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Better late than never!

Sharing a blog post from Divya who will remain a very special student. I remember her as a soft-spoken but determined girl who I think can do anything she sets her heart upon. Good luck Divya, thanks for sharing this! It should help the candidates who are running late for their MS applications.

I am Divya and I am currently pursuing my Master’s in business analytics from W.P.Carey School of Business at Arizona State University Tempe. It is an intensive 9 month program and I started in Fall 2016 and looking forward to graduate in Summer 2017. Prior to doing my Master’s, I did my under graduation in Computer science and engineering from SRM university, Kathankulathur Chennai and worked as a Junior Research Analyst at McKinsey and Company in Chennai.

I gave my GRE and TOEFL exam during my final year during my under graduation and applied to a few universities for MS in Computer science. However, during that time I did not have any proper guidance and randomly applied to a few universities for ms in computer science based on my what friends did without proper profile evaluation and course evaluation. Though I got admitted into a few programs, upon talking to a lot of seniors figured out that they were not worth my profile and suggested me to properly evaluate my profile and shortlist universities and apply again next fall. At the same time, I got an offer to join McKinsey and company decided to take it up as I felt it would add a great value to my profile. After interning for the first 5 months I got an offer to join them full-time. After a lot of thinking and getting opinions from a lot of people, I decided to work with McKinsey and company for at least 2 years and gain experience and then apply for fall 2016 as it was a great opportunity to start my career in such a big firm. Though I was working with a different team, I was introduced to the field of analytics at McKinsey. I interacted with a lot of folks from the analytics and team and understood the nuisances of the field. That is when I decided to apply for analytics instead of computer science. Though I did not have any relevant experience related to analytics, I applied to business analytics as it involves computers (data mining, sql, python), statistics and exposure to how business work and highlighted my under grad in computer science and my business exposure at McKinsey as my relevant expertise for the course. Though I made this decision much before the fall admission season begun I was not able to spend time from August to December to apply since it was the peak work season and it was very hectic.

It was during January that I reached out to Nistha and took her help to shortlist universities , recreate my sop and lor and resume. Since gre score was valid for 5 years I didn’t retake it and applied with the old score. However I had to retake my toefl exam. Since it is a time-consuming process, by the time I completed all these process and submitted by application it was almost march. I was on the round 3 of application deadlines. Most of the applications were submitted on the last hour of the deadline. However, I am glad that I applied rather than postponing it again to next fall. Thanks to Nistha for motivating me and helping me out in the last minute. Without her, I don’t think I would have applied for this fall. Finally I got a few admits and out of them I shortlisted ASU as their course ranking was very good and it was just a 9 month program.

After having completed almost 50% of my program, I consider this decision as one of the best decision I have ever taken in my whole life. The educational experience is phenomenal and it has been a wonderful learning opportunity for me so far. Had I not taken this decision, I would have continued working and would not have moved out of my comfort zone. The amount of learning I inculcated in the last 5 months is much more than the amount of learning I had from my 4 years of under graduation. Hence I consider myself lucky to have not given up till the last minute. I urge all students who haven’t applied till now to stop worrying about being late and to start working on their applications as soon as possible. After all, it is always “better late than never”.

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