“To become a great master attests your apprenticeship” - anonymous. A belief in the above quote is what churns my mental state in the present day, and has led me to make an informed decision for stepping up to Harvard admissions. “What I leave with, is what I live with” - a quote that resounds in all minds applying for Harvard admissions. Therefore all I’ll say is the churning, and what I hear will be a quote. Succinctly, I will talk about the journey that has sparked a consistent interest in pursuing MBA education. Most of it had started during my formative years in undergrad, but the buzz was heard by an elective in Math & Stats.

By the mid of my second year as an undergrad, my gut feeling had started to resonate with the field of Probability and Statistics. I had realized how it was deeply intertwined to the way modern Business models were quantitatively researched and applied to territories that ranged from the fluctuations of the stock market, to the system of economic trade in the global setting. To view through the lens, I took to this monstrosity through the pathway of elective coursework, and was sincere in getting a good grade in the same. I gravitated towards the option of developing my understanding through recitations, readings, and a term project titled “Gaussian processes for multimodal distributions, with variance noise and external perturbations”. The interest provoked within me, by the execution of this task, motivated me to take the next step by extrapolating it towards a full baccalaureate thesis in the field of Statistics, coupled to the field of Data Science.

The extension of the above project to my undergrad thesis was brought about by actually tackling the problem of multimodal-multivariate distributions, as encountered in the walks of Wall Street and consumer statistics. The goal was to apply shocks and frustration events to the otherwise normal market, and analyze the response, trained to a network of neurons that learned the trend. The aim was met using a home built python package, that trained a neural network to the market dynamics, with analytical and realistic perturbations applied to the same. Motivated by the results, we authored an article with trends analyzed on data provided by the classic market data storehouses, and the analytic breadth covered by a Boston Consulting Group report, that predicted the profit-loss margins in critical circumstances. This was a definite gateway for me to expand my horizons, one which would later motivate me to pursue a career in business and statistics.

In close alignment with my interests, post my undergrad programme, I was hired by the Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), to serve as a Business Analyst for their Indian stream of banking network. It was here that I got a chance to contribute towards their Financial Inclusion Program on projects to promote financial services to rural and underserved areas. In this regard, I was decisive in turning my focus towards the mid-income ranged population in the rural working sector, their household savings and assets, and the per family expenditure data. I believed that this section of the rural society was proving to be a cohort of activity - one on the brink of transformation brought about by recent technological progressions. By collaborating with local authorities, NGOs, and other stakeholders, I spearheaded initiatives that promote financial literacy and awareness. I played a crucial role in implementing technology-driven solutions, enabling easier access to banking services in remote areas. Through community workshops, outreach programs, and innovative digital platforms, I was successful in onboarding a substantial number of previously unbanked individuals into the formal financial system. Witnessing the transformative effects of financial inclusion, I started envisioning setting up a private firm, which in the long run would work dedicatedly on bridging the gaps in terms of financial options for the rural class, by working out potential innovative schemes that would technically equip the underserved community.

While the scheme of things were getting exciting, I decided to diversify my interests towards the product side of things. For this, I decided to join Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) - a leading FMCG company in the country, after spending a year at HSBC. This led me to the previously unexplored plethora of consumer goods and product factories. I chose to work closely with the Food and Beverages department of the company, and was involved in the process of bringing their new blend of Kashmiri-Kahwa tea to the aisles of the supermarket. Besides the supply chain, it also involved working in tandem with the Media & Marketing agencies, for which I was always upfront. I learnt the intricacies of the workflow - from product design to shelf-life, and from pricing to profit. Further to this, I was always an integral part of the division that was the workhorse of HUL’s Environmental Sustainability Initiatives. I worked in sustainable sourcing and waste reduction methods with HUL’s R&D labs, and was involved in the overhauling and replacement of the last bit of tin production in the company’s manufacturing division.

After working a year and a half for HUL, I was interviewed and selected for the position of Senior Consultant in McKinsey and Company, in the Strategy and Corporate Finance division. This was the time when the world was midway recovering from the third wave of Covid, and a tumultuous war between Russia and Ukraine had broken out. I was included in a team to work on the project “Old and new exogenous shocks: A pandemic, and a conflict in the former Soviet bloc”, and study its affects on the global banking economy. Working with teams from key investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, I led the team effort to understand the rise and fall in the global market and investment scene. From investigating the trends in GDP with Covid Vaccination rates and hospitalizations, to the looming risk of energy crisis being fueled by the war, we left no stone unturned to arrive at root level philosophies to mitigate adversarial global events. Working on this, I felt the project resonate with my undergrad thesis work on market shocks and fluctuations, and it strengthened my desire to build and lead an enterprise that could perform market research, utilizing the in house potential of the data science and analytics job-hunting crowd of India.

Following the above track, I’m sailing in an ambition to realize and fulfill my dreams of becoming an entrepreneur. But it needs the support from yet another dream, which is to pursue higher business education from a high ranked B-school. An MBA from Harvard Business School looms large in my aspirations because of the sensation and aura that surrounds it. Learning from an exceptional faculty base, and world business leaders at Harvard is sure to equip me with advanced knowledge in the business and financial realm. With one of the most dynamic peer environment for graduate studies, I look forward to building collaborations and agile networks. Finance theory, international economics, analytics, and business modeling are some of the get-setter courses I am most looking forward to. Having read papers and articles from eminent Harvard faculty such as Dennis W. Campbell, Ethan S. Bernstein, and others, I am always awestruck by these visionaries and their meticulous analysis of business subjects. Thus, in conclusion, based upon the rich feedback from Harvard’s alumni who crossed paths with me on multiple occasions, I can envision that an MBA from HBS would definitely be the right step towards making crucial contributions to the microcosm of business, and believe that I would be a good fit in the community, while adding to Harvard’s highly valued diversity.