Guide For MBA

Few years back I was a MBA applicant with dreams to secure a coveted place in a reputed business school.

It is then I created this blog to share the mistakes I was making and lessons I was learning along the path towards a business school.

In fact, I kept the title of this blog as "mistake, lessons, MBA and more..."

The entire journey from preparing from GMAT to  selecting the schools to crafting applications to polishing for interviews was very overwhelming. Many times, I wondered, phew...is this really worth it?

But after finishing this journey with flying colors against all the odds, I can proudly say - Yes, it was definitely worth it. It wasn't easy at all...there were lots of ups and downs, but at the end, the feeling to realize your biggest dream made all the pain worth it.

Now, after learning all the turns and twists in this journey, I want to leverage my first-hand knowledge and experience to help you.

I am going to transform this blog into an end-to-end guide for MBA to help MBA applicants to realize their biggest dreams.

Introduce yourself by leaving a comment below and stay tuned!

**2012 Write Like an Expert Announcement**

Beat The GMAT's 2012 Write Like an Expert Series - Free Webinar Series

How would an admissions expert answer this year's top business school essays?

Beat The GMAT is back with their annual Write Like an Expert series! In this 14-part webinar series, the world's leading admissions experts break down this year's top business school essays.  From HBS to Haas, experts analyze each essay 2012-2013 essay requirement so that you can craft your own story.

You can sign up for each of the sessions through this link.

"Write Like an Expert" Series Calendar

• Harvard - July 31 at 5pm PDT
• Stanford - Aug 2 at 5pm PDT 
• Wharton - Aug 7 at 5pm PDT
• Columbia - Aug 8 at 10am PDT 
• INSEAD - Aug 9 at 5pm PDT
• Yale - Aug 14 at 5pm PDT 
• Kellogg - Aug 15 at 10am PDT 
• Booth - Aug 16 at 5pm PDT 
• Haas - Aug 21 at 5pm PDT 
• MIT Sloan - Aug 22 at 10am PDT 
• Cornell - Aug 23 at 5pm PDT 
• NYU Stern - Aug 28 at 5pm PDT 
• Fuqua - Aug 29 at 10am PDT  
• Tuck - Aug 30 at 5pm PDT 

Make sure you RSVP today!

A

Two Days Left to Apply for Beat The GMAT 2012 Scholarship

**2012 BTG Scholarship Announcement**

Two Days Left to Apply for Beat The GMAT 2012 Scholarship

Beat The GMAT (BTG), the world’s largest social network for MBA applicants, is now accepting applications for its seventh annual Beat The GMAT Scholarship Competition. This year, BTG will award scholarship packages for six winners, valued at more than $11,000. Each of the winners will receive one GMAT prep course, an admissions consulting package and a $250 GMAT voucher. BTG will accept applications until Monday night, April 23rd, and winners will be announced on April 30th.

“Giving back to the community is an important part of our mission,” says Eric Bahn, Founder of Beat The GMAT.  “We believe that our annual scholarship is an important initiative to help talented individuals achieve their dreams of going to an amazing business school.” 

Since 2006, Beat The GMAT has been able to distribute $193,000 in scholarships to MBA applicants.

The following companies made generous donations to make these prizes possible: Admit Advantage, Clear Admit, Kaplan, Knewton, Manhattan GMAT, Master GMAT, MBA Admit, mbaMission, Precision Essay, The Princeton Review, and Veritas Prep.  For a full list of prizes, click here.

To learn more and to apply for a scholarship, please visit: http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/scholarship

Make the most of it!

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Beat The GMAT Practice Questions - Premium accounts available

In my last post, I mentioned about the Beat The GMAT Practice Questions. Check them out: http://practice.beatthegmat.com/

I have some premium accounts left with me; if anybody interested please email me using the button on your left.

Hurry up! Else you are missing an important part in your GMAT prep!

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A new approach to practice GMAT from Beat The GMAT

Beat The GMAT has launched a brand new product for GMAT practice, making it more interesting and effective to practice for GMAT, including more than 700 brand new maths and verbal questions. Being an official reviewer, from last four days I am reviewing some of these questions and found each one of them testing and teaching a new concept. The best feature of this product according to me is that every practice question features a video explanation for the given question, written/produced by a veteran GMAT instructor. I wish I had these explanations when I was struggling for my GMAT last year; my 740 could have been 20-30 points up ;)

Some other useful features:

• Its classifies the practice section wise, so you can concentrate on your weak sections first.
• Its supports completely online practice, so you can study at work or at home.
• It provides the ability to customize your preparation based on subject area, with just a few clicks.
• Performance reporting to identify your strengths, weaknesses on GMAT subject areas.
• Adaptive practice algorithm that mimics the real GMAT - the better you do, the harder the questions become in your practice session.

If you are preparing for GMAT and need to know more about this product, please don't hesitate to mail me using the link on left. I have a few accounts of this product specially for my blog readers, so let me know if you are interested.

Hope this helps,

A

Star wars and the bschool essays

As I mentioned earlier, I am in constant touch with BTG CEO, David Park discussing over various topics including BTG $100K challenge, SLP, writing good narrations for essays et al.

Today he sent me an assignment to complete before moving to R2 applications. And, to my surprise, the assignment is to watch 70 minute video review of star wars: phantom menace: http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/12/17/watch-this-70-minute-video-review-of-star-wars-the-phantom-menace/

Embarrassed I admit, I have not seen original star wars and the more recent star wars phantom menace, so he recommended me to watch them first before watching this review.

He says:

this probably sounds really weird to you. after all, what does making a movie have to do with writing business school essays right? imo, those two things are very closely related. ultimately, writing a good essay is all about telling a good story. the 70 minute video review has some very cool ideas about what makes a story good.

Interesting huh!
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In conversation with David Park, CEO of Beat The GMAT

Some wonderful things happen without a knock and leave you elated. Such one thing just happened. I just had an hour long conversation with David Park, CEO of Beat The GMAT. He left me totally stunned by his vivacious and grounded personality.

Why this conversation? As I mentioned in my earlier post that David has offered me some help related to bschool apps and that help was to review my bschool resume. Today we scheduled this. But before my resume we started with his introduction. He has done so many amazing things in his career with so many big names in his resume. Totally mind blowing.

Then we started talking about my resume, and he said my resume is just awesome with zero flaws. As per him, it is one of the best resumes he has seen in a while from an IT guy. And, he gaves a few reasons that why he felt so. I was like whoa...it was unbelievable for me. So as my resume is certified now, I'm not going to change even a single bit of it :)

Then we took the discussion to a different level with chatting about Startup Leadership Program (SLP), which he is aware of and finds totally impressive. Then he asked me to become guest blogger for BTG to share SLP experiences. He is very busy with some exciting BTG programs but humbly agreed to provide me feedback on my essays. That's simply great! He made my fly by saying that "Just looking at your resume and talking to you for these few minutes, I could say you are going places, and I mean it." And finally we discussed about a few very exciting things related to bschool applications, which I would save for the future.

All in all, it was an awesome and informative discussion, and now I'm going to have a smiling sleep. Thanks David!

Good night!

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Free Essay workshops from BTG

Sometimes it happens that you come back home so tired from office just to crash on bed. And when the door bell rang 100th time, it disturbs your sleep a little, making you get up from bed perplexed - when I slept? Did i have dinner? Is it mid-night? Why I'm alone, where is my brother? Is it morning? Am I late for office? It just happened to me. Thinking all this I walked to the door, opened it, and realised it was my dinner delivery boy, and it is evening, and I just slept 1.5 hours back.

Rubbing my eyes, I opened my mail box, and there was this mail waiting for me straight from the CEO of Beat The GMAT, David Park. I liked it because of three reasons:

1. David liked my blog and some posts in it. I liked his digital sign, dp.

2. He mentioned about few free B-School Essay workshops coming up. Must be very helpful. Details below.

3. He offered me some apps related services for free, now who doesn't like it :)

BTG in association with similar others big names in mba world are coming up with free B-School Essay workshops starting from next week. Over the next 4 weeks, they're going to have 9 sessions where an admissions consultant walks through every single essay from the top b-schools. Each of the 9 sessions will be devoted to a single school - the HBS session is next week. I encourage you to check it out. I've already enrolled myself to few of my choices.

I'm in total senses now!

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