My Second Invite

I received my interview invite for Chicago on the 24th, only a few hours after they started sending the inviations. So, I will take this as a good omen, and now need to set up a time with the alum.

On another note, I have not received anything from Wharton yet. Considering that it is now 10 days into thier interview cycle, with about 17 more to go, I am not yet worried, but certainly getting there. Since Wharton interviews about half of the applicant pool, getting an interview is not an achievement, but not getting one would certainly lead me to cast doubts on my chances of Harvard and Stanford. People will tell you that there is no correlation, but still....

On the non b-school front, the vacation is over and I am back in New York. Visiting home as usual was, awesome. I did not do much, besides spend some quality time with my parents, eat and sleep. As one of my friends puts it - Your only goal on your trip home is to put on a few pounds. He is right!

My first Interview Invite

Just a quick update. I received my Columbia interview invite today - my first one. I had thought that Columbia only interviewed a small portion of their admits, but just realized that I was wrong. They interview close to half of their applicants, and almost 90% of their admits. So, I guess its a positive sign.

I am pretty impressed with how quick it came. Columbia says that it starts reviewing applications on January 10th, and it came in on the 18th. Well, I am not going to do much about it for next week or so, since I am on vacation. But I should atleast drop an e-mail to my potential interviewers.

Not a bad start!

My Visit to Harvard Business School

I made my trip to the undisputed number 1 business school on the planet, the Harvard Business School in March of 2006 – almost a year ago from now. I took a Chinatown bus to Boston on Sunday afternoon. I had signed up to attend classes at HBS and MIT on the following Monday.

I reached Boston at about 3 in the afternoon. It was my first time there. I took the subway (which was far less crowded than the ones in NYC) from the bus station and reached my hotel. It was a pretty cold day, with high winds. After checking in, I decided to check out Boston. Walked to the Harvard square, and was appropriately impressed. After seeing a few sights and grabbing a quick bite, I headed back to my hotel – a cold Boston with an annoying constant downpour did not make for a day of tourism.

The next morning, I took a cab to Harvard Business School. When I had signed-up for the class, I could not help noticing HBS’s policy that you can only attend a HBS class once. Not surprising as there are several thousand people visiting HBS every year and they certainly do not want to inundate classes with visitors.

The HBS campus was, in one word, spectacular. Even on an overcast day, you could feel the history of the place. There was a certain something in air. The place was sacrosanct – you could feel it in the walls. Unlike most other schools, HBS has a campus of its own, a couple of miles away from the Harvard University campus. It was old school architecture, with several small buildings scattered across a lush green campus. Reminded me of my college campus.

I was attending an 8:30 AM class, and we had been advised to get there at least 15 minutes in advance. When I reached Dillon, where the Admissions Office is housed, at 5 minutes past 8, several prospective students were already there. We said quick hellos, and each of us was handed a description of the class we were attending. I was sitting in on a General Management Strategy class.

At 8:20, our escort came to guide us to the class. I forget her name, but she was a first student at HBS. After college, she had worked for Deutsche Bank for a year in Real Estate Investment Banking, and then moved to a Real Estate Private Equity firm, where she had spent a year as well. Nothing too impressive, I thought to myself. I had been working on Wall Street for close to two years, and at a bank that was easily better than Deutsche.

She took us to the class. When I entered the building that housed the classrooms, I could almost feel the money. By now, I had seen my share of state of the art classrooms. However, HBS was certainly amongst the best I had ever seen. The classroom had stadium style seating, and the furniture just shone. Almost as if it had been built a few months back.

The class of 900 at HBS is divided into 10 sections of 90 each and those 90 students take all their classes together in their first year. The section becomes their family. Everything is very structured – there is no testing out of classes or anything of that sort. Every student is assigned a seat on the first day of the class, and that is where they sit. If I remember correct, they sit in one classroom all year round. A little too rigid for my taste, I remember thinking. I really am not a big fan of having to take all classes – I don’t know what I am going to learn in derivatives, having worked the field for over a year.

I sat next to a guy who was a doctor. He informed me that in the class of 900, there were about 40 doctors. Not PhDs but MDs. I knew that HBS took in people from all walks of life, but I certainly did not expect such a high percentage of doctors.

The class started at 8:30 sharp. The case study in class was on an Argentinean chocolate company, Arcor. There were no laptops, and no people coming in late. At 8:30 you were expected to ready to go and no exceptions. The professor kicked off the class, and true to the HBS style, suddenly the whole class was engaged in a discussion. Every point was countered, and everything challenged. Everyone brought their experiences to the school and enhanced the experience of other students. It was interesting, but at the same time a little fluffy. It was just opinions floating around, and there was no right or wrong answer.

Working in banking, I am used to right and wrong answers. Either the economics make sense, or they don’t. I knew that case studies were, to some extent, a lot of about BSing, but seeing it in reality certainly brought a different perspective.

However, the class was on the whole interesting. There were some students from Argentina, who brought first hand information, and provided the local perspective. This was the HBS strength at its best – bring in people from so many different backgrounds, that for every case study you have an individual who has been there, done that.

After the class, I killed some time in Spangler, their hang out place, and then joined some current students for lunch. The discussion was interesting, but once again, it was the unique backgrounds of the people that set HBS apart. One guy was from Canada and after working at Procter and Gamble for a couple of years, had opened a Quizno franchise, and sold it at a substantial profit a year later. Another guy used to work in the Dutch government. A guy had been a teacher for Teach for America for five years, and the last guy used to work at Apple, in the iTunes department. Take this with a grain of salt – I am sure this group was structured to represent diversity, but nonetheless, it showcased the breadth of the experience that students bring at HBS.

I am not so sold on any Teach for America teacher making it big in the business world, and this guy’s personality was anything but impressive. He may have devoted the past five years to his life to a nobler cause, but that in no way qualifies him to be a business leader. It was my first taste that not everyone at HBS is a superstar.

All in all, the discussions were interesting. Usual HBS themes – no books, only case studies, you are encouraged to challenge everything, and all that good stuff. The guy from Canada said something very interesting. Replying to a prospective who had asked him about theory in classes, he said that you don’t learn theory from just books. He said that at HBS, you had the opportunity to learn from guys who are formulating the theories of tomorrow. What can be better than learning the theories from the horse’s mouth? It made sense.

After lunch, my visit was over. I would have certainly liked to sit in on another class, but HBS would not allow that. I walked around the campus once more, mesmerized by the hallowed grounds of the Harvard Business School. I left the campus with one thought in mind – how wonderful it would be to be a student there for two years?

I am home

And after that application madness, I am finally home. Last time I was home in November of 2005, and this has been the shortest gap between two trips home. Needless to say, being home is great.

The food rocks, it is great to have nothing to besides chill and talk to my parents about anything and everything. It is great to catch up with old friends, even though every year, we have fewer things in common.

The flight home was surprisingly ok. I dread the London-India leg of the trip and start preparing for it mentally at least a month in advance. However, it was pretty painless this time. Probably the combination of alcohol and sleep! I did not sleep two nights, but I think I am settled well into the routine. The weather is great, and I am just happy to be escaping the frigid temperatures of New York.

It was great to see my dog again. I got her when I was 10 years old, and after 15 years, she is still going strong. She is a small German Spitz and we joke that she is living on “bonus” time. She is really old now, and has lost most of her teeth and survives now on a semi-solid diet! But she is still the cutest dog in the world, and as I often tell my brother, a more important part of the family than he is.

And now its time to get back to watching some bad TV under a warm quilt! There is really no update on any application as such – too early to hear from them anyways!

And I am done!

I am finally done with what has probably been the most excruciatingly painful process in my life. I hit the submit button for the last application about 12 hours ago, and have not stopped feeling great about life since then. There were various points of time, when I felt about writing something just to write something other than essays, but felt that I had to put everything into the application.

I promised myself that I will write all that I thought and felt about the business school application process, right from the first visit till the last submit, after I am done. I hope I can live up to that promise. I certainly have some time now, and am starting on a vacation in two days, so hopefully, I will live up to my word for the first few weeks at least.

The last 3 months have been, in one word, just painful. Not only for me - but atleast 2 of my close friends, my brother and of course, for Y. Why Y puts up with me is something that I fail to understand. For 3 months, it was one heck of a relationship. She would say something important, and my standard reply would be something along the lines of what do you think about this idea in essay 2 for school XYZ? What started out as asking friends to do me a favor soon turned in me expecting them to drop everything and respond to my e-mails about what they thought if I replaced a particular word? And my poor brother, who really got shortchanged on his Christmas break in NYC because I was too busy putting in applications instead of getting drunk.

But at least it is over. Or part of it. The madness will continue in Feb/March, after I receive some interview invites (there is a big assumption here, but trying for the self-fulfilling prophecy). I will try and give my readers, (for that 1 person who occasionally stumbles on it by mistake), some insight into my profile. I remember reading blogs of fellow MBA bloggers, and I always wanted to know their background and profile. So, I will try and give some information, which will atleast give them a sense.

I grew up in India, and went to college in the United States. I have been working on Wall Street at a bulge-bracket investment bank for 2 and a half years now. I took my GMAT about a year ago, and my score is a non-factor - well over the 700 mark. While it is not going to help me get in anywhere on its own, if I get dinged, it certainly will not be because of my GMAT. I believe those are the basic stats that people are most interested in. I did not have to take the TOEFL obviously. And if it matters, my breakdown between my verbal and quant was very well balanced.

There are several people who give tips for GMAT. Not sure how much help I will be. I took a course with Manhattan GMAT (my company paid for it). Went to the weekly class, studied for it for a couple of months and went and took the test. I never spent a lot of time on it, but spread over a few months, I probably put in 2-4 hours a week on it. I spent most of my time working on verbal, as after the first couple of weeks, my quant got to the point where I did not think I needed much more on it. I think preparation is key. It really surprises me when an engineer from India has a low quant score. I was an economics major and if I can score what I did, the techies from India should be able to ace the quant part. I believe a lot of it comes down to understanding the kind of questions, and having a strategy to crack them. I think I spent the large majority of my time on practice tests and doing questions from the official GMAT book (the green one).

I visited each of the schools that I ended up applying to (will talk about my visits in detail in following posts), even the one that I really did not like. But it is such a well known school that it was hard to pass up on it. So after I was done with all my applications, I wrote essays for that school in day and just put it in. I really have no expectations from it, but sometimes you just never know.

And now the waiting game begins!