A year to be thankful for!

I have been back since last week from a wonderful, albeit short (yes, 3 weeks with a family you don’t get to see all year feels short!) visit home. We packed in a lot of travel, met a lot of family and friends, including my grandma, who I hadn’t met in 8 years and got my sis married off in true Indian fashion. This trip was unfortunately a bit disappointing on food experience side, despite the two weddings that we attended, but well that’s never stopped me from putting on weight. 😀

So, I am back to a cold, a bit dreary, and a practically “friend-free” Washington DC. Most of our friends are either on their annual trips to India or are taking advantage of the Christmas holiday travelling, while TH and I guard the doors at our respective offices. There isn’t much work, except the occasional email, and that’s great because, I desperately need to make up for the lost time in finishing my apps for Ross, Kelley, and Kellogg.

I have now got the process down to a science and every single day, I send up a prayer for being married to a guy who is as committed to this whole process of application as I am. He has been able help me distill my many, many words and thoughts into clear, concise, and articulate goals. If I do make it through to the interviews, it’ll be all for his support.

This year has been great in many ways – professionally and personally. I think I have been less afraid to fail, failed and still not given up, in all ways grown and matured more than ever before. In the same spirit, once I am done with applications, I plan on taking the last shot at GMAT again. Less to support my application story but more to get even with it. During the next month, I’ll also be preparing for my Kenan-Flagler interview and the Kellogg interview, and hoping and praying very, very hard that Ross and Kelley both like my application story and call me for interview.

To everyone here who has made it in R1 (Hamm0, TimBob, PoeticQuant, ExpectingMBA, and MBAGirlJourney) – many congratulations! To fellow travellers still on this journey in R2 – May the new year bring us closer to our dreams 🙂 HAPPY NEW YEAR!

 

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?! 😀

 

Music that makes me smile

I am sure everyone has one happy song or a piece of music that takes you to a happy place or right back to an unforgettable time, right? I think I have a few that always put me in a better mood and get me reminiscing.

1. The Office Theme Song

I started watching The Office in February 2010 when it had already run over 5 seasons here in US. What’s so special? Well, I was visiting DC on an official visit/vacation that February of the famous DC Snowmegaddon and while it was a new city et al, I was meeting Dodo (my then boyfriend – now husband) after 8 months and it was too cold for us to be really adventurous outside. So, post-office, we’d grab dinner and come back and watch the show and I’d doze off to this music catching up on my jet-lag. A week later, we moved to Charlotte for the vacation part of my trip and I spent two weeks catching up from Season 1-5 while Dodo and his friends went to their actual office! I associate this music to my first trip outside the country, first time staying alone with Dodo and deciding – I can marry this guy and move to US! For the next year and half as we figured out our way to make things work, this music wa

2.  Friends Theme Song

Dodo introduced me to Friends but me and my roommates spent hours and hours on LAN watching all the 10 seasons over and over and over again till we could quote their dialogues to real life situations. I can solely credit Friends and their characters for keeping my long distance relationship alive for 5 years. 🙂 Dodo and I fought and he was terrible at making up afterwards,but  I could always depend on him picking up a random Friends episode and crack me up over the phone. Then, after college, it helped me bond with my sister-in-law who was my room mate in Hyderabad as she and I along with her brother spent hours during lazy summer weekends watching the same re-runs again.  And it still does not get old!

3. Pehla Nasha

This is the song of me as an 18 year old smitten for the first time ever in college with a TDH (tall, dark and handsome!) if there was ever one. I spent agonizing hours during my first year trying to make sense of his flirting and seeing more into it than he meant. The icing on the cake came just a month before the end of my first year and his college final year when he dedicated this song to me in front of the entire college during our cultural festival and asked me for a dance! Then he, all of 6’2″, walked half way across the field where I stood with all my friends, seniors and practically everyone who I knew in college and danced with me for the entire song. I don’t remember landing on the ground the entire night. And now, every time I hear this song playing, I swear I float – just a little, with a smile on my face :).

4. Tu hi meri shab hai and Tonight are two songs that I associate with some really romantic moments with Dodo over the last few years. 😉  I remember him introducing me to Vodka with Limca for the first time while Tu hi meri shab hai played – ‘nuf said!