Bombay (or Mumbai)

I've been following the news on Bombay like crazy for the past 2 days. It's been pretty scary what's been happening in that city; a place I will always call home! Most of my family still lives there!

One of my family friends and his wife were caught in the fire at the Taj. They were celebrating his wife's birthday at a restaurant on the top floor and the attacks were on the lower floors. They finally escaped after 5 hours...!

A shout-out to the Mumbai police, firemen and all those involved in the situation! You guys seriously rock! Also the residents of Bombay have shown great resilience in these tough moments and I'm sure the city will be back to its vibrancy in no time!

GMAT 2

OK! I've started studying for the GMAT! This time for real!

Here's how:

I have about 3 hours of study time everyday (1 hour in the morning and 2 hours in the evening). 

• 1 hour in the morning: I spend this time studying math formulae that I should have known but do not know. As soon as I'm done, I'll start studying verbal during this time.
  
• The rest of the two hours are spent doing problem sets (Barron's, OG, Kaplan 800). However, this time I'm doing it a bit differently. Instead of focusing on 1 section at a time, I'm mixing it up a bit. So on day 1 I'll do 25 PS + 25 CR + 1 RC. On day 2 I'll do: 25 DS + 25 SC + 1 RC and so on.
• At least 2 papers per week (Friday evening and Saturday). 1 MGMAT and 1 GMATPrep. 
• Some AWA on Sundays. 

Lastly, I also need to write the essays so have been spending some time doing that everyday as well. (30 - 60 minutes). It gets tiring, overwhelming and really frustrating at times, but I don't have a choice. 

Surviving so far. 

This post is untitled intentionally.

Hey Everyone,

No promises that I'm back for good and I'll blog more often. I've said that before and not kept up to my promise.

Been a few crazy past-few-weeks including, but not limited to, immigration/visa issues, vacation planning, GMAT studying, product releases, deciding to apply this year to career change decisions.

GMAT: So lots going on and honestly, I'm lost at what I should start with. Maybe, the best place is the GMAT since its most immediate.

I started (really) studying for the GMAT. A few hours everyday. I'm planning to give it in Feb 09. The deadline for the application is March '09, so I maybe cutting it close. But we'll see. This time, I'm spending more time ensuring that my math concepts are good and have been reading a math text book rather than going crazy trying to get 40 problems knocked out per day.

Decision to apply this year: I'm not getting any younger, really. That sort of shocked me. I also gave it a really long (and realistic thought) on what I want to do post-MBA. The truth is I want to stick to the software business and maybe just transition from being an engineer to more on the business side. Secondly, due to my visa situation, I have to do my degree part-time. We live in San Francisco and that leaves me with very few options of top ten schools, namely one school - UC Berkeley.

I've been researching their part time program and spoke to a few past and present students and also visited their info session. Haas seems right for me. They have all the classes I wanted, the class will be full of people who are in the software business (this has a down side to it that it may not be as diverse as a full time program, but I may be wrong here), I will not have to leave my current job, and what I learn in class can be applied at work and vice-versa.

Financially, it does make a huge difference. My employer will foot almost 1/3rd of the bill and we won't have to take as many loans.

I've started looking at the essays and also started forming skeletons of the essays and thinking of theme's I want to focus on for each essay.

Work: Been very busy. But that is something everyone says. Had my first product release as a team lead on Wednesday. A lot of weekends went into this release and its a relief that we got the thing shipped! This does help with my manager being very happy and will write a good recommendation (Haas needs a letter from the immediate manager).

I've also been considering transitioning from Engineering to Product Management. More on this later. In a nutshell, I'm in a limbo right now.

Vacation: Ah! This is the fun part! Before I made the decision to re-give the GMAT in Feb and apply this year, I went ahead and bought tickets. We're headed for a three week jaunt to the middle east to see (among other places) a rose-colored city and a city that has three western religions right by each other! We'll also climb up a fortress that has more than 2000 years of history. Any guesses? :)

The vacation does complicate the GMAT thing a bit. We're going in December (last week) and coming back in January (second week). A three week break might throw me off guard. My wife and I decided that we'll make sure that I spend 30 minutes doing something related to the GMAT everyday when we're there. That way, I won't completely lose touch. I think it should work out okay.

So that's life now. More later. Gotta sign off and hit the GMAT books again.

Tweets

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I've started tweeting. Some things are just too small to be a full blown post. Hence the tweets. Short and simple.

http://twitter.com/mbamonk

I'm Back!

What happened here? I was so excited about blogging and even had a few blog posts written down in my text editor. And then ... I ended up never putting them here!

Well, I'm BACK! And I'll post more regularly!

A quick recap:

After my GMAT experience, I was all geared up to restart studying and retake the GMAT and cross that 700 mark. However, a few incidences changed all that. Some were outside my control and some were within my control (and in a classic-me fashion I chose to ignore them)

Outside my control

• I was banking on 3 engineers (1 full time, 2 part time interns) joining my team. They did not join my team (of currently 2 engineers) for various reasons. Since pushing out dates was not an option so I took on extra work.
• We had project delivery delays. Extra time to catch-up.
• Family visiting: I had a few family members who decided they wanted to move back to India and they all wanted to visit San Francisco. Some needed the regular SF tour. Some were veterans. However, we did end up having dinner at Jai Yun with my brother-in-law and it was superb!
  

In my control

• I spent a lot of weekends just doing nothing. I could have at least used that time to plan further.
• Been more proactive at work to plan my time better (like I did when I studied for the GMAT).
• I did meet a few grads from my target school (Haas - more on this later) and they all mentioned that retaking the GMAT for me is really not worth it and instead I should throw my energies towards the essays. After hearing that I starting taking things easy.
  

So where do I stand now? I'm still planning on retaking the GMAT by December. Just in time for the holidays and before I go on my vacation (more on that later too!).

Overall I'm not really feeling bad that I ignored GMAT-study. I did give my wife some time that I was unable to give all these months and we took some amazing bike rides together when the weather was not foggy.

In the next few days I'll post details on how I plan to re-tackle the GMAT and also some thoughts on selecting target schools.

Feels good to be blogging again.

The GMAT Aftermath and Beyond

After my not-so-disastrous-but-not-so-glorious-either GMAT score, I spent most of Thursday, Friday and part of the weekend in a daze. There were a lot of family commitments I'd made and had to honor them. Nevertheless it was a lot of fun hanging out with friends I'd not seen in a long long time.

However, as much as I wanted to not think about the GMAT and the MBA, the fact is that the GMAT and the MBA are something that are on my mind all the time. The MBA is a strong driving factor for me today. It is just a bridge to cross in a longer journey; but a bridge that will propel me forward much faster.

I've been trying to analyze where I went wrong, what I could have done better and most importantly, how do I plan the next few weeks before I re-give the GMAT and ensure that my score jumps at least 60-80 points.

Some quick thoughts:

Quantitative:

• Clearly quantitative was bad. I hardly had any time for the last few questions and so just clicked random answers since I did not want to lose extra points. I'm sure getting those right (since they did not seem super hard) would have caused my score to go up at least 10 points. So timing myself is all the more important.
• I was over confident of my math abilities. I was good at math in school. The fact is that I've not had to do math for a long long time (10+ years) and I've surely gone rough since then.
• I ignored that type of math I was weak in: co-ordinate geometry and some parts of number properties. I had three co-ordinate geometry questions and they were moderately hard.
• I am in the habit of solving each and every DS problem until I am certain of the answer. I need to learn to gauge when enough is enough.
• Lastly, I got the feeling that my math concepts are still rusty. I'm going to have to dig deeper into refreshing them. Maybe actually get a high school level book?
  

Verbal:

While I'm able to point a few reasons on what went wrong in Math, I'm having a tough time figuring out how to improve my verbal? Things that could have gone wrong:

• I screwed up the SC - more than I think I did. I thought I was picking the right answers but could have picked the wrong ones?
• I've not come up with a "formula" for tackling SC questions. Should I spend time learning (to a point of cramming so its in my head) the grammar concepts from the Manhattan SC book? Or maybe the key is to slow down, understand each sentence (extract the meaning) and then pick an answer.
• I had one really tough RC. All the options for all the questions seemed right to me. I just picked the ones to the best of my ability. I'm sure that must have hit me bad. But then those were just 4 questions. What about the rest?
• CR/RC: Maybe do the LSAT CR and RC questions to get tougher questions. That way the GMAT may seem easier. I've read that many people have tried this strategy successfully. Even if I can get most of the CR/RC right and as many SC's as I can right, this could boost my Verbal score.
  

Due to personal reasons I am not planning to apply to business school this year, but will apply next year. Hence, I still have some time to buckle up and try the GMAT once more. However, I've not been able to come up with a decent strategy to study for the next few weeks. Obviously, there is no point boiling oceans and doing the whole OG/Kaplan set all over again. This time I need to focus a bit more and tackle those areas where I truly suck.

From the top of my head I'm thinking:

• OG (just the last 50-75 questions for each section that were tough)
• Kaplan 800 (I never finished this book)
• Redo Manhattan GMAT. But slowdown. Its not a race.
• GMAT Hacks (www.gmathacks.com): I've read on a few forums (beatthegmat.com) that the gmat math bible has great explanations. Has anyone used this? Would you recommend this?
• MGMAT tests. Their quant is surely tougher and more wordier. Might be a good exercise for the brain.
  

What do you recommend?

The GMAT debacle?

Thank you to every one who wished me luck yesterday. It made my day yesterday!
---
Wrote the GMAT earlier today. Not as horrific as I had imagined in my nightmares but tad disappointing.

I ended up with a 680 - Q47, V 37.

Surprisingly, I thought I totally bombed the Quant (I had only 1.5 minutes left with 4 questions to go) and simply guessed answers. There were a lot of DS questions. Most of the PS questions seemed easy, however I completely stumbled on the co-ordinate geometry ones (there were 3-4 of these and I did not get any on the practice tests). Given my engineering background, its a shame I did not do well on the co-ordinate geomentry, or in general on the Quant.

The verbal was not that bad - or so I thought!. For most of the SC's I could pinpoint the mistakes. But still I expected a bit more on the verbal section.

Overall I'm happy it's done. It's a relief. However, a 680 is not going to get me into any of my target schools, which means I probably need to start hitting the books again. I probably will take it easy for a day or two and figure out a decent strategy in the meanwhile to redo the GMAT - and ACE it this time.

Here's to ROUND 2!