Reliance Stanford scholarship – v.2

Criteria for evaluation

“Up to 50 Reliance Dhirubhai Fellows Finalists will be selected based on:

• Merit
• Commitment to developing India
• Financial need “

 A single page resume and a 250 words (or fewer) essay, alongwith some other details, will give you the chance of a lifetime. I hope all the other Business houses take a lead from this and sponsor a few more such fellowships. Just imagine -

- Ratan Tata Nano scholarship for Cornell University (tuition fee waiver for 2 years)

- Ratan Tata Jaguar scholarship (full waiver ! )

- Adi Godrej scholarship for MIT.

- Kumar Mangalam Birla scholarship for London Business School.

And this one should definitely be round the corner -

Anil Dhirubhai Ambani scholarships for Wharton !!

Shaping your essay in 250 words seems more difficult than your dreams of shaping the country’s future.  You need to dream big, yet be concise. On the other hand, you have to fit your life’s story in a single page. Restrained passion should do the trick. I am done with the first few drafts.

Incarnated asked me how Quant heavy is my resume ? Mine is completely qualitative. While I cannot quantify how motivating did my team find my way of leadership, or weigh my stakeholders’ appreciation in numbers, I should still substantiate a statement like ‘creating more value for the client’ by saying ‘generated business of xyz$’ or ‘improved revenue by abc$’. To each his own style. I guess resume writing is one aspect we’ll all perfect at the business school.

The second good part of the Reliance scholarship (the best part, of course, is to get selected by Stanford after getting this scholarship ! ) is that it’ll shortlist 50 finalists, and I will get to know my standing viz-a-viz this years’ applicant pool. I am STILL undecided about my college list, as the more I research, the more attractive I find different schools to be. Instead of pruning my list, I manage to add one more for further consideration ! In case I don’t figure even in the top 50 Indian applicants, the exercise of pruning my list will become a lot simpler !

Though I certainly hope it doesn’t turn out that way. I can do the pruning myself, thank you !

Does anyone have an idea of the number of Indian applicants to US B schools ? Or say of x thousand applications received by any school last year, how many were from Indians ? Any perspective is welcome.

I noticed an interesting comment yesterday by Ss, who asked me my views on the flood of Indian IT applicants for B schools abroad. I’ll save my response until I complete a part of my other applications. If you’ve posted on this before or come across this topic somewhere, do send me the link.  Would in fact love to hear an adcom’s take on this subject.