Deepak P.

Background

Deepak Punwani helps MBA applicants find the spike in their profile that everyone else walked past — and turn it into the reason a top program says yes. Over fifteen years and more than two hundred clients, he’s placed eighty-plus candidates into M7 programs alone — Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Kellogg, MIT Sloan, and Columbia — with additional admits at INSEAD and LBS. He specializes in the applicant who’s been told their odds are long.

His own odds looked long once. He started in FMCG brand management at Colgate Palmolive and Goodyear, working across China, India, and Singapore, then moved into strategy consulting spanning the Asia-Pacific and Middle East. He earned his INSEAD MBA on the highest scholarship in his cohort — his second graduate degree — and took a role leading pricing strategy across APAC from Shanghai. Then he co-founded a renewable-energy company operating in India and Sub-Saharan Africa. The technology was patented; CNBC Global named it among the top ten ideas to change the world. That chapter taught him something he now brings to every client: the story that makes you compelling isn’t always the one with the cleanest ending.

That lesson runs through everything he does with clients. He’s built a practice around unearthing the narrative an applicant wouldn’t share with anyone else and converting it into the leadership spine of their application. INSEAD trusts him enough to interview their applicants and train their alumni interviewers — he knows what the other side of the table is listening for. His school footprint runs from the M7 through the Top 15 and Top 25, including INSEAD and LBS. He works with re-applicants dissecting what went wrong the first time, international candidates from oversubscribed countries navigating a numbers game that isn’t really about numbers, career-switchers whose professional arc looks like three different résumés, and anyone whose GMAT or GPA tells a smaller story than they do.

If you’re the kind of applicant who suspects there’s more to your profile than what’s on the page — a spike you haven’t articulated, a chapter you’ve been leaving out, a school you’ve quietly dismissed as out of reach — Deepak’s instinct is to go find it. He plays the long game. He’s not interested in packaging you for a single cycle; he’s interested in helping you see the version of your candidacy that makes the reach school the right school.