MBA Journey - Part 1

My journey to get into an MBA college has finally ended. I applied to 3 universities: Kellogg, ISB and NUS, this year and got admits from NUS and ISB. Earlier Kellogg gave me a false admit. It was a tough decision to choose NUS over ISB, but, after talking to so many people choosing NUS seemed to be more strategic.

In this post, I'll just discuss about my preparation for the GMAT exam.

Well, to be frank, my journey to MBA started during my last semester in IIT Bombay. My elder brother, an IIM Bangalore Alumnus, preferred to do a foreign MBA over an Indian MBA and, hence, guided me to prepare for GMAT examination. He told me to take the exam before graduating from IIT because the score remains valid for 5 years and, hence, makes sense to take the exam before getting into the corporate world. I did a one month preparation and scored just 660. I was kinda happy because I targeted 650 and I heard that above 650 is a good score. But, once I entered the job market I realized that at least 700 is a must to apply in good colleges. I was in no mood to take the exam then, so deferred it. But, importantly, I made a conscious effort to read articles, editorials seriously to improvise my grammar. I did that for almost 3 years. Truly speaking, learning grammar is a fun. There are rules, so if you know them it becomes a cake walk to spot a mistake.

Then after 2 years, ie in 2006, after making a trip to California I decided to prepare for GMAT seriously. During this time, one of my very good friend, Dhruv Garg, took the exam and scored 760. I took complete advantage of him and discussed strategies to click the score. One of most important ones I remember is to take the date when one is half done with the course. Mostly people take the date first and then start preparing. Bad Idea. What one should do is familiarize oneself with the course, take some practice tests and identify how much time is needed to be completely fit for the exam. With this intention, I prepared for at least one month and then took the date keeping in mind about the limited time I had for studies. Another strategy we discussed was to never take Kaplan tests. Standard of Kaplan test is way higher than the actual GMAT standard. So, why bug yourself with difficult questions. Kaplan acts as a de-motivator.

When I started, I felt quite comfortable in solving sentence correction and critical reasoning questions. I had some serious trouble with reading comprehension. I was scoring reasonably well in stars, biological related comprehensions, however, when it came to philosophy, humanities related comprehension I was getting screwed big time. So, I discussed this problem with my friend Dhruv and he suggested me to change my strategy to answer such types of comprehensions. I tried several strategies such as writing a line about what has happened in a particular para, writing only keywords (such as however, therefore, but etc.), reading the question first and then reading the comprehension, etc. The one that really worked was writing the keywords. Writing these keywords helped me understand the tone of the paragraph.

I never spend too much time on Maths. For essay writing, I understood the basics from Official guide to GMAT and gave one week time of preparation. I referred to following books/materials for preparation:
1. Official Guide to GMAT
2. Manhattan Sentence Correction (Awesome Book)
3. 1000 questions on Sentence Correction, Reading Comprehension, Critical Reasoning (search on net)
4. ETS and PowerPrep Tests (I scored 720 and 740 in 2 ETS tests)

This was my strategy to crack GMAT and in the end it worked out pretty well. Scoring 750 and 5.5 (essays) was something I never thought of, but then while I was writing the test I got the feeling that I would score more than 700.