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!