DING Report

I would like to say that I have been really busy and so swamped with the awesome stuff happening around, that I did not get time to come back to my blog and update it. And if I did, I would be so wrong.

I gave my Kellogg interview last month on 17th February through Skype, after weather gods decided that my flight should be cancelled and I should be stuck in the house with snow being dumped all over DC. A week before the interview though, I gave my GMAT again. Round 3 was more successful than my other attempts but came after my first ding from UNC. So, the final GMAT score tally stands as:

• GMAT 1: 580 Q37 V32
• GMAT 2: 570 Q36 V32 (?!?!?!#@%$#)
• GMAT 3: 680 Q44 V40

After the Kellogg interview, which went well except for the nagging feeling that I could have done a better job at telling more interesting things about me as a person (but more on that later), I waited for Kelley to call me. I waited, spoke to some wonderful people at Kelley and waited still for the interview. And then finally on 14th March, I heard back from both Kelley and Ross. No interviews or wait list for me to join the class of 2016. I also heard back from Kellogg yesterday and my nagging feeling turned up as another reject. So, the final tally for apps stands as:

• UNC – Applicant initiated interview on Campus. Result – DING
• Kellogg – Applicant initiated interview on Skype. Result – DING
• Kelley – No interview. Result – DING
• Ross – No interview. Result – DING

As of today, I have an offer (interview pending) to join the 2 year Weekend MBA program at Ross, who got my profile from FT program but I will likely pass that on in favor of a full-time program and attempt to apply again later this year to at least two of the above schools and a few new ones. The last month has been really introspective for me as I thought about what really went wrong in my application. People, who know me and know my work, are still convinced that shouldn’t take the route of doing an MBA for the sake of an MBA but rather still set my eyes at the Top 20 programs. This made me realize that there is a big possibility that I did not do a good job of portraying the person these people know, in my application. I am sure my GMAT scores did not help my case, but after speaking with the many students in this journey, I feel confident that my apps as a whole did not make a stellar case.

In the meanwhile, I also realized that I have some free time and not enough to do until end of summer when the application season starts again. I am also out of excuses to not become serious about fitness. As an overweight kid and adult, who has escaped health problems, I have always had infinite and one reasons to not “work out”. But, I also turned 29 this year and was suddenly very aware of my body-clock, about the inevitability of having kids eventually, raising them, and having a successful professional career, at the same time and taking my good health for granted, did not sound smart.

So, as I research and review the schools I will apply to over the summer, I know the one thing in me that has changed. For most of my life, I did not do things where I was not certain of being either the best or at least very good. But, in this one year (April 2013 – March 2014) I took on the GMAT, failed, and got back up. I applied to some really good business schools, failed, and will get back up. Hopefully, I will stay the course of fitness and continue sweating through this year and use the same perseverance to meet my other goals.

Congratulations everyone who made it! Be ready for the amazing ride of your life 🙂

 

On and beyond Super Tuesday

Hope everyone stayed warm during the polar vortex here in the US! Quite fittingly, once my apps for Ross, Kelley, and Kellogg were submitted on “Super Tuesday” of MBA Apps, work exploded, leaving very little spare time to come back here often. In a way, that has been a small mercy. In my not-so-infrequent visit to the forum, I can see that quite a few of us, who are in the same boat, are waiting quite anxiously to hear back. The next step for me was to open my GMAT books (I never managed to put them away), get my Kellogg interview booked, and start preparing for the Kenan-Flagler interview coming at the end of the month, all the while refreshing GMATClub and Gmail to hear the latest about Ross or Kelley.

One other thing that I also came to appreciate during this time was how amazing my recommenders were! Despite reading one too many horror stories about having chase recommenders or worse, them not submitting in time for the deadline, my recommendation writers completed all their end of the work right after Christmas. Not only that, they have been super supportive. One of them actually wrote this to me – “If you don’t get into one of these schools, I will personally go to them and slap someone.” 😀

Tomorrow, I am attending the Kelley Small Group Dinner in DC. I haven’t been able to find a lot of online information or much in terms of how the experience has been for other people in the past. So I do plan to debrief here on my blog, how the dinner goes. My interaction with Kelley Chair of Full time MBA program, Prof.Jonlee Andrews was wonderful. In fact, it was one of the main reasons that motivated me to apply to the school. So, I am pretty excited about the Dinner tomorrow, to meet more people from Kelley and understand about their program better. I won’t also say no to an ‘actual’ interview invite in a few days ;-).

And till then…everyone keep your peckers up! 🙂

 

Is this the end?

So attempt two at GMAT happened today. And after deceptively increasing scores in the mock and admittedly a better understanding of the exam, I bombed again. The shock and utter disbelief gave away to despair as I called TH to tell him that I let him down yet again. While in the first round, I refused to accept the message that the mock scores were giving me, for this attempt, my mock scores ranged at least 60-100 points from the last time around. I thought that was a good sign.

So now, is this the end of the MBA road for me? This one exam/score can possibly nullify the rest of my application. I am below the median scores for all schools that I want to apply to. But as I was thinking these justifications out in my head, I also realized, that this is it. These are all the objections that I have/can get for my application.

On the other hand, do I believe that getting a low GMAT score will stop me being who I am or what I do at work? Did not having a GMAT score stop any of the opportunities that I have had so far or will stop me from going out for any in the future? Sure, for that matter, even if I don’t apply, will I stop pursuing and building a profile in shaping strategy for a company? Is everything that I have done in school, college, and work so far, have no value without this GMAT score to confirm it?

To these many questions, my answer was no. GMAT failure doesn’t and hasn’t changed any of these things and likely has little impact on anything except my application and the number of schools that I had originally wanted to apply to. The reason why I want to do an MBA is still the same. The reason why I want to apply to certain schools is also the same. The onus is on me, as it always was, to convince the admissions committees of these schools that I am still the right candidate, with one less data point to support their decision-making process – the GMAT score. A typical candidate would have their college acads+GMAT to quantify her mental chops along with professional and extra curricular aspects. In my case, since my GMAT is now down the drain, I just have one less point than everyone else to make the same case.

I could potentially give this whole thing up with the pathetic GMAT score. But 5-10-15 years down the line, an older, probably wiser me, would definitely question, how I expected anyone else to have faith in my dreams and aspirations, if I didn’t have the conviction enough to follow them through their logical end. From the day I started this journey, I knew that I won’t be an MBA because of my GMAT, but inspite of it. Well now, let me start this journey in earnest with the GMAT behind me.

Some dreams stay with you forever,
drag you around but bring you back to where you were,
Some dreams keep on gettin better,
gotta keep believin’ if you wanna know for sure

 

At the end of this, I may not be successful, but I’ll at least know for sure.

 

GMAT ennui continues…

I have been with the books. That is to put it mildly with no exaggeration. My days and thoughts have now broken into the following neat pieces

1. Studying
2. Thinking of studying and what to study
3. Thinking of life once I am done studying

My struggles with both Quant and Verbal continue and all past sins of my school days when my cocky self thought I could skate by the theory has come back to bite me (yes, you know where). That said, my quant studies have me feeling amused on some days and tearing my hair out for habits I cannot outgrow, on others. Now, somewhere between 6th grade and 8th grade, my love for math went down from a certain amount X to 0.000X and by the 10th grade it was tending to 0. There were many factors. My teacher sucked and I was able to compensate my dwindling math score by increased interest in other sciences and humanities. Of course, that I could ever, in my wildest dreams, want to be an engineer (like my Dad? No way!) or do an MBA/MS (uh what?!), was a possibility that didn’t come into play.

But I did know that given the Indian education system, a less than 80% score in Math was equal to flunking. Most people I knew actually considered anything less than 95-99% akin to failing, so 80 was like my safety net to just save face. On the other hand, I knew that CBSE (Board of Education that conducted our exams) had some absurd ways of giving us some points for being a sport and attempting questions in the paper. Some of the things that I remember and which helped me through school were:

• Writing “hence proved” or “QED” at the end of theorems or LHS = RHS, that you proved got you 0.5
• Writing the equation and the first line of simplification such as remove parenthesis/apply BODMAS (PEMDAS) rule got you 0.5-1 depending on the question
• A text explanation of the next step e.g. “when we combine the above, we get” etc. got you 0.5

As I read through my current notes and the few pages where my “100 marks” and “Q51” scoring TH has scribbled on the pad, I can’t help but notice the number of complete sentences that I use to solve (not just explain to myself) math vs the crisp numbers and symbols that show TH’s process.

If only this story writing in Quant helped my Verbal scores, life would be perfect eh? 😐

Among other things, less than 3 weeks to go for this part of the process to end. Who’s pumped?! 😀

 

Luck and chance, those wreckers of all but the best laid plans

Fall is here! One of my favorite seasons in this country and one that I am currently loathe to be missing, as I sit here at home or office, running behind all that I was supposed to have completed by this time, per the original plan. When the thought of MBA finally crystallized early in spring here is the plan in my head as it looked like then.

1. March – Memorial Day – Complete the pro-bono project that I was leading and build the pipeline of clients that would feed my annuals goals
2. June – July – Prep for GMAT and give the exam on 3rd August, before a week long team offsite that was scheduled for August 1st Week.
3. August – September – Either prep for a re-test (assuming that’d be about 20-30 points off my target score) or start the essay process for 2 of my target schools. Enjoy fall and hit my Q4 goals by end of Q3 (work).
4. October – November – Prep for interview, R2 essays, application, shopping for India trip, celebrate the numerous Indian festivals of the season, sneak out a visit to Maine.
5. November end –mid December – India trip and break from work, essays, application!
6. mid- December to Jan first week – Final application R2.

Yep, that’s what happened to the plan. Here is where it stands now:

1. June – July – Work, lethargy took over and come July mid, I realized I wasn’t ready yet. Pushed GMAT to August mid. Q2 goal at work, thankfully was beaten to pulp. Boo-yah!
2. August – September – Dismal GMAT score, no where close to my target schools’ ranges. Q3 clients disappearing over summer in Europe and US and creating a faux panic mode at work about hitting annual goals. Hit the reset button on GMAT prep and began from scratch.
3. October – November – GMAT, Hit Q4 goal. Apply for CompassDC for the next year’s projects. Pick two festivals that I will spend time celebrating (sucks :(). No Maine or Fall weather jaunts.
4. November end –mid December – India trip and break from work. But work on essays, application because yes, all my apps are going to be R2.
5. mid- December to Jan first week – Final application R2. Cross fingers, toes.

So, with that big apologies to Bschool Admit – Aparna for not having taken up the tag for the Leibster Award. I promise, I will get to it and make sure I finally honor the first ever tag I got :). Promise.

 

The road ahead…

So…the G-day came and went. It was every bit the downer I had hoped it would not be. My score sucks and am in serious doubts if I should continue on this road still. In parts, I am despondent that after being petrified of giving GMAT for years, I did give it and I failed. On the other hand, I am indignant about my score because I don’t think I am in the 60 percentile level! I may not be the sharpest tool out there but this score should at least reflect my true potential.

I am moving on now to plan a Labor Day weekend trip to Vegas. R1 is definitely out of my reach because if I do go back and tackle this beast of GMAT again, I want to give it more than 45 days. Thanks again to everyone coming by this blog and keeping me company as I tackle this…its been precious to have you around.

 

5 days to D-day. ‘Nuff said!

And now, it is no longer just about MBA or career or the future.

 

Fear of failure…and here we go again!

“My thinking on the GMAT…is that…pretty good measure[s] of what a standardized test can measure which is not your intelligence but your ability to commit to do well on a standardized test. Nobody walks into the GMAT cold. People prepare for these tests.”

– Deidre Leopold, Managing Director of Admissions & Financial Aid, HBS

I think the famous HBS director has quite the right idea of it and it is the very reason I am hyperventilating. A poor GMAT score, which is a frightening, but a fairly probable outcome of the last few months of slogging for me, will likely not be indicative of me being dumb. But it would certainly be a damning indictment of my ability to buckle down and focus to get through a standardized test that needs preparation and a high degree of perseverance.

I moved my GMAT date to two weeks later to make sense of my abysmal test scores. That Math is not my main problem here is probably what has me baffled the most. Verbal, seriously? This whole exercise, if nothing else, will be such a ego bruiser the way my Verbal scores are moving. 😐 I think ego is also what is keeping my scores from going up and errors from going down. So clearly a loop that I better break out of and fast. I am practicing, analyzing, re-analyzing, trolling GMATClub for tips, tricks, answer key to the actual test that would turn up in front of me…anything that can work to turn this around. Hopefully it will…right?

In a moment of desperation, I submitted my profile for evaluation with EssaySnark on GMATClub. And for better or worse, they gave me a good chance of getting into my dream school subject to a 690-720 range GMAT score. And while this came with usual disclaimers of essays being on the mark, the earth being at certain angle, and other things within and beyond my control, it also is going to make it feel worse if my GMAT bombs. I appear to have worked hard enough professionally to become a good candidate but it is my ability to get this one standardized test wrapped up with a respectable score which will decide whether I should even both doling out the moolah for the apps that will follow.

 

One month to go…

So now that I have officially wasted the one long weekend before the D-day, I thought I might use these last few hours before heading home from the god-forsaken place that is Wilmington, DE to update my blog instead. The D-day is set for next month and prep for GMAT had been on track until the last few days. I think the abundance of prep material has me bogged down. I started with the standard OG, the Manhattan GMAT guides to brush up my rusty basics and had my prep down on the calendar. My pleasure at striking down chapters, and sets of questions as ‘to-do’ for the day gave me a pleasure that I cannot put down in words yet. 🙂

And then, as word of my GMAT got around, well-meaning friends and the TH (the husband for future references), who had been so far pretty hands-off, started to give me their two cents. It started with a Magoosh membership that still has a month of juice left in it and had ‘helped her soooooo much‘ and then reams of questions and practice tests both PDF and adaptive that ‘will guarantee a 700+‘ .  As this material has been piling on my desk, I went ahead and also go myself the 6 full CATs from MGMAT because for all their helpfulness none of the people I spoke with had these mock test for me to run through and pace myself on.

Sadly, with this huge mound of material, I am feeling quite overwhelmed. I had hoped to use this long weekend, the only days off I have before my test exactly 4 weeks later, to do something about it. And to help me do that, I offered to join TH at his project site, Wilmington DE. He assured me it was a city that offered no distractions and that he would be working with his nose to the grindstone himself both on Wednesday and Friday, giving me enough time to tame my practice schedule. What neither of us accounted for was my inability to focus outside of my trusted study table at my apartment and how ridiculously relaxing a plush king bed of a hotel room can be. 😐 Having checked out this afternoon from the damn hotel and spending time trying to study at a Starbucks has been a tad better. Before I could drown myself in the cup of Iced Caramel Machhiato, I saw that my accuracy hasn’t suffered due to this dilly dallying of the last few weeks. Phew!

Most of the schools I would like to apply to are already out with their application and not surprisingly, my main applications are due on 1st October for R1. I am still debating between Wharton/Kellogg and I guess my GMAT score and meeting a few people from both schools could help make it clearer which is a better fit. I’ll do a longer post about my schools and the why later, once this GMAT beast has been tamed. In the meanwhile, I got the following locked down:

a) Recommendation writers – I know I mentioned this to Hamm and PoeticQuant, but I spoke to one of my recommendation writers and he graciously agreed. My other recommendation writer is going to be my manager and she hasn’t so far given me any indications about her unwillingness to support me in this. But I’ll officially ask her by the end of this month. I haven’t had a chance to look this up online but is anyone keeping a third recommendation writer spare, you know just-in-case?
2. The other thing that had me beaming all day long last week was my ‘Why MBA?’. I have struggled to articulate it in a non-shallow way ever since I was 17 :-p and the first time I wanted to do MBA as a master’s course. AND FINALLY, in my head and in my notes I have been able to connect the dots leading up to today that should make it difficult for adcoms to at least poke holes in it. That did make me very happy 🙂

See you all soon!

 

Onwards, ho!

So after a few years of dithering, humming and hawing and thousands of valid, some not so valid excuses, the MBA journey has resumed. I have bitten the bullet, taken a date to give the damn GMAT and time has magically made itself available as boredom, sleepiness have made surprising disappearance. I am calling it a meant-to-be signal from God or the powers that be because god knows I have never ever had the will power to get myself to work hard otherwise.

My mom mentioned this in her usual “not being profound but here is some wisdom” way, and this gave me some heart, that there must have been an ounce of determination, will power or as this TED Talk says grit to have been a rank holder in school, gone into a fairly decent college and been a high performer at work. And in some magical way, it helped clear the mind in a way I had not felt in a long time.

Now to address the elephant in the room – the last entry was in August last year and why am I back now? The travels happened, not everything that I had in mind but more than I thought could be possible :). We went to India, and visited Chicago, Miami, Niagara in addition to the nearby places here in the US. Work blew up in a way I never thought possible and I learnt so much in the last year of my professional life that the 5 years before it seem quite meaningless now. I did get rewarded with a promotion that everyone thought was in the bag much before it was, which I think is great :). I also got to be the project manager of a pro bono consulting project, a first, which was an exhilarating experience in itself.

So once all this was over or rather, was just about to get over, I had an epiphany about doing MBA. So many who know me, will probably exclaim, FINALLY. And while I have wanted to do my MBA since I was 17 and getting into Engineering college, I had all but given it up when I fell off the CAT bandwagon. I spoke to so many of my friends and while I saw and understood why they wanted to do it, what was great, and why they felt I should join – I didn’t feel the same about it anymore. And while I started and stopped my GMAT preparation many times over under peer pressure and also when my job seemed like a dead-end, I didn’t feel my calling until now.

And then jump to about a month ago, here I was, thinking seriously and hard about taking the plunge and I started reading blogs of people going through the same journey, talking on the forums such as GMATclub and BeattheGMAT and that gave me hope. It lifted my spirits to see similar thoughts and doubts and hear each persons unique challenges. It has been helping me stay motivated as I take a plunge and also rekindled my urge to write and pen down my thoughts here.

I may not be back before I give my exam in a few weeks but I hope to chronicle my application process and think out aloud here as I embark on this journey.