Khushi's Journey: From Army Kid to Investment Banker to Columbia Business School

Upon graduation, Khushi began her career as a Financial Research Analyst at D.E. Shaw in Hyderabad. A year later, she transitioned to Goldman Sachs, where she excelled and achieved notable success turning around a $1B loan portfolio from non-performing to profitable. However, her time at Goldman Sachs made her acutely aware of the lack of mentorship opportunities for female employees at the firm, sparking her and her friends to start a podcast called “Out of Office” to provide mentorship and support to women and others in need.

Simultaneously, she cleared all three levels of her CFA certification in the first attempt and became a certified CFA in 2022. After spending two years at Goldman Sachs, Khushi realized that she wanted to pursue an MBA to build a successful and impactful career in Finance. However, since her post-MBA goal was to join an Investment Banking firm, she felt it necessary to first explore whether that was a good fit. That’s when she joined Deutsche Bank as an Investment Banking Analyst under the TMT division. At Deutsche Bank, she helped raise funds for firms with turnovers in Billions, devised investment thesis, and led the IPO process for European firms, further cementing her passion for Investment Banking. So, a year later, she decided it was time for her to apply for business schools. With support from Admissions Gateway, Khushi secured admits from Columbia, Yale, and Ross and is joining Columbia Business School this fall.

Samriddhi, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team recently sat down with her for a coffee chat to discuss her application journey. In this interview, Khushi shared her personal and professional journey, her experience of working on MBA applications, and shares advice for folks planning to apply for business school. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Question 1. Hi Khushi, let’s discuss your MBA journey and your plans for the future.

“For sure, thanks Samriddhi for having me.

It’s great to be here after converting admits. I was on the other side while watching these coffee chats of people who were speaking about their admits a year back. So it feels very surreal and overwhelming at the same time that now I’m on this side.

It feels great. I have decided to pursue my MBA this fall from Columbia Business School. I had three admits from Columbia, Yale School of Management, and University of Michigan Ross.

I finally decided to go ahead with Columbia and am really excited to start my journey of being a student again after five years of work experience.”

Question 2. Before we discuss the applications, can you shed some light on your personal background?

“I come from a nuclear family- me and my parents who I have lived with most of the time.

My dad was a part of the Indian Army for 11 years. And since the very beginning of my childhood, I have changed my schools a lot.

That was a certain kind of challenge I faced because my self-confidence at that time was affected since I wasn’t able to form proper bonds with my friends. So, in my childhood, I did face some confidence issues. But over time, because of my parents’ support and push towards becoming academically strong, I gained back a lot of confidence by winning Olympiads in my schools and participating in several extracurricular activities. They did not restrict me to books but wanted me to develop a holistic personality from the very start.

That really helped shape my childhood and even my teenage years. There were many setbacks I faced during my college times and my 12th board, wherein I was not scoring how much I had expected, given the amount of the number of hours I was putting in studying. But I think overall, it does not matter how much is put in at the end of the day, but your heart and your intention should be in the right place.

As long as you’re working hard, you can achieve anything. So that’s what I followed through all these years during my childhood and teenage days.

Question 3. How did you decide you wanted to get into investment banking?

“I currently work at Deutsche Bank as an Investment Banker for 2 years. But before joining them, I had cleared all three levels of my CFA. I realized that finance interests me. I worked with the D.E. Shaw Group for a year in an operations role, on the trading side. So I got to experience a trader’s life.

However, that was something that did not interest me a lot. So I switched to Asset Management, which made me implement what I had learned at CFA – mainly portfolio management and similar things.

Working there for two years, I got to know some of my friends who had already done an MBA from India and got into investment banking. They told me the kind of work that they did, which interested me.

So I always had in mind that I had to do an MBA, but I wasn’t sure what to do after it. To become confident that investment banking would interest me, I applied to many places and got into Deutsche, where I worked for two years.

I’m in the TMT division. I’m very fortunate to have been in the tech division, which interests me as well. Now I know that I want to do something like this because I find it to be impactful.

Trading is impactful too, but I feel that this impact comes with press releases and news. So I can feel the impact in that way, which is why I decided to pursue it as a career.”

Question 4. How did you decide, that now is the right time to do an MBA? What did you want to do in the long term? What was your vision? And why did you feel like you needed an MBA at this juncture?

“It’s a good point to highlight because I was at a point in investment banking where if I had stayed here for another two years, I would have made an associate. My trajectory would have been the same. I would have been an investment banker in India. However, doing an MBA was an important decision.

Spending that amount of money and changing geographies was something that I always wanted to do from an experience point of view. I had also taken the SAT back in 12^th because I wanted to experience how it is to study.

Since all of my friends have already done an MBA from good Indian institutes, I know what goes in there. But stepping out of my comfort zone is something that I really promote.

Hence, I wanted to do an MBA from abroad.

Now coming on to the question of which year. I wanted to do an MBA just after completing three years at Goldman Sachs.

However, I felt that before deciding on my post-MBA career, I should be completely confident about whether I want to do that or not. At Goldman Sachs, I was unsure. I faced a lack of mentorship, and people were putting their heads down to work and just working, while no one was discussing whether or not they like what they’re doing or what they want to do eventually in their lives. So there was a certain lack of mentorship that I faced.

I then talked to a lot of people, from other fields and walks of life, including those doing consulting and product management. That’s when I decided to pursue investment banking.

But before deciding that I wanted to experience how it really is. So I decided to postpone my MBA by two years and joined Deutsche. Now I’m satisfied with what really investment banking entails. Despite definite long working hours, I enjoy that kind of work and the kind of impact it creates.

That’s why I finally decided that now is the right time to do an MBA, get exposure that an international MBA has to offer, and post that, get back into investment banking and do what I like.”

Question 5. How was your overall MBA application journey?

“My journey was a bit tough till round one. Not to blame anyone, but it was more because I used to be completely under the water working for 14 hours a day. So it was very difficult to come back home and work after one or two AM. You have to push yourself to work on your applications, and work on your resume at that time. So it definitely pushed me into the corner. I wouldn’t say that it was easy. It was difficult to manage everything with work.

That’s where I have to thank Admissions Gateway and my counselor, who were extremely supportive and understanding during the weeks that I was extremely busy and the weeks when I could put in more hours. So that way I’d definitely thank him. Plus, I feel, especially for people who have difficult work weeks, getting some guidance from people like Admissions Gateway would really help because I did not have to read through 50 articles to get a gist of what I have to write in a certain essay.

That’s where the sessions that Rajdeep used to conduct and the time that I got from the counselors came into work. They directed my energy in the right direction avoiding extra effort or work from my end, which I needed.  I never felt that this was not going in the right direction. I got the exact guidance that had to go for a certain essay. And I just had to introspect and put that on paper.

So the clarity of thought that EG and my counselor had for me, really pushed me in the right direction so that there was no time wasted and I could get everything in place.”

Question 6. What were some of the biggest challenges in your application journey?

“I actually applied to London Business School without taking any help from anyone. But I did not get through.

I got an interview call, but I did not get through post that. So I feel the major challenge that I was facing was with my expression and the kind of things that I wanted to point out of my journey to the admissions team. So I could read essays and I can write on those essays, but I wasn’t sure of whether those points really make sense and whether those were the highlights of my journey that I have had in finance till now.

An example of that could be as simple as ‘What is the goal? What is your goal? What do you want to do after an MBA or the short-term goal, the long-term goal?’, I had in mind that I would want to work for an investment bank, but the backstory of it as to why I landed up and the expression of it really matters.

I faced these challenges in London Business School as well. In my first session with Rajdeep, I discussed what went wrong and he told me what I could have highlighted.

That built my confidence when I was perfectly sure of what was to be written and what are the highlights of my journey. I got validation from another person on what makes sense.

There was definitely a challenge, but after discussions with my counselor, everything was sorted till the time my essays had to be submitted.”

Question 7. Tell us a bit more about your application narrative. What were some of the stories you leveraged or how did you connect the dots between different experiences?

“I think your applications will be split into two. One will be an essay that definitely has to be about your goals. And second is how you have evolved as a person.

These are used for the Harvard or the Booth self-essay. The first goals essay contains my experience working in various avenues of finance. Now I know what I’m best at and what is something that really interests me.

I highlighted that in my goals essay. However, I have experienced that there are a lot of people who are not able to raise money just because they do not come from credible backgrounds. For example, if me and my friend from Columbia are going to raise money, then it will be more easy for a fundraiser to happen as compared to people who are coming from a non-pedigree.

I have seen those cases happening in investment banks very often, so I thought that this is something that I want to break into, that can be revolutionized even when I come back to India in the long term. There are also many boutiques, investment banks that keep coming up in Bombay. I belong to Bombay so I know what is happening nowadays.

The idea of having my own investment bank to help people who are not coming from such credible backgrounds in raising funds and giving them access to capital is something that I was really interested in and I admired. Hence I put that into paper as my long-term goal. And my short-term goal based on this was, to then gain experience and work in a boutique investment bank.

I’m currently a part of a bulge bracket, but in a boutique investment bank, you are given a lot of more responsibility for maintaining end-to-end transactions. So it’s not that four teams will be working on a certain transaction, but this team will be working on every detail of the transaction. That kind of experience, I thought would really help me when I want to set up something of my own back in India.

This is why a short-term goal like this completely made sense for me to do. Apart from that, it’s very important to go through the courses that you like in various semesters as electives as well as core. So I got in touch with a lot of people from Columbia, to understand how the course structure is, and what all happens in a course. So some of the courses that involve negotiations in Columbia would want people to come together and have a negotiation in front of the professors and everyone in that course would be involved.

It is very important for you to follow people and ask what is something that interests them the most. What will help me in investment banking? If I want to go, what are the kind of courses that would help me? So this is something that aligns your goals with what the school has to offer.

You should know how the school functions, what kind of recruitment activities happen at school for investment banks, and if there’s a placement cell available. You have to align whatever goals you have with the school and then tell the admissions committee the story of how that school best suits you. So this was for the goal essay.

For the self essay, it was very subjective. It comes from your background and whatever you have gone through in life. But for me, it was mostly how underconfident I was during my childhood days because of all that I had gone through coming from a family where my mom was specialized to have another son.

That and changing schools rapidly broke my confidence. Scoring well in academics helped me regain my confidence. I then dedicated myself fully to academics and extracurricular activities. I pushed my limits at that point. Gradually, when I started working in finance companies, I realized that there are not a lot of mentors available. There were two MDs and a team of 10. The two were also not very approachable.

So there was clearly a lack of mentorship.

Hence I started a podcast with my two other friends.

We discussed the challenges we were facing from moving from campus to corporate, for 2 seasons, and received commendable responses through LinkedIn messages.

So I was really happy with the kind of impact that I was making outside of work as well.

Despite working in finance, I was helping them in whichever way possible. I wrote this in my essay explaining how I grew from an underconfident person to someone who was leading organizations, and hosting podcasts. That is something that I want to keep growing in whenever I’m a part of CBS.

I would want to keep working on this front. So that’s what I wrote in my self-essay. But I think everyone’s self-essay would be different. It is very important to keep it authentic and as true to yourself as possible. Because at the time of the interview, there’ll be a lot of times when you would want to highlight these cases.

Question 8. How was your experience of Admissions Gateway? Can you share any feedback or anecdotes from the journey that stood out to you?

“My experience has been great. There were a few things in my journey, which might be different from others.

As I mentioned before, I was rejected from London Business School, so my confidence was not there. When you’re applying for your US schools, you need to be confident so that you can work in full power. But I was not confident.

The second different thing was, I knew that I would not have a lot of time to give to my applications. These two things were going on in my head every time I would have any session, every time that I would lean to the pre-recorded sessions that Rajdeep used to share. Admissions Gateway really helped me overcome both of these things.

As I’ve already mentioned, considering time, they were very efficient with respect to everything. Whenever there was an application date that was due, we had recordings. There were constant emails and reminders of the live Zoom sessions that used to happen. So while I was completely swamped with work, I knew that this was happening.

I made time over the weekends to listen to it. And the instructions and guidance were very clear. The things that had to be written were so clear that I just felt that if I followed the instructions of my counselor and Rajdeep, it would be very easy to put the skeleton into place.

Coming to refining it, going through just one session of what Rajdeep used to mention, plus my counselor used to say, both of them helped me lay down the skeleton, which we refined. So that way, it was extremely time-efficient.

The guidance was up to the mark because I have now converted schools. So I can say that the guidance was very clear and very appropriate.

Also, I thought that maybe out of the four schools which I choose, I wasn’t sure of how good my story was, because I had already gotten a rejection. However, my counselor pushed me to apply to two dream and two read schools. We weren’t going all berserk also and applying to only Harvard.

He was also like, in the first round, let’s judge what is the response like. How do they take it? And how beautifully we are able to express what we want to. So in the first round, we applied for two dreams and two read schools. I think that is the best decision that could have happened, because I got through two read schools and a dream school, and I got waitlisted from one.

So I knew that something was going right. That’s why I was able to give credit. I can definitely give credit to Admissions Gateway for putting my thoughts in the right direction.

Even for that matter, when there was schools being decided, we were not overconfident or underconfident, we were just there. I think practicality is something that distinguishes Admissions Gateway from a lot of other counselors. They are extremely practical.

I feel that with practicality and authenticity, anyone would be able to help you in the right direction.”

Question 9. Lastly, any advice for anybody who’s planning to apply this year to support them in their journey, to offer guidance on how to do things better, or how to manage a particular kind of situation?

“The best advice is to get GMAT out of the way when you’re applying for applications. I just feel that once you are doing both things together alongside a hectic job, it gets too much to put things into perspective. Application is one part of the process itself and GMAT is another.

Getting GMAT out of the way, you can focus on applications, and introspect more. That really helps you during an interview as well when you’re asked about challenging situations on the go.

So I would advise people to tackle them separately in different months. If not, then definitely keep on going. But I feel that if you are able to tackle both of them in different months, then that’s great.”

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.