How This Financial Consultant Overcame An Employment Gap To Make It To Wharton and Booth

Outside class, she was passionate about sports. Throughout her undergrad, she was a part of the Women’s Table Tennis Team and later went on to become the Captain for two consecutive years. That’s where she realized that to increase female representation in sports, there was a dire need for women to be a part of the Senior Leadership. So, she nominated herself and became the first person to run for elections for executive position in sports council at IIT Kanpur.

After completing her undergrad, she joined BCG as an Associate. During our coffee chat, she shared that her experience at BCG was an intense period of learning and growth for her. It equipped her with a rapid-fire understanding of diverse business landscapes and the consultative prowess to navigate through them. But the allure of consulting, while enriching, was not the endpoint of her aspirations. To make an informed decision she decided to take out time for introspection.

Whilst reflecting and introspecting, not only did she contemplate the next move in terms of her career, but also tried to identify what she can do to further pursue her passion for sports. That’s when she launched ‘Misfits’ – a community of 2000+ individuals that organizes regular group meet-ups to play outdoor and indoor games and sometimes even jam sessions.

Five months later, she joined the COO’s office at CoinDCX. Her decision to join CoinDCX was driven by her conviction in the transformative potential of blockchain technology and a vision to be at the forefront of this sector. Working in the COO’s office allowed her to drive various strategic initiatives. For instance, she created the roadmap for ‘Earn,’ (staking) product and worked on increasing its adoption rate by exploring innovative opportunities in web3 technologies for lending and borrowing.

These experiences shaped her long-term vision – to increase financial inclusion for the underbanked population in India by providing them access to credit via web3 solutions. To fulfill this mission, she realized she needed to develop her skills and aptitude in leadership, finance, and cryptocurrency through an MBA.

However, she believed that her chances might be slim given the five month career gap.

“I was skeptical about my chances because of the five-month career gap. But my conversations with the Admissions Gateway Team and a few fellow students helped me realize that this could be managed with effective and honest storytelling.”

So, that’s what she did and made it to Wharton and Booth with the help of Admissions Gateway.

Simar, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team recently sat down with her for a coffee chat to discuss her application journey. In this conversation, Mugdha shared her experience of working on her MBA applications and how she overcame the challenges in her profile to make it to M7 MBAs. So, without further ado, let’s dive in.

Question 1. Walk me through your GMAT journey and your initial interactions with Admissions Gateway.

“I first spoke with Rajdeep about my profile and apprehensions. Talking to Rajdeep was reassuring as he showed a lot of trust in my profile and was confident that I could make it to top business schools. I reached out to him after my first GMAT, which was a 710. He asked me to retake the GMAT and then come back with a stronger score.

Then I went back and wrote the second GMAT, which was also a 710. And I was pretty sure I was not applying with a 710. After months of preparation, I finally got a 740 in July. But I felt like it was pretty late to start my applications. However, AG accommodated me and I worked on an expedited timeline and was able to submit my applications in Round 1.”

Question 2. How was your experience with the expert-led workshops?

“I missed the live sessions and had to start with recorded workshops because as I told you, I joined very late. I think Rajdeep has a very clear way of explaining what works, what does not work and I mean, I would expect that. But he also has a very solid understanding of what every component of your application should look like.

I was extremely impressed with the detailed insights about the expectations from business schools. Rajdeep also has a very high intuitive sense for all of these things.

While watching the recorded videos he was responding to students in terms when they were asking about their stories, he had a very clear response to almost every question that was put his way. I found that interesting because despite a clear structure he was able to advise students based on their background.

But it was very interesting to see that at times there are like yes and no answers for the things that you’re writing. “

Question 3. What do you think about Admissions Gateway’s approach to resume?

“I worked with Mudit for the resume and it’s just interesting how people think. In India, when you’re making a resume, it’s pretty common to just write the things you did and mention the first-level impact that you had.

But the expectation is bigger. So the first half was me just writing everything I had done and Mudit came back and said, okay, so you did this, then what happened, then what happened, then what happened? And it just helps you think broadly.

For instance, there was one example at CoinDCX where I had worked on a project to improve the NPS. And he was like, okay, so why were you doing this? I was pretty confused because it was too obvious for me.

I eventually mentioned the broader impact of my work instead of only operational points. Effective storytelling in a resume that I didn’t imagine I would be doing but I ended up doing that for almost every experience I wanted to put on the resume.”

Question 4. How did you figure out your goals narrative with Nisha?

“So I talk about crypto in general and how I want to help Indians with financial inclusion using a crypto-based solution. That’s like the long-term goal. There are a lot of nuances to it.

You talk about why Web3 would be able to solve it better or why Web3 would make it interoperable. How would you ever get this country to adopt a Web3-based solution?

But yeah, overall I talk about Web3 and financial inclusion for Indians and about India’s growth story, etc. In general, how the iterations went. I think I came up with two goals and just wrote a very basic version and sent it to Nisha.

She came back with a lot of comments. So how Nisha works is you write things, you send them to her, and she comes back with comments. The comments are very thought-provoking.

And she’s like, okay, how will this solve XYZ? How will this impact ABC? And you’re like, oh, I have not thought about it.

So the first two, or three iterations of anything, be it the goals, be it the essays, take a lot of time to come back with answers because the questions are very thought-provoking. Post that, the iterations become chiller. It’s more or less just words that you have to change or slide here and there, juggling sentences.

But yeah, overall, pretty good experience with the content of the comments and the feedback that I was getting across all colleges. One thing that I was focusing very heavily on was just counting the number of words that I needed to write the essay. And Nisha was like, just forget that, and let’s just get the story out first.

We can cut the words later. But then cutting the words later was an experience in itself. But I think that’s the ideal way of operating because then you’re just not limiting yourself. You’re allowing yourself to flow. And then once you have the story out, once you have the items out, you can cut down the words.”

Question 5. What was the end product, and what stories did you mention in your application?

“My grandparents across both sides, mom’s side, and dad’s side, came from Pakistan to India. I talked about the difficulty in accessing credit once someone resettles. It takes generations at times to build that creditworthiness.

And now it’s a lot more digitized and probably you can move around and still have your credit history. That’s not how it worked back in the past. I’ve seen them struggle to get any access to credit, etc. I’ve seen people in today’s world also. So my household back at home takes loans at sometimes even 25-30%. And they just do not understand this calculation and banks don’t give them loans. So it’s just micro lenders or loan sharks, as you call them, that set things up. So it’s just these kinds of experiences that make you think that it’s not their fault that they do not have a credit history. Thus my long-term vision was clear – I want to work towards financial inclusion by leveraging web3.”

Question 6. How was the interview process for you?

“I’ll just break this answer into Wharton and non-Wharton interviews. For non-Wharton, I think Nisha had very good input overall. So how we worked around it was, I think there were one or two workshop links.

I think one Gauri took for Booth, there was one Rajdeep’s overall interview preparation workshop. Eventually, I wrote down answers to a lot of questions so that you are decently prepared in a STAR format.I had the list of questions, wrote the answers, and sent them to Nisha.

For Booth, I did two mocks. For Kellogg also, I did two, or three mocks with Nisha. Nisha has pretty good input in general on how you talk, what you should be talking about, what you should not be talking about, and how you should be thinking about stories.

One very good advice that she gave me was – you have three to four aspects you want to talk about, right? One CoinDCX story, one BCG story, one that’s more personal to me, and one sports story that if it comes to around that, at least you would want to talk about that and there’s like a very personal story around contesting elections as a girl in college. So that’s also something that comes out very strongly.

So she told me to cover all these aspects in the interview and not stick to one. So, if I get a question about leadership, I should share the leadership story from BCG. If I get a question about handling conflicts, I should share the corresponding answer from BCG or CoinDCX. But it should not be the case that the interview becomes BCG heavy or the interview becomes CoinDCX heavy. Just look at the time and ensure that you have talked about all aspects of your career and education experience.

So I think that was an exciting thought overall and I stuck to that across all interviews. I would keep in mind that I am talking about things in general, everything in general. But yeah, this was like one specific advice, but overall pretty good insights on how to talk, what to talk. I was struggling with the STAR format a lot.

Coming back to Wharton. For Wharton, there were two standard TBDs that Mudit scheduled with AG people, but then there was a running sheet that was going around with a lot of Wharton alumni. I was pretty sure I would need help with TBDs because I am a person who either does not talk or comes out very overbearing. There is very little middle ground and I knew I would like to practice more to strike it.”

Question 7. Finally, how do you feel about getting through two M7 schools – Booth and Wharton?

“It’s a beautiful feeling. I was generally a little skeptical about my profile because I had slight irregularities in my work experiences.

But, yeah, it worked out in the end. So, yeah, pretty happy about it.”