New Features in the Offing

New Feature being rolled out soon on the App. Keep your eyes open!

This is a feature i've been planning for a long time. Spent time coding over the weekend and i've moved one step closer to seeing it fulfilled. Now, i need to finish 1 BIG step and i can start a round of testing on it.

Throwing my hat over the fence by putting a notice of it on the app.

Keeping my hopes and spirits high :)

Rise in GPA!

WooHoo!!

My grades are out and pretty spectacular when compared to last sem. I took 3 courses and have 2As and a B giving me a sem average of 3.66 and an over-all average of 3.33!! That's waaaay better than the average when i finished my Engg degree so in that sense, this degree is certainly helping me cover that weak area of my app. i hope to graduate with a 3.5+ GPA and with another 700+ GMAT score, that effectively takes care of my Acads! w00t!!

Now,to work on my work-ex.

Hear ye, hear ye-- Experienced Product Manager seeks exciting product development and product management job :)

beatthegmat Scholarship deadline approaching!!

If you'll havent already gotten wind of this, then briefly

Scholarship offered by beatthegmat.com
First prize is

First Prize ($5490 total value)
$500 Cash
One full Manhattan GMAT course
1 School Comprehensive Package with Stacy Blackman Consulting

Four more prizes up for grabs. All you have to do is write 2 sweet and simple essays
500 word limit - REQUIRED: Why do you deserve this scholarship?
300 word limit - REQUIRED: Why do you want to go to business school?

Deadline - May 8th!!!
More details on the scholarship can be found here
http://www.beatthegmat.com/scholarship.html

Wanted: Entrepreneurial Partner

Looking for a partner off whom i can bounce some ideas and eventually/maybe/hopefully implement a project. At that point please be willing to share expenses($60 - $200 or so between you and me ) and time(1000+hrs/year).
Familiarity with any/all programming languages/packages(PHP/MYSQL/Joomla/phpbb/vBulletin/FBML/OpenSocial) a plus

You would be:
1.)Passionate/knowledgeable about the online education industry preferably the online GMAT and MBA app world.
2.)Applying to a B-school in the next few years

(Preferably) Leave a comment or e-mail me ryanp @ fbprepapps dot com

Job Hunt

When i first landed here, the recession hadn't blown up so everything was still rosy in terms of jobs prospects. Somewhere towards the end of Nov, i sent off a rather cheeky e-mail to a company that had a particular position open. Little idiot that i am, i was rather proud of it. Even more so when they mailed back to set up a time to talk. A time was fixed and the call did take place. That talk led me to believe that the company would not only offer me a summer internship but also a full-time job. Considering i can work full-time come May, this was a god-send! I was thrilled!! I celebrated!

A little too prematurely it seems.

As the weeks passed, things began to go wrong. As they now stand, i do not have a summer internship. Which means its back to the Career Development Center on campus and a job hunt all over again. In this recessional time, not something i am looking forward to.

Day2 of Internship

Any of you remember reading the Google article that said its Search bot would go through your site once in several days or if you were a really popular site/generated a lot of content the bot would visit more often? Now i dont update daily nor do i think having 2(this number is unverifiable but probably true) readers constitutes me being popular. So imagine my horror when my blog post about my previous day shows up in Google Alerts about an hour after i created the alert!! I'm sitting there thinking "OMG!! What did i ever do to you Google??" Sure enough, within the next coupla hours, i get a friendly acknowledgement of my blog post. Somebody work out yet how to get the earth to open up and swallow you??

Lesson of the Day: Do not blog about interning company till you are well out of the way.

Anyway, it was another interesting day where i got to talk to the Content team, saw the studio where lessons are taught/broadcast and went through the process of what happens when and how. I was scheduled to go in today and take a look at a live session, but i am sick and feverish, and so decided to rest. I have a long trip back home tomorrow with assignments and papers due all next week.

Went out for lunch with the tech team in the afternoon. Went to this Istanbul Grill restaurant where the food was awesome! Little adventure in getting there because we walked to the place, it was freezin cold, and we weren't sure about the directions. Eventually though, we did make it and the trip was well worth it. My tab was picked up and A Big Thank You to Chris for that. The tech team is a fun bunch and lunch was a thoroughly enjoyable affair.

Was scheduled to have meetings in the afternoon but big happenings meant i couldnt get my meeting as such. I did get to speak to the anti-christ but it was more an informal affair. I also spoke to Dahn a bit. I have a couple of concerns that i should have asked but i didnt. I guess its back to e-mail which, in some ways i prefer because it gives me time to think and put down my points. Yet, i think i would have been far more relaxed had i resolved these issues.

I leave to go back tomorrow and my NY trip, with the exception of the annoying fever, has been interesting. I wish i could have seen more but there's always next time. The office is next to the Hudson river, and i wanted to walk down and take a snap but the cold acted as a huge deterrent. Seriously, next time i have lots of catching up to do.

My sis got into Harvard School of public Health which is huge for us! She also got into Johns Hopkins and the LSHTM. She is the first doc on both sides of the family.

Needless to say, I have a lot of catching up to do.

New York Calling!

I finally landed in NYC after a gruelling ride to figure out what kind of work i will be doing with Knewton. Knewton, in case you don't know, is this little "upstart" (some review called it that, i forget which but i think its kinda apt) of an Online Education system that prepares students for a variety of exams including the GMAT, the LSAT, the SAT, the GRE etc. The learning tool is adaptive and improves with each student who enrolls and goes through the course. I believe they are doing well for a company that's new and they've got an impressive line-up of teachers so it should be interesting to see how they do. Hopefully, i'll have something meaningful to contribute to them. Wish me luck!