Here is a video I watched whenever I felt disoriented while writing the applications. Remember….knowing the “WHY” is important . Having the inside out approach through the concentric circles Simon draws makes your essays sound coherent.
This is a blog entry I just read and felt that it has some content relevant to the apps as well.
I have got some tips from my experience so far-
-Never make your dream school your first app.
-Make your dream school the first school you research.
-Start thinking about career goals as soon as you can and discuss them with successful professionals in your choice of career.
-Discuss your career goals with friends who know about this sh**. It’s an added bonus if they enjoy putting you down and not believing in anything you say. Just argue with them till you win and then write your career essay.
I submitted the part 2 of the Kellogg application well within the first round deadline. Yaay!! <does the celebratory jump around dance>Yaay!!
It took two sleepless nights when I wrote draft after draft of the essays and my friend read each of them. He didn’t become immune to the essays and kept pointing out the flaws. Stinky….You are awesome. Right now, I am feeling a little hammered and am finding it difficult to follow people who speak fast. I even did a product demo this morning. Cracked a lot of jokes. They must be thinking that I am on crack.
This experience taught me that <essay lingo> one should never write an essay without writing an outline first. Yeah, do a lot of introspection. Paint a grand picture of yourself. Dig out the old appraisal forms you wrote, your old journals and even that big bundle of useless certificates. Make a list of events and see if they all say some common things about you. Make a list of people and think that what do they feel about you and find a theme there. Now, with your own image clear in your mind, attack the info about the school. Go through the website. Read your email interactions with alumni and current students. Don’t stop absorbing stuff about the school until you develop a “feel” for the school. You should have a fair idea of the curriculum, the remarkable faculty members, clubs and the teaching method of the school. Also, find out if there are certain things that the school is famous.
Now read through all the questions and first create a broad outline of the overall pitch. Then make the outlines for individual essays. Please write only when you are feeling like, i.e. when words are just flowing from your fingertips. Never ever write your essays if you have to drag through them. Please don’t put all your info out there in the essays. Put it in a list in bullet points.
Well I did the OG sentence correction. Like always I was very fast with 1.02 min/question but not great on accuracy. I got 108/140 which is about 77%. One extremely important tip- when doing the analysis, read through all the questions, especially the ones you were not sure about and had to decide between two options that seemed correct. Read why the incorrect one is incorrect because it may have some point, not ingrained in your SC skills.
Mr reviewers tell me that I write extremely long sentences. Looking at the tip sentence above, I think they are right.
If you have lost your ability to reason after hours and hours of studying the stuff you never bothered with in school, do some Maths. As in drink a strong coffee and then listen to some good music and then so like hundred problems in a row and do them as if your life depends on the result. And then check the results. A 100/100 always lifts my spirits. Even a 99 does the job at times. The key is….just don’t give up on any question and guess 🙂
If you are looking for a 700+ score, I guess Kaplan Advanced is one of the most important books for sentence correction. They have two sections , each explaining eight types of problems. The first section had stuff which I was more or less acquainted with but the second section had really arcane stuff like the sunjunctive tense which I had heard of only because I had taken French classes.
It’s rarely used in English but is important in languages like Spanish and French. Apparently, the French have lot of desires, wishes and hypothetical situations. I also came across “the gerund” in English which I had heard of only in Spanish. The gerund was in Sahil’s notes and I think that just mugging up those notes is a real good idea.
Learn from my mistakes and never ever defer your GMAT to a stage this late. It will make things more difficult for you. I keep telling myself that juggling the trilogy of work , GMAT prep and essays is preparing me better for the future at a b-school, the fact is that I have to study sentence correction with my heart yearning to write story after story for my essays. Well , today I am going to complete part 1 for Kellogg and register the recommenders for part two.
All that said, there is one last tip, time your practice questions as well. In my first GMAT, I think that the exam pressure made me drop by two points atleast.
I just wrote the Manhattan CAT-1 and got a 710. I got happy about it as I was told by one of my friends that you tend to score less in Manhattan. Then, I checked out my GMAT reference blog (I have mentioned it in some earlier post as well) and found that he had scored perfect 800s in two Manhattan tests in a row. Well, it goes to say that I really need to ramp up all my books asap. And yeah, I had 15 incorrect questions and still got 710 which made me a little skeptical of the score. I have written a mail to the manhattan people to ask about this. Will post back with the response that I get.
I got to know about the “boldface questions” in CR and didn’t find them much difficult. There are some other questions in CR which leave me rather clueless.
And yeah….it’s important to write the AWAs while doing the peactice test as otherwise it’s not a true simulation.
Now, I am going to prepare myself a nice dinner to nourish my much exhausted mind, body and soul. The test still needs to be analyzed. More on the analysis later.
Nowadays my MBA fever is going full throttle and the only things which is bothering me is the scarcity of time. There is so less time and so much to do. Apart from the big dream, I also have to sustain myself so a major part of my day goes into the sustenance processes. Apart from that, a world of advice to all those who may aspire for an MBA from an International University in the near future…..aspire now because that will give you the time to do it right. I often think that had I thought of this a few years ago, I would have been so much better off. Future aspirants out there…..start working on your profile right now and give it you best shot.
catcher's mba chronicle 