Wednesday, April 7, 2010

A VERY pleasant surprise

Just got off the phone with a very old friend (met last century!), who is very coincidentally a current student at one of my top 3 dream schools, Yale! This particular friend (we'll call him R.) and I hadn't in fact even spoken since the late, great 20th, but we caught up in moments on the telephone. R's having a roaring good time in the Ph.D. programme at the School of Public Health, and he told me that my candidate profile seemed very strong to him from what he knew of the School of Management. As though the prospect of white clam pie, cheesing off Crimson fans and a real winter (with real snow!) weren't enough, now I can look forward to the prospect of spending some time with a really top-tier person. R. has very generously offered to put me up for the New Haven leg of my EC school trip later this year, and I think I'll have to take him up on the offer; not least because I must meet his blushing bride!

And though it's awful and intrusive and tacky, I have to thank FaceBook for making this reconnection possible. Pretty great evening, all told.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

First Post!

Hello everyone! This will be probably be my first serious attempt at a blog. I've had things like a LiveJournal and some other minor colourful (rather than substantial) efforts in the past, but those were very infrequently updated and I never really gave them much attention. This blog will hopefully be very different. I'll try to post at least once a week, and I'll try to make the content rather more meaningful than my prior adolescent efforts.

As you have no doubt surmised from the title, the main topic of this blog will be my attempt to secure a place at a good business school through my application this year. I have rather a long way to go, since I haven't even taken my GMAT yet!

I have taken a GMATPrep diagnostic, scoring a 740/800 with a Verbal score of 49 and a Quantitative score of 43. This parallels my SAT experience very closely (1510/1600, Verbal 800/Math 710), with the critical distinction being that I took the SAT absolutely cold. I'm hoping that actually learning the format of the examination and reviewing my areas of weakness (properties of numbers and calculation tricks for Quant, actually paying attention to the question in Verbal) will lead to a satisfying GMAT result instead of the disappointment I faced after the SAT. I have around two and a half months to study up, so I'm confident about this part, at least!

There are of course many other parts to a business school application, such as Letters of Recommendation, personal essays, work experience, undergraduate GPA, community service and extracurricular activities. I'm hoping to explore every one of them with you all in the coming months.

If I allow it, I can see this first post exploding into a hideous unwieldy beast, so I think this is a fine note for us to end on. Next up, preparing for the GMAT, in detail!