Manmeet is not the average B-School candidate
An area manager in his family’s poultry business, from the disputed Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, Manmeet has won admits from both Duke and Darden with scholarships.
Manmeet was born in the city of Jammu and attended it’s Delhi Public School, where he had one of his formative experiences at just eight years old, when he fell through an open manhole into the school’s underground water tank, almost drowning.
The incident stuck with him and when he was fifteen, Manmeet started a collaborative with his mother, a government school teacher, to mark or cover open manholes to prevent accidents and injuries; an effort he pursues till today.
A combination of good grades in school and an interest in computer science led Manmeet to a B.Tech with a Major in Electronics and Communication at Vellore Institute of Technology.
In college campus placements, Manmeet secured a System Engineer position at Fidelity Investments. However after just over a year, Manmeet felt the role wasn’t stimulating enough and didn’t see a future for himself in the organisation. He decided to return to Jammu to work in his family’s wholesale poultry supply trading company, Manmehak Enterprises, leading digital transformation of a traditional business in a fairly conventional industry.
Within a couple of years, Manmeet had boosted revenue and more than doubled profitability and was looking for new challenges, once again. Manmeet says he wanted international exposure and thought business school would open a lot of job prospects to him and give him the time to discover what he really wanted to do.
In August 2021, Manmeet took the GMAT and got a 710, which meant he was too late for R1. He heard of Admissions Gateway on Poets & Quants and after speaking with eight different consultants in Indian and abroad, deciding to work them, based on recommendations from friends and testimonials from other applicants with a family business background, similar to his own.
Manmeet says his counsellors at Admissions Gateway encouraged introspection, which helped him to learn from the process of putting together applications; a valuable experience for him. They helped him to think coherently about his goals and build resumés, essays and goals that formed a cohesive whole that told his story effectively. His counsellors at Admissions Gateway also pushed him to retake the GMAT, allowing him to improve his score to 740.
Manmeet says the most important question for B-School applicants is their reason for applying.
“I would say the biggest word is ‘WHY’. Why MBA is the biggest one. If you look hard enough, you will come up with your why.”
Manmeet says throughout the application process he kept asking why, even when he was initially frustrated by his inability to find the answer.
“I started looking less at the MBA and more at what I wanted to do after it.”
He also says that focusing less on the MBA and thinking more about what he wanted to do after business school, helped him with introspection and made putting together his applications really easy.
“You need to ask yourself if an MBA is the route to get from where you are to where you want to be.”
Manmeet is currently working to make poultry farming in India more sustainable and post-MBA, he aspires to help reduce the environmental impact of the meat industry.