Wise Words

When I first seriously thought about my GMAT journey,I mailed a few people I really respect. Posting verbatim 1 reply that really made an impact on me. KetanM is friend of mine whom I met via PG.com and I hope he's always available to give me such rock-solid advice!!

"
I will try to give an objective analysis of the entire situtation. I would rather not delve into "Why MBA?" or "Why not MBA?". I would assume that you already introspected that question in your mind. Just a word of caution... dont do MBA just because you are bored with being mediocre in your life... secondly DO NOT consider MBA as a destination but rather as means of reaching the destination and candidly speaking I see a huge number of people not able to differentiate between the two.

Take the following actions-items step-by-step for achieving your GMAT target:

a) Research about B-schools. Try to select B-schools that fit your long-term goals, dont try to select schools based on your background and the possibility of you getting admission, these other criterions can always be looked upon later on and the choice narrowed down. The methodology to select B-schools is to go through web-sites, adcom-blogs, student-blogs. (The links can be found through "daveformba" blog)

b) So you now have a list of B-schools which you are looking at. Get to know more about the b-schools from their student blogs. Find our admission requirements, financial help, faculty strength, industry interface, alumni network, placement records, indian student ratio, class diversity, your own functional specialization strength and many other parameters. Narrow down your list further and focus on 4-5 B-schools. Mail the current/past students of these B-schools and get first-hand info about them. You can even try to visit the adcom people if they have any stall put up in some MBA fair or anywhere else which is accessible to you.

c) Once you have all this information, then focus on GMAT. Since you already know the range of accepted GMAT, you can keep a target score a bit higher than the range. For example if some B-school has a average GMAT score of 700, that means a score of 720 would be good for you (above average), so keep the target something like 750. (10-20 points higher). Now go through forum (esp Psychodementia's GMAT efforts) and also other forums like gmatclub, testmagic and start studying. Also register for GMAT and setup the GMAT date. Spending money usually brings some seriousness to the efforts. There is usually no specific period for GMAT, but make sure you dont take GMAT during rush hours (when ISB admissions, R1-R2 happens). The ONLY WAY to compensate for poor acads is excellent GMAT score... nothing else can do that magic ....

d) Once you are done with GMAT, based on your score you can re-try the GMAT or if you got a good score, you can revisit your list of B-schools and add/subtract b-schools based on your score.

e) Once you are done with this 800-pound gorilla, then focus towards improving your other aspects. Focus on essays/recos/extra-curricular and other skills... B-schools usually dont give much weight to activities you did within last 1-2 years.. since it implies that you got involved in those activities just for the sake of b-school admission... Learn from the mistakes of others...thats the mantra for B-school admission."

Thank you so much Ketan Bhai!!


p.s. I love his statement "800 pound gorilla" Nice play on words Ketan bhai :-)