Many MBA applicants’ best friends are their Blackberries or laptops. But waking up three times a night to check admission emails wasn’t his thing: Bhushan Renuse preferred to be informed more personally.

Prior to being offered a place at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University, the software specialist made three trips to the RSM campus in 11 months during 2008 and 2009.

In a blog published on the RSM MBA Blog page, Renuse, who is originally from India, recalls how these trips helped him to get into the world’s 25^th ranked MBA program.  

Renuse joined ABN AMRO in Amsterdam after he took his GMAT in October 2007, and during the time he realized that the Netherlands is a great hub for international business. So, when his thoughts turned to doing an MBA, the Rotterdam School of Management seemed the logical choice.

“Not only was I exposed to the diverse cultures but it also made me realise how important it was to have an international outlook in order to succeed in today’s ‘Flat World’,” Renuse writes in his blog.

The diversity of his workplace played a bid part in encouraging Renuse to stay in the Netherlands. His ABN AMRO colleagues included a British-Israeli banker who was “passionate about running Marathons”, German consultants who are “not tired of describing how much they love the beer gardens back home” and a South African who “thinks her specialty lies in making brownies than negotiating vendor contracts”.

But the three trips to RSM really made up his mind. In April 2008, when Renuse first arrived on campus, he was invited to attend an EMBA class, dine with EMBA students and meet Angela Dickerson, director of the part-time EMBA program at RSM.

“I was quite impressed by the atmosphere at the school,” writes Renuse.

Then two months later, he was on campus again for an MBA Open Day. This time Renuse went to a mini-MBA class, How Traditional companies can learn from the ‘Innovative Approaches’ of online companies, taught by Professor George Yip, Dean of RSM.   

At a cocktail networking session afterwards, Renuse was “surprised” to see that some applicants had travelled in from countries like Peru and Spain.

Reuse’s final visit to Rotterdam was in March 2009, when another MBA Open Day took place. Having done his admission interview a week earlier, Renuse was given a “pleasant surprise” when a member of RSM’s admissions team told him that he had been offered a place in the MBA Class of 2011.

“In fact, Maryke (admissions manager at RSM) had called me to inform about the results on Friday… (the day before the visit), but since my cell phone was out of power, she could not reach me!” writes Renuse in his blog.

So it all ended where it began. No wonder Renuse wouldn’t mind staying a bit longer: “Long after the [Open Day] event was over, I still lingered there, talking with the staff and fellow visitors. The journey back to Amsterdam was just too peaceful!” he writes.

To read Bhushan Renuse’s original blog, click here