You are sitting in the waiting room outside the IIM interview hall. Around you, candidates are whispering about their achievements. The girl to your left spent six months volunteering at an NGO in rural Rajasthan. The guy across from you has a startup that raised seed funding. Someone else is casually mentioning their internship at McKinsey.
And you? You went to college. Attended classes. Maybe joined a club that met twice a semester. Watched Netflix on weekends. Did not save any orphans or disrupt any industries.
Your mind races through the inevitable questions. "Tell me about your extracurriculars." "What interesting experience shaped you?" "What is unique about your profile?"
You have nothing. Or at least, that is what it feels like.
The Anxiety That Nobody Talks About
This fear is more common than you would think. Across MBA forums and candidate discussions, the same pattern emerges over and over: bright students with solid CAT scores convinced they will fail the interview because their lives are too "ordinary."
One candidate described it perfectly: "I have no work experience, no internships, no defined hobbies. I am an introvert with nothing to talk about. What do I even say when they ask about my achievements?"
Another said: "I feel like everyone has these compelling stories about leadership and impact. I just studied, passed exams, and watched cricket. My life is boring."
Here is what no one tells these candidates: the panel is not looking for extraordinary lives. They are looking for ordinary people who can think extraordinarily well.
Why IIM Panels Do Not Expect Everyone to Be Extraordinary
Think about it logically. IIMs interview thousands of candidates every year. The overwhelming majority are:
- Fresh graduates with no work experience
- From engineering colleges with similar curriculums
- Without significant extracurriculars or international exposure
- Living ordinary middle-class lives with ordinary experiences
If panels only admitted candidates with exceptional achievements, the classes would be empty. The math simply does not work.
What panels actually evaluate is your ability to:
1. Reflect thoughtfully on your experiences--however ordinary they seem
2. Articulate your thinking clearly under pressure
3. Demonstrate self-awareness about who you are and what you want
4. Handle uncomfortable questions without collapsing
None of these require you to have started a company or saved a village. They require you to have thought deeply about the life you have actually lived.
> "The most boring profile in the room often gives the most interesting interview--because they have had to think harder about what their experiences actually mean."
The Narrative Construction Framework
Here is what candidates with "plain profiles" do not realize: everyone's life contains stories. The difference between boring and interesting is not in the experiences themselves--it is in how you frame them.
This is called narrative construction, and it is a skill you can learn.
The framework has three components:
Component 1: The Micro-Moment
Instead of searching for big achievements, identify small moments that reveal something about how you think or what you value.
You did not lead a team of 50 volunteers. But maybe you organized a group study session before exams because you noticed classmates struggling. That is a moment.
You did not intern at Goldman Sachs. But maybe you helped your father manage inventory at his small shop during summer breaks and noticed inefficiencies you suggested fixing. That is a moment.
You did not start a viral social media campaign. But maybe you spent hours researching laptops before buying one, comparing specifications across twenty models because you hate making uninformed decisions. That is a moment.
The moment does not have to be impressive. It has to be revealing.
Component 2: The Insight Layer
Every micro-moment contains an insight if you dig for it. The insight is what the moment taught you about yourself, about people, or about how things work.
The group study session reveals: "I realized I understand concepts better when I explain them to others. Teaching forces clarity."
The inventory management reveals: "I noticed patterns my father missed because he was too close to the daily operations. Fresh perspective has value."
The laptop research reveals: "I am uncomfortable with uncertainty. I compensate by over-preparing. It is a strength when thoroughness matters and a weakness when speed matters."
The insight layer transforms a boring fact into an interesting reflection.
Component 3: The Connection Thread
The final component connects your micro-moment and insight to the question being asked or the context of the MBA.
If they ask "What is your greatest strength?", the laptop research becomes: "I am thorough to a fault. When I am making a decision--whether it is buying a laptop or choosing a career path--I research exhaustively. That is why I am confident about pursuing an MBA. I have spent months understanding what business education offers and how it fits my trajectory."
If they ask "Why MBA?", the inventory management becomes: "Helping my father's shop taught me that small businesses fail not because of lack of effort, but lack of frameworks. They work hard but not smart. An MBA would give me the strategic vocabulary to help businesses like his scale systematically."
The connection thread shows the panel that you can think, not just list achievements.
Five Experiences Everyone Has (That Can Become Compelling Answers)
You think you have nothing to talk about. Here are five categories of experience that every candidate has--and how to mine them for interview gold.
1. Academic Projects (Yes, the Boring Ones)
Every engineering or commerce student has done projects. Most candidates dismiss them as "just college stuff." That is a mistake.
The reframe: Do not describe the project. Describe what went wrong and how you handled it. Every project has conflict, constraints, or failure points.
"Our final year project was a smart irrigation system. Standard stuff. But three weeks before submission, our microcontroller fried. We had no budget for replacement. I spent two nights learning to repair the circuit board from YouTube videos because buying a new one was not an option. We submitted on time."
What this reveals: Resourcefulness under constraint. Problem-solving without resources. Bias for action over excuses.
2. Family Dynamics
You do not have work experience. But you have lived in a family for two decades. Families are complex organizations with politics, resource allocation, and competing priorities.
The reframe: What role do you play in your family? How do decisions get made? What conflicts have you navigated?
"I am the oldest of three siblings. Growing up, I was the translator between my parents and my younger brother--he is more emotional, they are more practical. I learned early that the same message lands differently depending on how you frame it. That is probably why I am drawn to marketing."
What this reveals: Emotional intelligence. Communication skills. Self-awareness about strengths.
3. Consumption Patterns
How you spend your time reveals what you value. Even "unproductive" activities contain insights.
The reframe: What do you consume obsessively? What does that obsession teach you about yourself or the world?
"I have watched every Marvel movie multiple times. What interests me is not the action--it is how they built a franchise over fifteen years with interconnected storylines. They essentially created a subscription model for movies. I have thought about how that strategy could apply to other industries, like education or healthcare."
What this reveals: Pattern recognition. Strategic thinking. Ability to extract insights from unexpected sources.
4. Observations About Your Environment
You do not need to have changed the world. You need to have noticed things about it.
The reframe: What inefficiency, unfairness, or irrationality have you observed in your immediate environment?
"My college canteen wasted enormous amounts of food every day. They would prepare fixed quantities regardless of attendance. On exam days, half the food went to garbage. I never started a campaign about it, but I spent months noticing the pattern and thinking about what demand prediction would look like. It is probably why I am interested in operations management."
What this reveals: Observational skills. Systems thinking. Intellectual curiosity applied to real contexts.
5. Struggles That Did Not End in Victory
The best stories do not always have happy endings. Failure and ongoing struggle reveal more about character than polished success stories.
The reframe: What have you struggled with that you have not solved yet?
"I have been trying to build a reading habit for three years. I have tried everything--Kindle, physical books, audiobooks, reading challenges. Nothing sticks for more than a month. What I have learned is that I am better at intense bursts than sustained consistency. I prepare for exams in two-week sprints, not semester-long study. That is a pattern I am still figuring out how to work with."
What this reveals: Self-awareness. Honesty. Capacity for reflection. Growth mindset.
The Ordinary Life Advantage
Here is the counterintuitive truth: candidates with "boring" profiles often give better interviews than candidates with impressive resumes.
Why?
Impressive profiles create a trap. When you have done something genuinely notable, you rely on the achievement to speak for itself. You list facts instead of revealing insights. "I started a company that raised funding" sounds impressive but tells the panel nothing about how you think.
Ordinary profiles force depth. When you cannot rely on achievements, you have to work harder to extract meaning from your experiences. That extra work produces richer, more thoughtful answers. The panel learns more about you as a person.
> "The candidate who makes an unremarkable experience sound insightful will always beat the candidate who makes a remarkable experience sound like a press release."
Why Practice Matters More Than Profile
Everything in this article is useless if you cannot articulate it under pressure.
The narrative construction framework works. The five experience categories contain gold. But knowledge is not the same as performance. Reading about how to reframe experiences does not mean you can do it when three professors are staring at you and your mouth goes dry.
The gap between knowing and accessing under pressure is where interviews are won or lost.
This is where practice becomes non-negotiable. Not practice in your head--actual out-loud practice where you are forced to articulate answers in real time.
The candidates who convert their IIM calls are not necessarily the ones with the best profiles. They are the ones who have practiced enough that their narrative construction becomes automatic. They have rehearsed their micro-moments so many times that the stories flow naturally even under pressure.
Tools like Rehearsal exist precisely for this purpose. You can practice articulating your ordinary experiences out loud, get feedback on whether your framing is working, and refine your narrative construction until it becomes second nature. The AI does not care that your experiences are "boring"--it cares whether you can make them interesting.
The Final Reframe
Stop thinking about what you do not have. Start thinking about what you have actually lived.
You have made decisions. You have observed patterns. You have struggled with things. You have thought about your future. You have consumed content and had reactions to it. You have navigated relationships and family dynamics. You have completed projects and dealt with constraints.
That is not nothing. That is twenty years of human experience waiting to be mined for insights.
The candidate in the waiting room with the McKinsey internship has one impressive bullet point. You have thousands of moments that reveal who you are--if you learn to frame them correctly.
The question is not whether your profile is interesting enough. The question is whether you have done the work to understand what your ordinary experiences reveal about you.
Because in the interview room, it is not your profile that matters. It is your thinking.
And thinking can be practiced.