Work
For the rest of the month, I’m going to be out in beautfiul Yuma Arizona where the sun always shines and the desert sand is smoking hot. I’m not sure what I’m doing out here other than if I didn’t come out here, I might not have a job for the rest of the year. That doesn’t sound good but it’s the reality of an economy that has supposedly hit rock bottom. The days are going to be long but at least the work seems easy from what I’ve gathered. Crossing my fingers that things stay this way, especially the weather which has been surprisingly cool.
School
I finished the first and third essays for Smith over the weekend and sent it off to Tiff for review. The first essay is the goals essay and is applicable to all the schools. The third essay is the optional essay and again, it is applicable to all the schools. Thumbs up to me for getting that first draft done. Hopefully Tiff doesn’t rip the essays to shreds. I’m also having my resume reviewed by TL who has already redlined the hell out of it.
Some of the better guides that I have used to help me with my essays include: Montauk’s Big Book, Mba Game Plan, and The Techie’s MBA Guide. If you only want to buy one book, get the big book. It is the encyclopedia britanica of the mba guides. MBA Gameplan is good too. It’s got a really good guide for the Top 30 schools that’s worth a look if you need todo a prelim run down on schools. The techie’s guide for mba is written by the people from www.accepted.com. It’s OK. It walks through a fictional engagement between an Indian technologist who is working with an accepted.com admission consutant. I found most of the material applicable to my case, but since I can’t relate to the fictional character, some of the value is not lost.
On the GMAT side of things, I spent an hour with a MGmat tutor on Saturday going over strategies, assessing my practice test results, and doing some problems to illustrate some review concepts. One thing that I thought was interesting was what the tutor said after he asked me why I was taking the test again. I gave him my reasons and he said “fair enough, but realize that the GMAT is just one data point. if you can, focus on essays because those are just as important if not more so”. he talked to me about his experience and how even though he got a 770, he got rejected by the schools that he applied to last year. Food for thought. I’m certainly regurgitating and chewing it again.
On a work related note… minus McCombs, I got all my recommendation provider forms sent out. I’ll be putting together a briefing that I’ve put off for a while for my recommenders to help them out with the forms. My manager also told us that he highly recommends taking vacation before the year ends because of the reason I sort of alluded to above, but also because we’re supposed to be crazy busy starting next year. I’m going to take his recommendation and plan some school visits as well as taking the last couple of weeks of the year off. Owen and Broad have “preview weekends” in November that I’m planning on going to. Similarly, Smith has a couple of class visits/info sessions that I’m thinking about as well, though they’re in the middle of the week so TBD. I looked over the itinerary for the preview weekends @ Owen and Broad and it looks packed, especially Owen’s plan. For Owen, we can also schedule an evaluative interview, though I’m not sure I’m ready for one yet. It seems like there’s a lot of value that can be extracted from these school visits and @ the very least, I’ll be able to notch East Lansing, Nashville, and College Park/DC on my travel belt.
OK time for bed. Even though it’s PST here, we’re working EST hours so i’m way past my bedtime. Booo. At least we get two free beers from the hotel everyday to comfort us after a long day in the sandbox.