. When I was talking to somebody senior at Wharton, they told me about how one of the professors actually wrote one of the Healthcare Acts for the US. So that’s the kind of professor exposure you get there.

Similarly, Kellogg is known to have a very collaborative culture focused on very strong tech outcomes and a very strong people focused culture. I personally worked a lot in the people domain, both at BCG and at the HR Tech startup. So it flows from there.

So that was how I decided that these are the schools I want to apply to.

Question 11: Did you also factor in conversations with current students or alum in this decision making?

“Yeah. I think talking to students is very important as you’re deciding on schools. Outcomes to an extent, sure, you can look at an employment report. But the curriculum, type of professors, culture, these are things you can’t really get only from the website. And there is no better source than people who are already studying there or people who graduated.

And we’ll have a bird’s eye view of how it transformed their lives. So definitely that’s helpful.

And I think that’s where probably just being at BCG also helped because we have alums from all of these schools in the network. Some of them I’d worked with before. Some of my seniors and friends were at these schools.

So I was able to just readily access them in that sense. Also, many of these schools also have an option to connect with an admissions fellow or connect with the student options on their website. So that is also very exciting or a very easy way for me to get in touch with the students.

And yes, I think student input was very, very important by narrowing down from 10 to 7 to then 5 schools you want to go to.”

Question 12: Was there something that you particularly struggled with in the process?

“So the process is, I would say 60-70% about your content and your life journey. But it’s also about how you bring it out.

And I think that is one place that I don’t think I could have done a very fantastic job at just by myself. And which is how do you represent these stories in the right frameworks? How do you represent them at the right level, at the right language that allows you to share more with less words?

Be shared in a manner that an AdCom who’s never met you can follow those stories and actually get to understand you and actually feel at the end of it that, yes, OK, I understand this person. So I think language is very critical as you’re going through this. And that’s something that I don’t think I could have done by myself. Rajdeep and I did a lot of iterations to get that right and I’m really glad we did that.”

Question 13: HBS, Wharton and Kellogg each have a unique interview format. How would you describe your interview experience?

“Yeah. So all of them are very different, right, in many senses. So let’s go through them one by one.

So if I look at Kellogg, right, which is a lot more behavioral. They’re trying to understand your motivations, what you’ve done, the circumstances you’ve been in and how you reacted. I think this is a lot more about sitting with yourself and thinking through your stories, because in the end, the game over here is you have a very limited amount of time for a question and you want to help them understand what exactly happened. So it’s a lot more introspective in nature in the sense that you want to sit with yourself and just get your stories in order to understand the five inflection points in your story. To think about – where did I fail? Where did I succeed? What do I think was different about a particular scenario? So that’s more about the Kellogg process. The Wharton one is very different. Wharton is trying to understand whether you’re what my sense is.

Wharton is trying to understand how you’ll fit in that class. Will you be collaborative and will you add to the team? Because they have a lot of group based discussions. Will you add to the team or will you subtract from it? So from that sense, Wharton has the least prep that you can do, because there’s a prompt and there’s probably a minute of your introduction that you can prepare for. Beyond that, it’s all discussion. So it’s more about just understanding your discussion style and being ready during those 30 odd minutes that you have to contribute very positively to the group and ensure that you don’t come off as overbearing while doing that. So Wharton is just more about getting that framework ready in your head from that sense.

Harvard is a whole different beast altogether. Definitely not an interview you would want to go unprepared. The Harvard one is a lot more of – soul searching, I would say. They’re looking to understand your experiences. They’re looking to understand what you’ve done, why you’ve done it. How did that affect you? What were the challenges? Everything in and out about your application. I don’t think any interviewer amongst the four or five interviews that I gave, came so ready for that conversation as the Harvard interviewer.

So again, it’s about sitting with yourself, looking at your stories, looking at your essays, looking at your CV, but then also doing a few mocks. Maybe talking to people who have different perspectives and making sure that you’re able to make them understand your stories and the core content in a very pithy, in a very sharp manner, while not missing out on key details. So a lot of things are about not using jargon, but using simple words to explain something so that you and I can have a conversation about it, even if we have very different backgrounds. Because otherwise you’ll have a class where engineers are speaking engineering and consultants are speaking consulting, which won’t lead to a lot of great learning outcomes.

Because that’s in the end how the Harvard classroom works, right? You have 90 people who have very different backgrounds, all talking about strong business decisions. So yeah, that’s how the process is.”

Question 14: How did you decide which school you want to attend?

“Yeah, so it’s a bit of a tough decision. Because again, every school has a very different plus point, right? But for me, it really came down to two things.

One was looking at what sort of alumni base will I have access to post my MBA? Secondly, what kind of learning experience am I looking for? Where do I thrive the most?

And for me, the major selling point for HBS is that it’s very discussion based. If you look at any of the videos that HBS puts out about the case method, they talk about how the professor is a facilitator of the discussion, and the class is discussing the problem at hand. And if I look back at how I have learned best, I think the most important learnings for me have come through discussions where more often than not, I’ve been proven wrong, but I’ve been told why. And so I can learn from that. And I think that’s the kind of culture I’m looking for. And that’s really what sold me on HBS.”

Question 15: Any plans for the next few months before you join your cohort?

“I think the last five years have been a whirlwind. So definitely looking to slow down a little bit. Enjoy life, enjoy the clouds, go out dancing, I don’t know. And then yeah, get ready for Boston.”

Question 16: How was your experience of working with Rajdeep and Admissions Gateway?

“I think my experience was very good. The outcomes clearly also speak for themselves. From my perspective, look, I was looking for an experienced hand that could help me avoid a lot of these mistakes.

My sense was that if I do this myself, I will probably get a lot of these things. I will learn a lot of these things through the process, but I would just stumble a lot more. And for me, I wanted to make sure that I put my best foot forward.

And I think Rajdeep really, really helped me on that front – which is helping me, pushing me to think even more clearly. Pushing me to think, what were the reasons I did a specific action?

How has that affected my career? Looking at the same event from multiple different perspectives. I still remember how both of us scrapped my Kellogg essay, probably five days before the deadline, because both of us just didn’t feel like it was communicating the story we wanted.

And we went afresh, we said, ‘No, we want a different perspective here.’ This is probably not the most impactful thing I’ve done. And just having that sort of a soundboard, that’s as enthusiastic as you are to get the best answer and the best foot forward was just a very delightful experience for me.”