665 GMAT. Global operations. Five of the world’s best MBA programs said yes.

Kartik Singhal spent six years turning around factories, managing $82M in P&L, and being selected by his CEO as one of 15 global subject matter experts for an enterprise transformation. Then he sat for the GMAT and the score didn’t reflect any of it. He applied anyway. LBS, Darden, Duke, Kellogg, and Cornell admitted him.

Where the story begins

Kartik is the kind of student who cannot just study. At Penn State, Aerospace Engineering, Dean’s List twice, he leads a 20-engineer team for NASA’s University Student Launch Initiative and places third nationally — after raising $50,000 to fund the program himself. He founds the Engineering Consulting Collaborative, builds partnerships with Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG before graduation, and gets 15 students placed in full-time roles. He wins the Global Grand Challenges Summit representing the US team with a Moringa-based water purification system built at 30% of conventional cost, which goes on to be piloted in three developing countries.

He leaves campus believing that most problems yield to hard work and clear thinking. The next six years would test that belief repeatedly — and prove it right.

What the work actually was

Kartik joins Cummins Inc. in 2019 through the Manufacturing Development Program and finds, quickly, that he loves it. Not the abstraction of manufacturing — the physical reality of it. The noise, the rhythm, the people who show up at 6 AM and are still there when the shift turns over. He moves fast. Process Manager, then Site Leader, then Operations Excellence Leader across a business unit spanning the US, India, UK, China, and Mexico. Cummins eventually selects him as one of 15 subject matter experts globally for the CEO’s enterprise transformation team.

The results are the kind that get written up. He takes a Charleston facility carrying $31M in backlog and brings it to under $500,000 while growing production 35%. He designs a facility re-layout that generates $3.6M in annual savings. He deploys IIoT systems across 13 plants and builds a PowerBI ecosystem that gives executives real-time visibility into production floors they have never been able to see this clearly. The turnaround ends up as a case study at Harvard Business School. He manages 750,000 turbocharger units a year, an $82M P&L, and 250+ employees. He drives $10M in operational savings across 13 plants in five countries. He is a three-time Business Impact Award winner.

But the story that defines him isn’t in any of that.

Late one night the factory floor is quiet and he finds one of his team leads sitting on a crate, shaking, unable to speak. Her son has been killed. Kartik doesn’t know what to say. Nobody does. So he sits with her. He doesn’t check his phone. He doesn’t try to fix anything. He just stays until she can breathe again. In the weeks that follow he deals with police so she doesn’t have to hear no over and over. He rearranges shifts so her team covers while she grieves. He shows up as someone who cares, not as her manager. None of this is on his résumé. It is, however, the clearest picture of how he leads.

The score that threatened to overshadow everything

When Kartik decided he wanted an MBA, he had the career, the impact, and the global credibility. What he didn’t have was a strong GMAT. He sat for the exam. It didn’t go well. He studied through long COVID. He sat again while simultaneously launching a greenfield remanufacturing plant. He took it four more times. The score settled at 665.

He started wondering whether three digits would be all anyone saw. Two decades of proof that he could lead, build, and turn impossible situations into working systems — and it might all be overshadowed by a number that had nothing to do with any of it.

He came to GyanOne. The first conversation reframed everything. Stop defending the score. What happened on that factory floor at night? What does it actually feel like to fix something everyone else has given up on? What does it mean to manage 250 people across five countries and still know when to put the phone down and just sit with someone? Those are the stories that define an application. The GMAT is one data point. The rest of the file is the argument.

Five schools said yes

LBS. Darden. Duke. Kellogg. Cornell.

Each of these programs received the same thing: an honest, specific, undefensive account of a career built in places most MBA applicants have never been — factory floors, turnaround situations, greenfield plant launches, and the kind of late-night human moments that never make it into a performance review but define what kind of leader someone actually is.

If a low GMAT is making you hesitate, read this

A test score is a single signal in a file that tells a much larger story. Kartik’s file included a Harvard Business School case study, a CEO-selected transformation role, $10M in documented savings, and a decade of leading through conditions most applicants have only read about. The 665 was real. So was everything else.

The question for any applicant isn’t whether the score is ideal. It’s whether the rest of the application makes the case so clearly that the score becomes a footnote. Kartik’s did.