Cracking 750+ in GMAT and Making it to Columbia Business School

Aayush cracked 750 in his 4th GMAT attempt and made it to Columbia Business School. His journey to business school is one of grit and resilience coupled with clarity of thought. Hear from Aayush in his own words.

""I was born in Madhya Pradesh and grew up in a middle class home in Gurgaon. I went for high school to DPS Vasant Kunj (New Delhi) where my aptitude for Science and Mathematics led me to a formal education in Engineering. I graduated from Manipal Institute of Technology (Karnataka) in 2012, but since I was more interested in the business side of things, I ended up working in sales (B2B) at Philips from 2012-15. Here, I formulated and delivered on a two year business roadmap for a previously underperforming territory, resulting in 40% sales CAGR and 80% growth in market share. I absolutely loved my experience of stakeholder management and building new partnerships, but my passion for learning new disciplines brought me to Ashoka University where I studied Liberal Arts (Young India Fellowship), graduating in 2016. The Fellowship was the turning point of my life (both professionally and personally). As a part of the curriculum, I worked on a year-long project in rural India to uplift a low-cost school. By partnering with several education organizations to bring about a meaningful change in the school's curriculum, I learned how the private sector can play an equally significant role as the government in driving social change. This brought me to FSG (US based impact consulting firm) where I spearheaded the fundraising, marketing, and dissemination of a $16 million program to improve education in 300K low cost schools in India. Through pitching our program to 100+ funders and interacting with several key players in education, I learned about the challenges and opportunities in the Indian education system. Driven by my passion and experience of the transformative capacity of education, my ultimate goal is to start my own consulting firm that will help education based social enterprises in India address ecosystem barriers so that they can focus on affordable, quality education for low-income schools. I am currently headed to Columbia Business School for an MBA to hone my strategic thinking and problem solving skillset and to get a global perspective on the education space. Outside of professional setting, I am an avid fan of Tennis, which I enjoy both playing and watching. I have also been recently bitten by the travel bug, having traveled to 34 cities in 8 countries in the past 9 months."