Keerthi: A Trailblazer's Journey - From Kerala to Japan to Wharton

Her innate curiosity and desire to explore new horizons pushed her to explore internships outside the country, helping her develop a solid professional network. This network played a critical role in enabling her to kickstart her research and development career in Japan. Keerthi’s stint in Japan included working on innovative projects and collaborating with factory workers to develop practical solutions. Her career trajectory took a pivotal turn when she transitioned to management consulting at Nomura, focusing on digitizing products and processes for various clients.

Keerthi’s formative years, growing up in a village with scarce resources and her impressive contributions working in Japan, leveraging technology to develop innovative solutions to help the aging Japanese population with their business needs, shaped her ambition to harness technology to reduce systemic inequities and make a meaningful impact to society.

Her business school journey took an exciting turn when Darden shortlisted Keerthi for the Jefferson Scholarship and invited her to visit their campus in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a one-week in-person interview. Flying down to Darden to meet the admissions team and connecting with current students on campus helped her gain an authentic flavor of what the business school journey in the USA would entail. Eventually, Keerthi was admitted to Darden, Duke, Ross, and Wharton. After careful consideration, she is headed to Wharton to pursue her MBA

Simar, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team, recently sat down with Keerthi for a coffee chat to discuss her application journey. In this interview, Keerthi shared her personal and professional journey, her experience working on MBA applications, and her unique experience, which led her to secure admission to 4 excellent B-schools.

Question 1. Congratulations on receiving admits from Duke, Darden, Ross, and Wharton. First of all, how does it feel to be accepted to top business schools?

It feels great. I feel a lot of gratitude. And it’s also a sense of responsibility that I want to help the people coming after me.

I remember feeling very overwhelmed and not knowing whom to talk to early on in this process. I am very thankful that there was a community of people who could help and support me. I am so excited to go on this journey and help people in the same boat.

Question 2. Please introduce yourself to our readers and tell us more about your background.

I was born and raised in a village in Kerala, South India. My parents are doctors, and my family has many doctors.

I am the black sheep who wanted to do engineering. I have always been inspired by the kind of changes that technology is bringing about in day-to-day life. Even though there is limited infrastructure in my hometown, I decided to take a challenge and crack the IIT-JEE exam.

Hence, during high school, I already started convincing my family that this was something that I wanted to do. It was understood that I would do MBBS after high school. After convincing my parents, I moved about five hours away from my home to a bigger city with enough coaching institutes.

I lived in a hostel for around two years while doing my higher secondary studies. And yeah, that was until I reached college age. I was the only girl from my school who got into IIT. And I am happy that many more people got in after that. I’m glad that I was able to carve a path and show that it is possible to do such a thing. Hence, my first 15-16 years were a lot about not being scared to be the first person to do something or not seeing a dream that nobody has ever seen.

Question 3. During your undergrad, you pursued multiple internships abroad. Tell me about your experience, especially as an Indian student, and how difficult it was to get a research internship outside the country.

I’ll discuss first finding an internship at IIT. There are many structured methodologies for getting emails from specific universities or programs.

In that case, you must submit your resume and find a research lab or a company that interests you. Another way is to cold email different professors and demonstrate your interest in participating in a project with them. I have tried both, and they both have their pros and cons.

The structured programs are better if you want more handholding and are trying to figure out what you want to do. The unstructured program tests your initiative-taking skills, and you can decide what you want to do, which is also very exciting. After doing some internships, I also did one in India, which was very interesting.

After many internships, I felt that Japan would be an excellent place to start my career because of the innovations in technology there. I wanted to continue working in Japan, so I spoke with many of my colleagues in the research lab at Tokyo University during that time. That’s how I learned that a few companies hire international students. I could reach out through that network, and having my university’s name and Tokyo University affiliation on my resume helped me land a job at my first company, Konica Minolta.

Question 4. Was it challenging to choose between a research internship and a corporate internship?

There are two main parts.

You do research or a corporate internship, and both have clear avenues.  Given my experiences in college, I wanted to explore the research landscape. Before I went to corporate, I wanted more research experience because it helps you understand a product’s inner workings.

Knowing the product’s inner workings is helpful, even if you’re working on a business and trying to sell or scale something. That would be a valuable experience, laying the foundation for the rest of my career. Even though it looks counterintuitive to do a research internship, which won’t directly land you a job, a corporate intern can get you your replacement offer. There would still be value in digging deep into various workings. Hence, I decided to pursue international research internships.

Question 5. Please describe your work experience and how you pivoted from R&D to management consulting at Nomura.

I started my career working at Konica Minolta, a technology company. There, I had the opportunity to work very closely with users. I was on the research and development team.

Hence, I worked directly with factory workers to understand their problems. We also built crude prototypes and tested them on the factory floor to see if they reduced efficiency and the challenges. That was very exciting to me.

I saw a product being built from a prototype. Initially, it was just an Excel sheet, but slowly, it became a website and an app and finally integrated into the actual hardware. That was very satisfying to see. Hence, I wanted to explore this by working in different industries.

I realized that consulting would be a great way to extend what I have learned in one industry and apply that knowledge to help many clients. That’s why I started thinking about pivoting to consulting. At Nomura, my work revolved around digitizing products and processes.

Nomura Research Institute is one of the oldest consulting firms in Japan. Hence, many of the clients are long-term companies and governments. I had an opportunity to rethink some of the processes already in Japan, which was meaningful. I worked with a convenience store chain to see how to improve it. So convenience stores, just to give you a bit of context, are everywhere here in Japan.

As their digital transformation team, we rethought how to increase the product array while maintaining that convenience factor. We came up with an e-commerce model that can help. Helping convenience store chains to make their processes more efficient and future-proof was a highlight of my work.

Question 6. When did you decide to pursue an MBA?

To be honest, I started thinking about it just after my undergraduate studies, but I was still unsure if that was something I wanted to pursue or whether I wanted to do a master’s. However, there were more opportunities after getting placed in Nomura Research Institute. I had more opportunities to seriously consider the MBA because a few of my colleagues had already gone.

There were also sponsorship avenues. At Nomura, I also had a chance to see the vast array of projects happening worldwide. I could progress in my career one project at a time.

But it would take a long time to understand the different problems happening in the world. Hence, taking a step back and going back to school will help me understand the worldview and get a 30,000-foot view of the issues, the processes, and the changes happening in the world. That outlook will help me in my next project to ensure that whatever we create or change we do will not go on for one more year and then be halted when the following change comes but something more substantial, something more sustainable.

After coming to Nomura, I met with some of my colleagues who had already gone to business school, which helped me understand more why an MBA would be the right choice for me.

Question 7. Can you tell me about your post-MBA short-term and long-term goals?

I mapped out some goals and used the MBA school’s career report to guide my understanding of a realistic future. Not only did I think about what my values are and what’s important to me, but your skills play a huge role in where you end up or where you end up shining. Making and using technology to improve the world and reduce systemic inequities is very important.

In high school, I did not have access to the best coaching centers in the world. But using the internet, I could access some websites and compete with people with much more training who are the same age as me. For me, it has been about how technology has democratized many of the services for people worldwide.

I saw that when I was studying in my village, but I also saw it after I came to Japan. We helped to make convenience stores more accessible. And I could see that an 80-year-old grandfather in a Japanese village could get his medicines on time because of technology.

That reinforced my belief that using technology to improve the world is very important. To achieve this, I needed to understand more about the infrastructural inadequacies and strategic factors behind a technology project. Finally, I also required adaptive leadership.

As skills evolve globally, one needs to grow as a leader and bring others’ perspectives together. To fill these three gaps, I thought an MBA would be a great place. After the MBA, my short-term goal is to go into consulting because that will improve my worldview. Being in the United States will help me develop a global outlook, which would be helpful for my long-term goals.

Regarding my long-term goal, I want to work in an organization like the Gates Foundation. They have many programs that specifically target using technology to make the world a better place, such as the Financial Good Foundation. They have a program that will make it easier for poor people to access their funds and ensure that government aid reaches them quickly.

Question 8. You received the Jefferson Scholarship at Darden. Tell me about the process.

 Darden has a Jefferson scholarship for which early applicants, early round applicants, and round one applicants are invited based on the rest of their MBA applications. I was so happy to be informed during my admit call that not only are you admitted, but we are also shortlisting you for the Jefferson scholarship.

I was invited to come to Darden and spend two and a half days there. There was a whole one-and-a-half week of programme, which concluded with an interview. It was a fantastic experience to begin with. Not only did they pay for the travel from Tokyo to Darden and back, but I also had the opportunity to meet with many students and understand what the Darden community is all about.

Another crucial aspect of the Darden experience is the case method. They also required all the contestants to sit in on a case class and encouraged us to participate. I had never taken a case class before.

I called Ravi, and since he’s an HBS alum and has attended many case method classes already, he gave me a few tips. I went in with a playbook in mind about what I should say and what opinions in a case class would actually add to the conversation.

That was super helpful. This was my first in-person interview in the MBA application process, so I was naturally very nervous. However, I was glad that all of it worked in the end.

Question 9. How was your interview experience?

I had very diverse experiences in my interviews. The interviewer was very responsive in one interview, and I could feed off that energy. It felt super friendly and natural. In another interview, I could only see the interviewer’s eyes up on words, so it was a bit thrown off.

Hence, I need to be prepared for everything before the interview. Wharton TBD is more about how you behave in a team; they test your team dynamics.

Therefore, I had to do a lot of practice because the team dynamics in my current firm are very different from how you would expect them to play out in a Western scenario. You usually interject in a meeting only if it is a life-or-death situation.  It was not intuitive for me to come into a conversation unless called upon. And that was something that I had to train myself to do. You have to expect the unexpected in terms of interviews. But at the end of the day, remember that the other person is just a human who wants to get to know you. That helps put your mind at ease.

Question 10. How was your experience with Admissions Gateway?

I’ll start at the very beginning. I was looking at a couple of consultants and had my initial call with Mudit.

He connected me to Ravi. When I spoke with Ravi, I needed clarification about whether I should do an MBA at Wharton. Unlike many other people I spoke with, Ravi answered my questions comprehensively without trying to avoid the main issue.

He explained why he did an MBA and how he thinks about it. I was concerned about the financial part. If I don’t get a scholarship, is it better to get an MBA from another school offering me a scholarship? He was frank about sharing his story.

And that gave me some clarity. Instead of selling himself to me, he told me to go and talk to more people, people who have worked with Ravi before and other consultants—that established trust between us, which is essential in the MBA admissions journey because it’s unpredictable. There are many deadlines and moving parts in a single application. You are doing five to seven applications in a single round.

My initial conversations developed a deep trust between us. That was a big part of my decision to go with Admissions Gateway, so I signed up with Ravi. I have also heard the same thing from people working with Ravi. Ravi pushes you. He’ll push you even further, even if you think this is the best thing you can do. That helped me, and having somebody as committed as you in your application allows you to bring out the best in yourself.

Initially, I had an image of what my resume would look like. And after countless iterations, which I’m embarrassed to admit, as there have been far too many, it was much better than I could have imagined.

The best part was that I knew how it came out to be like this. It didn’t feel like somebody else’s work—it felt like my own work.

If I had to replicate it, I could. It was a learning experience, and this learning will remain with me forever. This felt like more than just an essay or resume writing process. It’s just a learning that will stay with you forever.

I hope you found this coffee chat interesting and helpful. If you’re applying for an MBA this fall, fill out the Contact Form to get in touch.