From Jaipur to Harvard – A Journey of Unconventionality, Resilience, and Hard Work

Vasu’s long-term ambition is to work for an intergovernmental organization like the International Energy Agency (IEA). He envisions contributing to global strategies that balance climate goals with the provision of affordable energy. From his humble beginnings in Jaipur to heading for an MBA at Harvard Business School, Vasu’s story is one of perseverance, ambition, and a relentless pursuit of excellence. He is a testament to the power of adaptability and vision in shaping a meaningful career.

Simar, a fellow MBA Admissions Consultant from our team, recently sat down with Vasu for a coffee chat to discuss his application journey. In this interview, Vasu shared his personal and professional journey, his experience working on MBA applications, and his unique experience, which led him to secure admission to Duke, Kellogg, Wharton, and Harvard. 

Hi Vasu, You’ve received admits from Duke, Kellogg, Wharton, and HBS. These are some excellent schools. How did it feel for you, and what was your reaction when you got the admission?

The feeling has been nothing short of unreal. At the beginning of the process, I was hoping that if I could land even one school in the top 12, I would be happy with the process. And then I got into Duke, and then I got into Kellogg and Wharton.

 

I was already extremely satisfied with the entire process back then. But then, HBS had always been my priority, which was precisely why I kept it: I didn’t want to dilute my application; I wanted to focus entirely on it. And then it worked out well in the end.

 

I’m glad the strategy worked out, and I also had the proper support. But the feeling is fantastic. I’m going to a dream school, a dream in every way that I can describe it.

 

Can you tell us about your background?

 

I come from Jaipur. I was born in Jaipur and raised there for the first 12 or 13 years of my life. My family is primarily from there. I grew up in a multi-generational home, spending more time with my grandparents. Even though I did not realize it back then, there was a time when my family was going through financial struggles because my father’s business had just collapsed, and my grandparents were fresh out of retirement.

 

My mother was the only member of the family earning money at that time. However, after a while, my father took a leap of faith and did his business, taking up a new job at the last minute, which for me meant moving from Jaipur to New Delhi. That turned out to be one of the most transformative experiences of my life because I was used to standing out within a group of 70 students, but suddenly, I was put into a pool of 700.

 

That taught me a lot about life. Since that day, I’ve truly understood the importance of not being stagnant or complacent. I graduated, and I completed my schooling in New Delhi.

 

I then wanted to do something unconventional in life. I narrowed it down to Petroleum Engineering because it was also close to me from a personal perspective. And it was unconventional; it paid well.

 

That’s how I got into Petroleum Engineering. I graduated from UPES in 2018 and interned with Schlumberger, or SLB, as it’s now called.

 

I received the PPO and joined the company full-time right after graduation. I’ve been working here for the last five and a half years.

Can you talk about any leadership experience in college?

So my college, yeah, sure. So I was the vice president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, SPE, Stolen Chapters, where we won the presidential award for four consecutive years. We were the only chapter in the world at that time out of 432 international chapters.

 

In my fourth year as a vice president, we also organized India’s biggest student-led energy conference, which was the first of our kind in our college, where we had participation from delegates who worked well with petroleum companies. Apart from that, we also started through SPE, various conferences, and lobbying. We started a cross-cultural knowledge exchange program between Venezuela and India.

 

I met the Venezuelan ambassador to India himself, and we had a series of discussions and interactions where we told him how these two countries can mutually benefit from a cross-cultural virtual platform for exchanging knowledge and ideas. 

Other than that, I’ve always loved playing and watching football, and I am a big Manchester United fan. I played football throughout college as well. By the end of my fourth year, almost at the end, I was delighted with my college life because I had a job, good friends, a PPO, everything. I had one regret: I did not win a trophy on the field. And that happened five days before graduation. And that was a special moment for me because I was the captain of my side. That thing did not seem huge to people, but it meant a lot because I had always felt it was very special.

 

Lifting that trophy as a captain five days before graduation was another experience that’s always been exceptional as far as college is concerned.

 

Tell us more about your work experience at Schlumberger.

 

Sure, so I primarily joined as a field engineer trainee, and my role was purely technical. I used to spend half the year at sea or half the year in a desert, where we used to help clients such as ONGC and Reliance produce oil and gas. I spent much time on these rigs in remote locations without internet access for months.

 

Later, as I progressed to different roles, I started working at the intersection of engineering and management. So now, in my last two roles, I took care of the project’s planning and optimization before it was commissioned. I also led a team of 15 or 16 people at a time to test wells for these clients.

 

It was my job to give them data on which they decide whether it makes sense financially for them to produce from this new well or just abandon it and look for something better. So that was my primary role. In my last role as a competency assurance lead, however, I started working more towards the workforce development side.

 

I had two main objectives. From an employee’s perspective, making sure that their career progression was on track and that they were getting the required training.. From a company’s perspective, I ensured that we were deploying the right people for the right job,and improving our safety metrics. That was my most recent role, where I started transitioning out of the field and moving towards the office role.

 

What was your motivation to join Schlumberger?

 

I was set on not doing a 9-to-5 job right after college because it did not appeal to me. When I received a PPO from Schlumberger, I knew this was what I was going for primarily because of its diverse international career opportunities.

 

If I think about it now, it gave me my first international flight, sailing experience, and chopper ride. These things mean a lot to a person who’s coming from a tier 2 town and has not seen those different perspectives. It meant a lot to me besides the professional growth that SLB offered.

 

Regarding my personal development, it’s been an absolute pleasure working with SLB because I’ve talked to people from different functions and countries. It’s been an experience I could not have imagined if you had asked me, say, seven or eight years from now, while I was in college. 

 

That is primarily why I decided to stick with SLB for these five and a half years and not make a switch. And yeah, the only reason I am leaving SLB is that an MBA is the right choice for me at this point; otherwise, I would have carried on more.

 

When did you decide to pursue an MBA?

 

Yeah, so I also briefly mentioned the motivation behind getting into petroleum. I’ll briefly touch upon it because back in Jaipur, my grandma cooked food for us on a cow dung stove. After all, we could not afford LPG then. That is where the idea of solving the energy crisis problem and making it more affordable and accessible first came into mind.

 

Of course, to a 17-year-old, it wasn’t a big enough motivation to go with petroleum engineering. But, of course, it was a driving factor for me. Now that I have worked with SLB for the last five and a half years with proper hands-on experience, I have improved energy access to many rural families and people like my grandma, who was struggling at some point.

 

The problem of energy access is now very, very much related to climate change. People using cow dung or coal for cooking pollute the environment and harm their health. So, it’s a dual energy crisis problem, and that is what I want to solve.

 

Over the past few years, working for SLB and limiting myself to the oil and gas domain will probably not do justice to my skillset. I want to expand towards clean energy. Hence, I am looking to pivot away from oil and gas but not entirely from energy.

 

I want to solve this dual energy problem by improving everyone’s energy access and using cleaner fuels to fight climate change.

 

You have already touched upon it, but can you tell us your short-term and long-term goals?

 

My long-term goal ideally would be to work for an intergovernmental organization like the International Energy Agency, the IEA, which works with various bureaucrats, businesses, policymakers, et cetera, to come up with plans and strategies for different countries, where they lay out roadmaps for how every country can achieve its climate goals as well as make sure that they’re providing energy and cheap energy to the last mile consumers.

 

Working in management consulting would give me the proper exposure in the short term. For example, if I work for MBB and clients such as Shell and Chevron, I can help these clients expedite clean energy access and transition from a conventional oil and gas portfolio toward clean energy. In that case, I think that experience will give me a lot of exposure in the first three or four years.

 

If I work directly for a company like Shell and Chevron, I will only be exposed to one thinking or strategy. However, if I work for a consulting firm and take on these as clients, I’ll be able to learn and understand the various problems at a much, much faster rate. 

 

How does the USA as a geography fit in with these goals

The USA makes sense to me as a geography because of various factors. First, I talked to many people who’ve gone from SLB to these M7 schools, and many of them have gone into consulting.

 

Companies like NextEra, which are currently doing extremely well in this domain, have a very strong presence in the US. So, it’s a geography where a lot is happening in the clean energy sector. There is the right network that exists in the US, especially in Houston, for example, when you talk about energy.

 

It’s a place where I can learn from the advancements that have already taken place and then figure out a way to make them more efficient or cheaper or to expand them geographically in a country like India. That would be my reason for opting for the USA.

 

Would you like to mention any interesting personal story you mentioned in your application, which you initially didn’t expect would be there in your application?

 

One story, which I did not realize would be significant or impactful enough for an MBA story, but my consultant did, is an anecdote about my time in a small town called Barmer, which is in Rajasthan. We were working on an oil well in an unexplored field.

 

We were expecting hydrogen sulfide, a toxic gas. However, if not dealt with properly, hydrogen sulfide can kill you within 10 minutes. To our surprise, the levels of H2S were higher than we expected.

 

Hence, I wanted to stop operations, but the client turned out to be someone with not much regard for safety and wanted us to continue with the operations. That’s when I stepped up because I thought my team’s lives were jeopardized. I involved my manager. I told the client that I empathized with his perspective. I knew he was trying his best to meet the quarterly production target. But I reminded him that perhaps the potential loss of 80 lives was much more significant than a $40,000 revenue loss.

 

And I got my manager on board and finally got the client on board. And we stopped operations. We stopped producing oil and gas during that time because we needed to prepare to deal with what could happen.

 

Later, there was a proper investigation. Then, it was declared that the decision to stop operations was right. Operations on that particular field were stopped completely, and those wells were abandoned because they were declared too unsafe to work on.

 

It was normal for me because we are trained for it. But my consultant made me realize that from a third person’s perspective, it is an anecdote that stands out because, first, no one goes through such things. Second, it shows the character that you’re standing up for the right thing and that he deserved to be in my HBS application.

 

 

How would you describe your interview experience?

 

As I prepared for the interviews, I realized every interview needed a different approach.

 

For the Wharton, TBD, I talked directly with my consultant daily. He told me one thing: they’re looking for people to eliminate. You will get through as long as you do nothing wrong, are confident, make sense, and are respectable to other people. And that is what worked for me. Considering it was a conversation between six or five people, I followed these few points. Getting through those 25-30 minutes as an interaction amongst friends helped me for the Wharton TBD. 

I was worried about the HBS interview because I had heard from many people that they go into a lot of detail. I did not know what to expect from the interview because it was 30 minutes and had more than 25 questions. You don’t realize when it started when it gets over.

 

So for the HBS interview, how I prepped was I took every single resume point and I made a table where I described what the situation was, what was the challenge that I faced, what was the learning that I had, and how I could improve things if I had to do it all over again. I did that for all the points on my resume one by one. Once I made that sort of a table, I was confident that now there won’t be any questions, which may take me by surprise.

 

In retrospect, that worked well. After all, I prepped a lot for the HBS interview because I was the most worried about it. But following this strategy where you grill yourself and write down stuff before the interview, you take a couple of weeks to do that.  

 

Can you briefly describe your experience with Admissions Gateway?

 

I was skeptical about going with AG initially because it was a pretty hefty investment, but I talked to many people, some of whom were from my school and college, who had worked with AG and made it to M7. And then that is how I finally decided this was the right choice.

 

And then with Ravi, it made a lot of sense because he went from my company, SLB, and now he’s graduating from HBS. I knew that for this particular combination, he would be the right fit. And that bet that I took on him worked out exceptionally well.

 

The first thing I loved about AG was how they handled the resume. It went on for a couple of months.

 

Initially, I felt that we were putting in more time than required. Later on, I realized that a resume makes a lot of difference. Plus, it lays the framework for the stories you will be writing in your essay.

 

The clarity AG gave me and the fact that we spent a lot of time and effort on my resume helped me in the long run. That was the first major positive I took from the AG team. Apart from that, I also really liked that there was a structure to everything we followed.

 

It wasn’t like I told them I had to write this essay and we’d directly start our work.. It depended on the college that I was applying to. And then there were always Excel sheets where I came up with rough drafts, ten possible stories, out of which one was eventually selected.

 

I never felt like they were doing it just because it was their job. They cared, and that is something that gets lost once a firm starts becoming more successful.

 

But I’m glad that hasn’t happened with AG, and I’m sure it won’t because they have a great team. So, that struck a chord with me, and I’m glad I chose this.

 

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