Some dreams aren’t inherited. They’re built one page of notes at a time, one rejection at a time, one cup of chai and a borrowed textbook at a time.
The story I want to tell doesn’t begin on a leafy campus where tuition rivals the GDP of a small country. It begins in a two-bedroom flat in Pune, India. Ceiling fan on full speed. Mosquito racket at arm’s length. And me, hunched over a hand-me-down laptop, toggling between GMAT quant problems and YouTube videos of people who’d “cracked the code” to Harvard Business School.
I watched those videos like bedtime stories. But I knew, somewhere in the part of my mind where reality sits heavily, that I wasn’t going to Harvard. I didn’t have the pedigree. I wasn’t from an IIT. I hadn’t interned at Goldman Sachs. I didn’t have a family friend on Stanford’s board.
But I had time. I had hunger. And I had something I later came to understand as voice.
This is my story. And it’s not just mine—it belongs to the many of us who come from places where the idea of elite education feels like it was designed for someone else. We don’t belong to the club. But we learn how to walk beside its gates, find an opening, and build something just as meaningful on our own terms.
Growing Up in the Non-Ivy World
If you’re from India, Nigeria, Brazil, or China, you likely grew up with one foot in aspiration and the other in anxiety. Our education systems are factories of memorisation, our college admissions games are blood sport, and our families measure time in report cards.
I didn’t go to a globally known university. My college had cracked tiles, professors who moonlighted as consultants, and a computer lab that shut down during monsoon storms.
Yet it gave me the one thing that elite systems sometimes forget to offer: resilience.
My batchmates and I weren’t taught to pitch ourselves. We were taught to make do. To optimise. To hustle, without calling it hustle. To code and re-code ourselves, even when no one was watching.
That scrappiness would later become my superpower.
Finding My Way to the GMAT
I first heard about the GMAT from a Quora post. A guy from Delhi had scored a 760 and was going to Wharton. His study plan was detailed, his confidence radiated through the screen, and I bookmarked it like it was scripture.
I didn’t have money for a coaching centre. But I had Wi-Fi, a cracked PDF of the Official Guide, and an online forum where people posted questions like “What does a 710 get you if you’re not from IIT?”
The GMAT wasn’t easy. I struggled with data sufficiency and the verbal felt alien—my English was fine, but not business school fine. I failed my first mock. I froze during sentence correction.
But slowly, I began to see the patterns. I studied at 6 AM before work and again at midnight when my house was finally quiet. I learned that the test didn’t reward intelligence. It rewarded consistency. Discipline. The art of not giving up just because your graph dipped.
I ended up scoring 720.
Not perfect. But enough. Enough to apply to a set of schools that didn’t ask me for a Harvard-shaped résumé. Schools that didn’t care if my college had ivy on the walls, but whether I had fire in the words.
The Pivot to Public Ivies
I applied to a mix of programs, some ambitious, some realistic. And in the process, I discovered a category of schools I’d barely known existed—Public Ivies.
The University of Michigan Ross School of Business. The University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler. The University of Texas McCombs. These weren’t the most shouted-about names on Indian MBA WhatsApp groups. But they were respected. Recruiters loved them. Alumni had real jobs, not just glossy LinkedIn posts.
I was drawn to Michigan. Ann Arbor had a strange kind of poetic pull. Cold winters, yes—but warm community. A school that had the rigour of the Ivy League, but the soul of a town that believes in people over polish.
Ross didn’t just look at my GMAT. They read my essays.
They noticed when I wrote about helping my mother digitise her small clothing store during COVID. They saw my side hustle building a podcast about forgotten Indian entrepreneurs. They liked that I wasn’t trying to be someone else.
I got in.
What Public Ivies Teach You That Ivies Sometimes Don’t
At Ross, I met students who had worked on oil rigs, in refugee camps, in jazz bands, and in national politics. We weren’t legacy kids. We weren’t polished. But we were curious, hungry, real.
I had professors who called me by name, classmates who listened when I stumbled over a cultural reference, and recruiters who didn’t care where I was from, only where I was going.
That’s what Public Ivies offer.
They give you scale without sacrifice. Access without arrogance. Support without spoon-feeding.
And they’re often more international in thought than schools locked into East Coast elitism. We talked about Africa’s fintech boom, Brazil’s startup culture, China’s supply chain dominance—not just the next round of American IPOs.
The Career, The Visa, The Aftermath
After graduation, I joined a supply chain consultancy in Chicago that valued my perspective as someone who understood both macro trends and micro adaptations. The firm sponsored my H-1B. I now lead projects across Asia and Latin America.
But more than the job, it’s the journey that stayed with me.
Every time I meet someone fretting about the “right” test, the “right” school, I want to tell them:
The real power doesn’t lie in where you study. It lies in how you frame your story.
The GMAT mattered. But my essay about helping my cousin escape a fraudulent study abroad agent in Hyderabad? That mattered more.
My undergrad wasn’t Ivy-tier. But my community service, my startup failure, my late nights reading policy papers on a cracked phone? Those told the admissions committee who I was.
For Those Still Standing Outside the Gates
If you’re reading this from Lagos or São Paulo or Chengdu or Kolkata—wondering if you’re enough because your path hasn’t been linear—let me say it clearly:
You are.
You are the product of systems that did not make space for your dreams. And yet you dreamed anyway.
That’s not weakness. That’s worth.
Whether you choose the GMAT or GRE, apply to Public Ivies or top European schools, remember that your story is not a deficit to overcome—it’s your differentiator.
What We’re Really Testing
Business school applications claim to test quant skills, leadership experience, global awareness.
But beneath the metrics, we’re all answering the same unspoken question:
Can you turn your life into meaning?
Because that’s what the best students do. They take the chaos of their own context and shape it into something legible. Something compelling. Something true.
And no Ivy League gatekeeper, no test algorithm, no admissions trend can outshine that kind of clarity.
So no, I didn’t go to an Ivy.
But I went somewhere better—for me.
And that made all the difference.
Author: Sudhakar Rao