Reliance Fellowship for Stanford MBA | Summer Awesomeness!

I think summers are a great time. Infact, summers are friggin' awesome times. I remember thinking last summer that things cannot get more awesome than they already were. This summer is slowly standing up to beat it!

A kick-ass coincidence is this: Three of us (I will qualify 'us' soon) had applied for a really amazing scholarship being offered by Reliance Industries called Reliance Dhirubhai Fellowship. It is an all-expenses covered scholarship to pursue the two-year MBA at Stanford University. It is not restricted to college students, infact most of the guys who apply are people with extensive professional experience.

So, of the 1500-odd applications (as of last year), Reliance selects about 50 fellows and then finally Stanford selects the 5 who will be offered the scholarship. So, that's a cool 80-odd lakh scholarship for two years!

The information page can be accessed here.
The list of fellows of last year is here.

Anyway, the coincidence part is this: Two of my friends...

- Gaurav Sapra - BITS Goa, just finished college this year - He is one of those 'childhood friends' that they talk about in stories and movies.

- Aniket 'Uss' Pangarkar- Insti fellow, going into final year now - He is my mentor, guide, chuddy-buddy etc. etc. He is also my partner in most, if not all, crimes in the insti. (They say gay-partner, but that's not true, trust me).

... and I had applied for this fellowship. And to our respective utter disbeliefs, all the three got through to the top 50!

So, while we reel under the sheer awesomeness (yes, indeed flicked from Kung-fu Panda) of the coincidence, those two have started preparing for their GMAT (provided free of cost by Reliance to the finalists) and I, having already taken my GMAT last month, am planning to write a book on how awesome summers, even summers like the ones in Chennai, can get! :-)