median2k9

MIT

2006-12-22T10:18:00.000-05:00

I was talking to a couple yesterday both from MIT Sloan. They said a lot of good stuff about the school. Here are some of the things I took away from the conversation:

In the essays/interview focus on the "I" rather that "We" when talking about team situations since the adcom needs to know more about how you behaved and what you did as opposed to what the team did
If you get into Sloan (I guess this is true for any B School) think really hard about your future career choices before joining school because the recruiting begins almost as soon as you start and being unsure could cost you
Visit Sloan and talk to professors. Knowing what Sloan is and exactly what you want from the MBA experience. It is very important
If applying for entrepreneurship have a good career plan. It seems Sloan is wary of applicants who say that they want to venture out on their own right after graduation and do not have any other options
When in Sloan try to take courses from the main MIT campus and do not get confined to Sloan courses
Professors are sort of mixed. Some are great well known researchers but not necessarily great teachers while others are not so famous but are great teachers.

Well, that's all I can recall. Any additions or critiques are more than welcome.

I am still alive !!!

2006-12-21T09:26:00.000-05:00

Its been a while since I updated the blog....lots has happened since my last post. Got an interview call from Columbia. Interviewed in the city. Same questions Why Columbia ? , Why MBA ? , Why Now ?, Teamwork , Leadership. A couple of interesting questions:

* There are two types of students in Columbia a) Hardworking, b) Smart. Which one are you ?

* In a team situation (you are not the lead), the team picks your idea for a project how do you restrain yourself from taking over the project and at the same time ensure that your idea gets implemented properly

The interview was short about 20 mins in the middle of which my interviewer walked out to attend to a phone call. I was not very satisfied at the end of the interview. I felt I was a bit under prepared and missed out on getting a couple of points across and repeated a couple of things :(

As I sort of dreaded I got a ding about one week later. so that's that. At present I am finishing up a couple of 2nd round apps. Will write about them later.

Oh and last but not the least -----
Congratulations to all the bloggers who have gotten admits !!!!

Importance of a partner in crime

2006-10-14T22:04:00.000-04:00

One of the biggest assets during the first app process was my partner in crime...my wife :)).

Apart from people who review your essays you need someone who knows you very well for discussing approach to your essays. There were at least 3-4 instances where I hit a roadblock while working on my essays and talking to my wife helped a great deal.

Wanted to write a long post about the whole experience but a series of short posts might have a better chance of making it :))

Columbia...Done!!

2006-10-12T11:38:00.000-04:00

Finally after initially struggling and then obsessing with my columbia application I submitted it yesterday......yeeeeeeaahhhh!!!!!

tete-a-tete with a recommender

2006-08-29T00:54:00.000-04:00

So tomorrow I have a call with one of my recommenders. As I am always on top of things :)) here I am sitting up at 1:00 am finalizing my thoughts on what I will discuss with him tomorrow. I briefly went over the recommendation management section in "How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs" and an article I found on Clearadmit on managing recommenders and here is what the agenda will be:

Appetizers: Howz Life/Weather/Work/Play etc.
Main Course: Dive in into the good stuff.
* What are my future career plans?
* Why an MBA?
* Why did I choose School X?
* What is the school looking for?
* Good Ol' times (projects/work/good things I did and so on)
* What I want to get across in my recommendation
* Go over the recommendation questions if possible
Dessert: I am truly grateful to him for doing this and I need to make sure
I get this across

Hopefully I can get all this done and then I need to send him an email with all the things discussed for his reference

Please comment if I am I missing something?

and also Wish me luck !!!!

Schools

2006-08-17T23:24:00.000-04:00

I have finally managed to shortlist schools. I was looking for general management/consulting/entrepreneurship focus. The list is:

Columbia

Haas

Kellogg

Sloan

Stern

Tuck

Wharton

All the schools seem to be great, which makes this process extremely challenging. I hope I have made the right choices. I intend to elaborate more on why I chose these schools going forward.

Looking forward to comments/critiques.

Detour:: Meebo me

2006-08-08T13:55:00.000-04:00

My daily browsing led me to a new innovation done by Meebo called Meebo Me. Seemed to be a pretty cool concept to me so I decided to try it and that it what you see on the right hand navigation on my blog now. So if you feel like checking it out IM me :)

Recommender's .... Check!

2006-07-30T12:27:00.000-04:00

So after some deliberation and thanks to the unanimous advice of guymba, marina, stresstensor, uniqpath I asked Asterix to right me recommendations and he was very supportive about it.

So now I have my recommender's lined up. Next up is to attack the essays. I have a fair idea about what I want to portray in my applications, now let's see if I can put it down in words. Also I still have to finalize a couple of more schools to apply to.

P.S:
@stresstensor: I was not going for being Obelix but I definitely do not mind being him. btw will pass your regards to dogamatix;)

@uniqpath: If I am Obelix then the B-schools would be quarries that would give me better menhirs ;)

How to lose a reccomender (almost...)

2006-07-19T23:53:00.000-04:00

In one sentence.

Lose touch with them for over a month.

I had contacted one of my supervisors from an old job about 3 months ago asking for recommendations (thinking I'd get a really early start) but then managed to not keep in touch with him in the interim. Finally I mailed him a couple of days back with updates about my apps but got no response for a day. This guy is very prompt in answering his emails so no response from him got me scared. So in panic mode I forwarded my updates to 2 other emails I had for him.

Finally after waiting for another anxious day I got a response from him today. One of the best things I have seen in my inbox in a while

Moral of the story:

never forget that the recommender is doing you a huge favor and keep them in the loop all the time

On the topic of recommendations I have another dilemma. In my current workplace I have two ppl I can ask recommendations from:

1. The guy I generally work for (let's say Asterix) who is about my age and is supervising me since he has spent more time with the company.

2. The ceo of the company (lets say Vitalstatistix) who is my official supervisor

Asterix knows me better but Vitalstatistix has seniority. Also I think I will be able to coach Asterix better regarding my recommendations.

To ask or not to ask is the question?

Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?

2006-06-11T14:43:00.000-04:00

I came across this article in the Sunday edition of NY Times. The link is below, u guys might have to create a login to access it.

Was Earning That Harvard M.B.A. Worth It?

It talks about "Building Career Foundations", a project undertaken by one of the HBS Alums to document the life of 10 chosen batch mates in intervals of 5 years. It also has some stats about the Harvard "Bottom Line" and some thought about MBA in general.

It’s a pretty interesting read.

Enjoy!!

Detour :: L'Auberge Espagnole

2006-05-30T11:37:00.000-04:00

Disclaimer: This post is not in anyway connected to MBA :))

Saw this movie over the weekend. The title literally translates to "The Spanish Apartment". In short its about six exchange students from different European countries sharing an apartment. Its pretty cool. If you guys need to take a break from hectic schedules and insanity of juggling 10 things at once check it out.

The imdb link from the movie is:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283900/

enjoy!!

One Step forward, two steps back

2006-05-28T12:51:00.000-04:00

I have been quiet on the blogging front lately, was busy with this that and the other.
So where am I in the app process...back to square one I think. First I decided to rethink my school selection because it was hasty and now I am actually in the process of doing some introspection! Somewhere while researching schools I realized that I have to have a concrete answer to the following questions before I can select schools

Why MBA?
Why Now?
What after MBA?
What five years after MBA?

Not that I did not think about these before but I really need to write these things down and be very clear about it. Am I doing the right thing or just losing too much time? Also are there any other questions I need to ask of myself before I can finalize the schools?

Any thoughts are much appreciated

School Selection Trilogy: Rankings

2006-05-08T00:30:00.000-04:00

Thanks to everyone for their comments on my previous post. I shall not spend my energy chasing a better GMAT score. So with that out of the way I looked at my shortlist of schools and realized that it was too hasty and ranking heavy. So I decided to start from scratch again. I figured that this is going to be a three-step process:

Get a shortlist of about 20-25 schools and categorize them into three tiers
Online research on the schools (websites, student forums, chats, emails etc.)
Experience the school fist hand (Visit campuses, sit in classes, attend admissions events etc.)

So for the first step I went back to the rankings again. I still think they are a good starting point. Instead of looking at just one ranking I looked at 5 different rankings this time. Below is a short blurb on each

US News: They rank the schools based on the school's reputation (gauged using a survey of deans, admissions officials and recruiters), placement success (using data such as students placed at graduation) and admission selectivity (using data such as average GMAT scores

Business Week: They rank the schools based on survey of employer and students as well as the "intellectual capital" (extent to which professors are published etc.)

Financial Times: Their rankings are based on graduate’s Career progression (using data such as salary before and after graduation), diversity of student experience in the program (using data such as students placed abroad), school’s research Quality (using data such as percentage of facility with PhD’s)

Wall Street Journal: Their rankings are based on survey of recruiters on their perception of the school, its students and if they will come back to the school for future recruitment

Economic Intelligence Unit: They survey students as well as business schools and then ranks schools based on schools effect on student’s career, salary change, network, educational and personal development. This is the most flaky of all the rankings.

For a detailed low down on the rankings read "How to get into Top MBA programs" by Richard Montauk.

I compiled an excel sheet with all these rankings (I plan to put up the excel sheet on my blog but till then if anybody wants to save themselves a couple of hours of scraping the net email me at median2k9@gmail). I managed to get a list of 30 schools using these rankings. I plan to categorize them further into 3 tiers using the rankings and other data e.g. the probability of a YETI getting an admit :)

That was my update on the GMAT front. Good Night and Good Luck!

P.S: How did people survive w/o spellcheck?

Retake GMAT?

2006-05-03T22:39:00.000-04:00

I took GMAT about one and a half years ago. I managed to cross 7xx barrier with 8x% quants and 9x% verbal. Till now I thought that this score would suffice for my applications. It would not be a glowing positive but would not be a negative either.

Last night I had a rude awakening. While reading a GMAT admissions guide I came across this:

"The value of your score depends upon the part of the applicant pool in which your application places you. If you are an Indian Electrical Engineer, you face some of the stiffest competition at leading American Schools. A school with an overall GMAT average of 700 might have an average of 740-750 for Indian Electrical Engineers. A human resources consultants would not face such stiff competition in this regard."

What ???? I am doomed by the virtue of my profession and my nationality. So now I am thinking that I should, may be retake GMAT. Then I saw something else in the same guide

"If you are an analyst from an investment bank or an Indian Electrical Engineer, you should apply as early as possible"

So now I might need to retake the GMAT and also apply early. Both of these are mutually exclusive for me. So my options are:

Live with my current score and devote all my energy on delivering a strong application early
Retake GMAT to try to improve my score at the risk of losing valuable application time
Change my nationality!
Change my profession!

I am pretty sure I am going to go with the first option but am still not 100%

Schools

2006-05-02T23:01:00.000-04:00

Choosing schools is a daunting task. There is so much research involved. B-School rankings available through various sources seemed to be a good point to start. So I went to the business week site and went through their list of top 30 b-schools in the US. Then I looked at their specialty rankings for the majors I was interested in. After that I collected all the data I thought was relevant (average GMAT scores, work experience, acceptance rate etc.). I entered all this data into excel and came up with my own formulas for calculating which schools are best for me and what are the chances of my getting admitted to them. They don't always match do they? In any case I short listed six schools which appealed to me. Now I need to do in depth research into these schools:

Get Brochures
Sign up for admissions events
Get Placement Data
Look at student profiles
Get a list of courses being offered
Look at the research going on in the majors I am interested in
Soak in all the data available on the schools website
Figure out if the teaching methodology fits my personality

That is all I have for now. Hopefully I can get more insights into it through advice from people who have gone through this process before.

I read somewhere that the list of short listed schools should contains "stretches","possibles" and "probables". The problem I have is that my list does not contain any "probables". Am I being over ambitious or just under selling myself?

First post

2006-04-28T17:00:00.000-04:00

Objective: To record the ups and downs of my mba application process.

Give Credit where its due: I want to start out by giving a shout out to all the of you who have documented this process before me. Thanks a bunch !!!,
these blogs are a great source of information and inspiration to the likes of me who are aspiring to get into a top MBA program

Why the name?: The name of the blog was inspired by a preliminary research into the stats of the well known mba programs. I soon discovered that my credentials are exactly at the median of the schools I want to get into :).

Who am I?: As for my background, I am a YETI trying to get into a good mba program.

That's all for now and best of luck to me