My name is Adil Wali and I am a second-year MBA at Tepper. I grew up in a small town outside of Chicago called Darien, IL. There, at a young age, I become intensely drawn to entrepreneurship. My parents, almost as soon as they came to this country 33 years ago, were entrepreneurs in the supermarket and video rental businesses. My parents experienced mild success with their businesses because of their lack of business training, and that was a driving force for my pursuit of an undergraduate degree in Finance and graduate study in business.
During my undergraduate study at Truman State University, I began to push forward with a small web development studio I started in high school. I overhauled the business model for the company to work more like a virtual development shop and subcontracting consultancy and immediately began hiring. The company became significantly more profitable and had grown to six people before I realized I wanted to pursue an MBA. The company wet my appetite for large scale venture-backed entrepreneurship, and I realized that I needed a more powerful toolset and network to make that happen. As a result, I decided to pursue an MBA at a young age (20), directly after I graduated from undergraduate study.
I spend my time at Tepper being involved with a great deal of extra-curricular entrepreneurial activity. I have been fortunate enough to compete in a number of the large business plan competitions, where our team did very well. We won the popular Moot Corp business plan competition near the end of the year, and as a result, we were honored with the opportunity to open the Nasdaq Stock Market in mid August. It was an incredible opportunity, and served to wet my appetite even more. I want to open the Nasdaq again, but next time, I want it to be when I am able to lead a company to IPO. I am currently working on a startup with a fellow 2nd year MBA as well as a colleague from my first startup, and I am having a great time with that.
I also spend a good deal of time extra-curricularly being involved in Net Impact, a professional organization that promotes positive social impact. I try to be as physically active as possible, which includes occasional workouts, games of ultimate Frisbee, and flag football.
Hi Adi,
I wasn't sure on where I was supposed to go for this but in your opinion do you think 22 is too young an age to be applying to a Masters program at Tepper.
I know that most of the times it probably depends most on what sort of work ethic you have, your qualifications, etc but going through some of the requirements and the level of know how needed, I felt myself getting intimidated. You see I really didn't do all that well in college (2.97 in BBA- Finance) but I know I have the potential and desire to do much better. A GMAT score of 700 is difficult but not impossible. I feel that the more B-schools I see, the more fearful I get.
Bottom Line is: I don't want to feel like the odd one out among all the geniuses at any B-School.
PS: I know this has no relation to what you posted on your blog and you may not be the right person to ask but I guess I still did.
Posted by: Akash Singh | October 25, 2006 at 05:07 AM