From CMA setbacks to the top 22 Mavericks: Kritika Sharma’s MBA Finance journey at Parul University

Kritika Sharma cleared the first two stages of one of India’s harder professional finance exams at the first attempt, and then, for a stretch, could not clear the third. The gap between those facts and what she did about it, is the whole of her story. She is an MBA Finance student at Parul University, a finalist in the Cost and Management Accountancy course, and one of the students selected as a Maverick, the title the university gives to a small group drawn from the top of the batch.

She is from Banaras originally, but Vadodara has been home since she was in the third standard. Her education has stayed inside one field without a detour: a BCom from MSU, the CMA qualification she has been working toward alongside it, and now an MBA in Finance. By her own description, her background is entirely finance and accounts, and every step she has taken has kept to that line. That consistency is worth stating early, because the setback at the centre of her account was never about effort or direction. It was about confidence.

Kritika did not wait for her studies to end before working. Her practical experience began alongside her CMA preparation, with six months at a CMA firm where she worked on accounting, costing and GST, the core of the subjects she was sitting exams in. After that, she joined a multinational company in its accounts payable department and stayed for fifteen months, handling invoice processing and TDS and taking part in the month-end activities that keep a finance team’s records straight. She also ran a few bank audits along the way.

That is an unusual amount of real finance work for someone still studying, and it matters to what follows. Through the whole period when her exams were not going to plan, her professional side kept moving. “Professionally I was gaining experience,” she says, and the detail is the point: the stall was in one part of her life, not all of it.

The CMA, awarded by the Institute of Cost Accountants of India, is a staged professional qualification that runs from a foundation through two intermediate groups to a final level, and clearing it while holding down work and another degree is demanding by design. Kritika’s run at it started well. She cleared the Foundation and Group 1 on her first attempt, a strong start in a course that does not hand those out. “Initially things were going quite well,” she says, and she had reason to expect the rest to follow.

Then COVID arrived. In her words, “COVID came, and things fell apart a bit,” and the disruption left her unsettled enough that she did not clear Group 2 of the intermediate level on her attempt. The exam’s own structure made it heavier. The CMA is held twice a year, so each attempt that did not go through fed straight into another round of preparation and another exam. She describes being “stuck in that loop.”

Personally, I was stuck, and I had lost confidence in myself

She is precise about separating the two sides of that time. The professional side was building: the firm, the MNC, and the audits. The personal side was not, and that loss of confidence, not any exam result, is the real turning point of her account, because it is what her next decision grew out of.

Kritika did not want to stay in the loop. She decided she needed to start something new alongside the professional course rather than wait on it, and that led her to an MBA. She is clear that it was never meant to replace the CMA. It was a way to regain ground, academically and personally, while the CMA continued in the background.

Choosing where to do it came down to what she heard from people already working. Colleagues told her about the placements at Parul University, and the feedback was positive. The exposure the university offered matched what she was looking for, which was not just a degree but an environment that would open doors in finance. On that basis, she committed, and in her reading of it, at that point in her life, Parul University was the right call.

The largest shift in Kritika’s story happened here, and it is a shift in temperament more than in credentials. She describes herself before the MBA as an introvert. “I didn’t have that much confidence,” she says. The environment pushed against that. Rather than wait to be called on, she began to initiate classroom discussions, group discussions, the competitions arranged for students, presentations, and the international lectures the university ran.

“The environment here was very different from what I was living,” she says, and what changed her was the competition in it. “This competitive environment motivated me a lot, and my mindset got changed.” The change was not sudden. It came from showing up to the same kinds of things repeatedly, voicing an opinion a little more often each time, until participation stopped being an effort. She credits that practice directly for how her placement preparation went.

Two experiences outside the classroom fed into it. A university-organised visit to Adani let her watch a large organisation run from the inside, with managers explaining how the parts fit, which let her tie the invoices and month-ends she already knew to the shape of a whole business. And during the MBA, she completed a 45-day internship at Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, BHEL, which added another large organisation to her record and, as it turned out, supplied the material for the last round of her Maverick selection.

The Maverick selection at Parul University runs in stages, and it narrows hard at each one. The first evaluation was built on expression, discussion, personal rounds, and an aptitude test, from which the faculty shortlisted sixty to seventy students. It then left the university’s own hands: HR professionals from well-known companies came in, shortlisted further and ran their own rounds, and each step cut the group down.

The final stage turned on the BHEL internship. Kritika presented a PowerPoint on it to a jury, who questioned her on her introduction, the presentation, and the work behind it. The preparation, the real experience, and the confidence she had rebuilt over two years all had to show up at once. At the end, she was among the top 22 Mavericks. “I also got selected in my Mavericks top 22. So, another milestone,” she says. For someone who had doubted herself as hard as she had, the result meant more than the title: it was evidence that the change she had worked on had produced something visible.

Her advice is not theoretical, which is its value, because it comes from someone who started without the confidence she is now recommending others build.

Begin early. “For placement, we have to think from the start,” she says; a student should not wait for the final semester, because every stage of the course is part of the preparation. Her own method was to treat each group discussion, personal round, and competition the students were told to expect as something to prepare for daily and to actually enter, introvert or not.

Work on the right skills. Asked which matter is most important, she names three without hesitation: “Communication skills, confidence, and how we are presenting ourselves are the most important things that I have learned.” Her improvement came from steady participation in classrooms, discussions, and presentations rather than any single event, which is also the reassuring part of her advice: these are skills a student who does not feel naturally confident can still build.

One theme runs through every stage of Kritika’s account: confidence. It was the first thing she lost when the exam attempts stopped going through, and the first thing she set out to rebuild when she enrolled in the MBA. Her later results, Group 2 and the Maverick selection, read in her own telling not as separate wins but as what followed once the mindset had shifted. The order matters to her: the confidence came back first, and the milestones came after.

The other feature worth naming is how her practical and academic sides grew together rather than in sequence. She reached the MBA already carrying real finance work, a CMA firm, fifteen months in accounts payable, a handful of bank audits, and the degree, which then added management study, international lectures, presentations, and two more large organisations in Adani and BHEL. The Adani visit is a clear example of the two meetings: having already handled invoices, TDS, and month-ends herself, she could stand in a working business and connect what she had read to how the whole thing runs.

Two results arrived during the MBA, and in Kritika’s mind they were linked. She cleared CMA Group 2, the stage that had held her back, and she calls it “a milestone for me” that carries extra weight for having come after she had begun to doubt she could. And she was selected among the top 22 Mavericks. She does not read the timing as coincidence; both followed the change in mindset, not the other way round. “Starting from setbacks, now I feel like I have completed” is how she puts the arc.

Her goal from here stays on the line she has held throughout. She wants to build a career in finance, and she is specific about the level she is aiming at: a role “where I can make and take decisions according to the company and for the betterment of the company.” That is an ambition to be in the decisions, not just the function, and it sits naturally on top of the accounting practice, the professional training, and the management degree she has stacked up.

My MBA didn’t replace my CMA journey; it helped me regain my confidence while continuing the journey.

SOURCE AND CONTEXT. Based on an interview with Kritika Sharma, MBA Finance, Parul University, reported by Janvi Singh. The CMA progress, work history, and selection account are as stated by the student. She was named among the top 22 Mavericks; a separate profile’s source recorded ‘top 22’ for the same program, and the figure should be confirmed before any single number is published across articles. No placement package is claimed, as her placement is a forward goal. Her LinkedIn link has had tracking parameters removed; the ICMAI and BHEL links are to the respective official sites.

• Kritika Sharma MBA Finance student and CMA finalist, Parul University; named a Maverick
• Parul University Host institution; Vadodara, Gujarat
• Institute of Cost Accountants of India Awards the CMA qualification; context for her CMA finalist status
• BHEL Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited; her 45-day MBA internship
• Adani Host of the university-organised industrial visit she attended