Frankly GMAT ting!

After a proud score of 760, lot of MBA aspirants seek my advice on various topics which revolved around three major questions:

- Am I MBA Material?

- Why MBA

- Where MBA

- When MBA

- How MBA (What is important for MBA admit)

So I am writing this article in difference sections, starting from bottom up.

This is the First part on “HOW MBA”

How MBA:

Before even consdering MBA as a career option, you have to set your ambitions right and your priorities straight [Why you want to do MBA, Where you want to do MBA, What specialization for MBA]. Realize its not a joke and needs commitment and hard work. Once you have accomplished this step, you can start preparing for your Voyage – destination MBA.

The journey starts much before you can start applying to various target universities. These are the prerequisites before you can start applying to universities:

- Work Experience
- A good profile
- Communication skills
- GMAT score
- Recommendations
- Essays
- Application deadlines

Work Experience:

Work Experience is an important part of an MBA application. Almost all of the Top 20 US universities require 2-3 years of work experience on an average. Why do they require work experience? I am not sure of their specific reasons, but I got a few which make sense:

- Experience entails maturity: Mature people make better professionals.

- Clarity of goals: An experience individual would have better clarity of his goals than the person who is fresh out of college. Fresh graduates tend to be fidgety about their career options, if you tell them that “Doing X is a great career option”, they start considering X.

- Competent Program: The competence and quality of program depends upon the quality of students in the program. Experienced professionals offer specialized perspectives along with professionalism and maturity to the program. As a part of MBA program dont expect to learn everything from a text book, students learn from each other. In my MBA program, I would definitely want to work with an experienced individual because then we both have something to offer each other.

- The Genius Factor: Geniuses usually make better scientists and lousy managers. If you have excellent Acads, how would the universities know you are not a genius suitable more to technology than to MBA program? Your work experience in the corporate world allays some of these doubts and helps make you a better candidate.

- The Average Factor: Responsibility and Sincereness of a person with averag/poor acads is always in question. If you have bad/average acads, only work experience can pacify these questions.

Now I hope you see the importance of Work experience for MBA programs. The next question is “How much experience is good enough?”.

According to me 2 years of work experience is minimu for a good university, however for Top 20 universities this has to be backed up by excellent GMAT Score, superb Profile and neat Essays (for application). Needless to say this is not an easy combination. Work experience of >=4 years relaxes these limitations a bit or actually contribute quite a lot to “profile” and hence “Essays”.

Coming Next: A Good Profile

[Bookmark this Article]

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My GMAT test experience can also be found here: http://www.scorechase.com/gmat/showthread.php?t=1610

If you just started preparing for GMAT, Check out 10 ways to score 700+ in GMAT

GMAT Preparation for 3 months was well worth the effort!. Absolutely thrilled …. 760 [Q:51, V:45] . I expected >700 easily with my prep, but never expected it to go so high. Absolutely pleased with the score.

Thanks Scorechase and scorechasers, without you’all it wouldnt have been possible. Special thanks to Sneha for amazing explanations, guardian for helping in Math and RC, Hagrid for being the best admin, maverick and saswati for keeping things alive.

Start:
I started my GMAT preparation in October [I forgot to mention, my first mock test score in october was 580] , here is the first advice I got from Guardian and Sneha [the GMAT Tutors on Scorechase], which I relegiously followed:
- DO NOT refer to a LOT of material. concentrate on basics for 2 weeks and then PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE.
- Stay positive, if you have worked hard for it, you will do it.
- Take GMAT gold seekers membership from Scorechase
- You have got nothing to loose, nothing is the end of the road.

Given the advice, here is the material I recommend:

- Manhattan SC for sentence correction – dont read it digest it.
- OG11 – read math concepts, practice SC ONLY after you have completed Manhattan SC
- Scorechase Gold Seekers Cove subscription [that made my day]- do MGs and VGs religiously, ping Sneha/guardian if you dont get any of ‘em, but solve them religiously ..each of them
- beatthegmat forum [great resources]
- GMATPrep tests [ take them more than 2 times to exhaust all questions from the bank]
- Kaplan tests [I hate them, but if you are scoring around 700 in GMATPrep then these definitely help[although the max I got in Kaplan was 680]

And thats it for the prep!!

Final day of the exam

- Took rest, as is always wisely adviced. Believe me you would need it in verbal.
- Reached an hr earlier and relaxed.

GMAT exam

AWA: easy, just look around for some tips.

Math:

quite a few concepts on algebra. I was surprised to see no questions on mean/median/SD.

Verbal:
- Got 3 RCs,

- SCs were purely GMAT type, Manhattan SC will do it. that was enough to boost my confidence, I knew I got em right and was sailing. For verbal, if anything else except Manhattan is needed ..Sneha’s explanations will fill the void
- CRs always strong for me ..

Overall, was expecting somewhere around 720 , 40 marks I guess bonus, MGs and VGs helped a lot.

All the best all for your preps.

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