Finally !! Great Lakes calling !!

Writing post to remember the series of events happened for my admission to Great Lakes:

After giving CAT and getting moderately good percentile(96.8). It was in Nov-Dec 2008 when I was simply browsing few B-schools to apply for when I came to know about Great Lakes...It was giving 1 yr MBA which only few colleges are providing till now...soon I researched few more things about colleges, found to be highly suitable for my profile, decided to apply for Great Lakes in December 08.

Some of the important events and dates of my journey to Great Lakes admissions:
Application:
Applied for the Great Lakes on 9th Jan, 2009 through online mode, the last date was 16th Jan, 2009. As to my assumption, it was good time in advance to apply for any college. But to my surprise Great Lakes application was a complete exception to any other B-school application in India.
There were range of sections to complete.
1. Personal Information section: Simple
2. Academic profile: Simple
3. Non-academic profile: Ok to complete
4. Work Profile: Simple
5. Essays: Very Difficult, the biggest surprise in the application. There were 4 mandatory essays and 1 optional essay to be written to complete application. Colleges abroad (GMAT based) accepts essays but any Indian B-school asking essays of such intelligent level was completely new for me.
The essays were:
i. Strategy is defined as synergy between values and goals. How do you think Great Lakes fits into your strategy? (400 words)
ii. Character comes out in crisis. Please tell us what do you think of this statement. (400 Words)
iii. Heart has its reason which reason knows nothing of. Comment. (400 words)
iv. It is alleged, that B-School students are driven by Money and Power and not Service and Sacrifice. Do you agree and if so how will you change this in Reality? (300 words)
Optional
v. Please provide any additional insight or information that you have not addressed elsewhere that may be helpful in reviewing your application. Complete this question if you feel your candidacy is not fully represented by this application. (300 words)

6. Recommendation: Difficult, 2 recommendations from people you worked with/under.

Soon after filling the form on 9th, I realized that completing the essays is a mammoth task. Anyways started giving my best to it and planned to write 1 essay each, finish them by 14th and review all of them on 15th and 16th so as to submit them on 16th Jan. Essay i and iv were completed by 13th. There was a lot of pressure to complete essays on time with a good quality.
Moreover the recommendations looked like very difficult to get on time from my busy managers.

To my utter happiness, a good news floated in my mail box on 13th, that last date for form submission has been extended to 30th January. It was a big sigh of relief as it was ample time to complete essays as well as getting recommendations in time.

I started re-writing all my essays + wrote kind of appraisal for my recommenders listing my achievements, learnings etc on work so as to make information handy for them while writing my recommendations. Guess it helped a lot.

One of my recommendations got submitted on 26th Jan, thanks Satish, one of my recommender.
Finally submitted my application on 28th January, 2009.
My another recommendation from Gowrish was pending yet and he was not getting enough time for it. Finally pushed him hard on 30th Jan and got it submitted on 30th late night. :)

So my application was all set and done by 30th Jan. It was a big relief.

GD PI shortlist:
On 9th Feb, 2009, received a mail about my shortlisting for GD PI to be held on 21st Feb, 2009 in Nehru place, Delhi.
I was aware of actual GD PI events from my last experiences and knew it very well that your communication, ideas in a flow and confidence matters a lot in the tough situations of GD PI where fish market is a common scenario.
I was bed-ridden due to leg fracture during that time and was completely out of GD PI and communication environment. So to make up for it, I started reading newspaper and magazines all aloud in the room. That was an effort to raise confidence level to speak in public. Twice or thrice I called up Bulbul from my neighbour to come for debate on some of the highly common topics. She used to be highly enthusiastic about debating topics like women liberalisation, student power, india kashmir issue. I kept it as debate so as to oppose her and to raise my confidence levels to speak in opposite. Sometime the debate became too hot but there was nothing personal.
Surely, all of it worked. :)
Last 3 days I gave just for reading newspaper, googling major events of last 1 year and increasing GK as much as possible. My GD PI for Great Lakes was on 21st Feb and before that I had GD PI of IMT-GHaziabad on 20th Feb which has happened to be like a mock GD PI for Great Lakes. :)
So on 21st Feb, reached at
Venue:
Paharpur Business Centre & Software Technology
Incubator Park,
21 Nehru Place Greens,
New Delhi 110019. Time: 3.45 PM

I reached at around 2 PM with my father and Ravindra, was on crutches and limped all around. :)
Group discussion:
The process started at around 3:30 PM by giving psychometric test within 10-15 min. Then at around 4:15 PM we were called for GD round. There were 2 judges inside, too young but matured. We, 12 people started with small introduction.
GD was on a case study which was something like this: XYZ is a CEO of cloth company which manufactured a lot of cloth and treated with some PQR chemical. The chemical later found out to be cancerous and got countrywide ban. There is huge inventory of the cloth and company may incur huge losses if cloth is scraped. XYZ decided to export the cloth to eastern countries. Was that a right action?
I put few good and unique points like finding out the validity of research about the chemical, putting a statuary warning upon use of the cloth and treating cloth with some other chemical to reverse the harmful effects. So I got 2-3 sound entries to speak my points.
I must say the GD PI was best among all GD PI experience I had ever had. People were matured and gave speaking opportunity to everyone. While there were some people who again tried to capture whole show but even then everybody got a good enough chance to speak.
After 10 min discussion, the judges asked to write the thoughts on paper and soon asked randomly to give monologue of the case study. I gave judgement of Mr XYZ to be unethical.
Interview:
Soon after that I got my documents verified. At around 5:40 PM, I got the call for interview. There were 2 panelist both in their 40+ I suppose. Soon they started with their volleys like:

1. why MBA? >> entrepreneur
2. fees is 10.2 lacs, can u manage tht amount? >> saving + loan
3. money is not important for a B-school aspirant? >> not tht imp
4. ideology can not be followed without money, true or false? >> false
5. Example except Gandhiji who followed ideology without money? >> Sardar Patel, Subhash chandra bose, vivekanand, dayanand
6. Courage and stupidity which is true, if somebody put gun on u? >> scenerio and situation dependent
7. Soldiers who die in war...courageous or stupid? >> depends
8. Charity can happen only by money >> not true, may happen thru time and wrk too.

I suppose I gave my answers quiet well and convinced in most of my answers except question 6 and 7, in which probably they wanted to grill me more...but instead of getting grilled i grinned :P
All in all, I got positive vibes from the whole session.

Result:
So finally on 2nd March, 2009, I received the mail about my selection to Great Lakes.:)

to be continued...