The Immortals of Meluha

Hi Readers,

I hope you are doing good. While I was taking some time off my MBA schedule, I happened to read this book written by an Indian author, Amish Tripathi. I am sure you will like it.

Read this post on my personal blog: The Immortals of Meluha

I am back...

Hello Readers,

First and foremost, let me apologize for neither posting nor answering to your queries for such a long time. I have my reasons for doing so. First, I was not preparing consistently, owing to work and other personal pressure, and second, I was really adamant not to post unless I studied with all vigor. If I happened to post when I was not preparing with such seriousness, it would falsely satisfy my sub-conscience.

However, I took the GMAT and literally screwed it up. I would not like to discuss this any further. I am still contemplating on why everything went wrong, but in vain. Im clueless till this moment. Given that I am person who does not rest till I succeed in anything I undertake, I am determined to beat the GMAT. Right now, I am giving it a break, while having applied for one college, in India.

I will be giving GMAT after a month or two. Meanwhile, I will be regularly updating on my progress in preparation as well as on my B-school research.

Festival of Lights, MasterGMAT etc..

Long time again since I gave an update. I have been constantly preparing though. I am at my home town for a week now, for celebrating the 'Festival of Lights'. Meanwhile I happened to take the free 7-day trial of MasterGMAT course which boasts of a 120 point improvement. And blimey! This course has the power to do it. I had not taken any courses before this for the GMAT, but this course impressed me so much that I am thinking of taking the complete course. 

I have been going through the course every now and then. The best part is their flexibility and the thorough explanations provided for every bit of lesson they teach or problem they give to test our knowledge. I definitely love their course. As of now, my prep status goes like this.

I have also been working on questions from Magoosh GMAT, and I can say for sure I am improving.

Quantum CAT - Number properties

Aristotle SC - Finished the basic grammar stuff (Part 1 of the guide) : People say it is a guide to be completed before doing MGMAT's SC, and let's see. 

Re-reading the PowerPrep CR Bible.

I am reading the book 'Rich Dad Poor Dad', and so far it is just awesome. I ll update more in the days to come.

Featured on Accepted.com

Sarah from accepted.com contacted me about a month ago, and I had an interview with her. The questions were good, and they reflected the analysis of your profile and your ideas about application to b-schools. I liked the way the questions were sequenced. You can see it published here .

Since I have not started vigorously applying for b-schools till date, I found it to be a starter to analyze my profile and my ideas about applying to b-school. Do read the interview script at the above link, and share your comments.

Practice session 1

A weekend is gone and there has been some progress. The saturday was fun filled given that we celebrated the Sports Day at our organization. It was fun @ the YMCA grounds for a whole day. I returned home late that evening all tired from the fun that day!

Sunday was a good day and I could do actually do some studying, practise, and also relax. I solved a few questions from the '1012 GMAT' book, from The Princeton Review. In my opinion these are of 600-700 level, and found them doable. I was browsing through gmatclub forums and I happened to read through a few strategies that took test takers from 650 to 700+ with disciplined practice. I promised to myself, I will stick to my schedule.

I happened to come across the link to BTG's practice questions. I've always wished that these practice questions were available at a discounted price and I was happy that this time I happened to see them on discount. I quickly got one of the packs and started taking tests. I should say, it is worth it. The environment and explanations given are crisp and clear and gives you the advantage of comparing yourself with the average scores of other Magoosh test takers.

I have taken like 6 to 7 tests on Magoosh now, and I am happy to say I am improving. I felt the need for revising the basics of SC and CR from the MGMAT SC and CR Bible respectively. I realize I need to work a lot on my quant score, I should increase it by atleast 5 to 6 points. I am looking forward to preparing for CAT (Indian Entrance Test for entry into the prestigious IIMs), which is way tougher than GMAT Quant. This will automatically improve my GMAT Quant scores.

Gearing up for GMAT #2

It has been a long time since I actively posted here. Variety of reasons behind. Office, personal life, projects have taken a large part of my everyday life, giving me little time to think about GMAT. I even considered dropping the idea of a second GMAT attempt for a while. Now I am back on track, and you will regularly see updates and progress.

I took quite sometime analyzing my mistakes during the last GMAT preparation time, and the problems with my approach. I happened to read through BTG and gmatclub posts on retaking GMAT, and several other posts which gave me an idea of how to proceed from this point. I am considering changing the pattern of studying this time.

From now on, I will post some questions on my blog, so that we also have a chance to discuss on the questions, and come up with more concrete reasoning for the solution behind. I will also post my progress on a daily basis as usual.

For a push today, let me tell you what I have been doing over the last weekend regarding GMAT. Not much, but I took a few practice tests that were available on free on gmatclub.com. I should say, my brains were beginning to get rusty about GMAT. For quant, I have been looking at several questions on gmatclub forums, and answering them with the timer 'on'. It worked out quite well.

I am determined to spend extra time on my weak areas:

• Data Sufficiency
• Reading Comprehension

I am currently signed up for the basic free packages available on BTG and gmatclub. If you have any other suggestions, do let me know. My access to GMATPrepNow has now expired. It was one awesome source to quickly learn a lot of concepts which haunted me for a long time.

And additionally, I have the GMAT ToolKit and MGMAT FlashCards on my iPod, which help me from getting bored while travelling. I have also added a few vocabulary apps as well including a couple of classic novels of my choice.

Here are a few questions for discussion:
http://gmatbytes.blogspot.com/2011/10/presidential-campaign-sc.html
http://gmatbytes.blogspot.com/2011/10/problem-on-mixtures.html

I will post questions like the above in my second blog, so that this one does not get cramped with lot of details.

The G-Day

Moderate preparation levels; moderate practice levels - and here I am giving a debrief of GMAT #1.

Preparation :

I booked my exam for August 23, 2011, giving a complete 3 months for preparation. And I felt confident about my plan in mind. Until the big health blow and project deadlines in office broke my regular study hours. To see my progress levels, you can take a look at this blog.

Getting a good 41 days of preparation did not really get me reach my target. There was a good level of break here and there in between my prep schedule which ultimately lead me to think that I will not be able to score as much as I targeted. In course of my preparation, I realized, I was always scoring well in SC, as compared to other sections. Math is never my cup of tea, and this was something that hit me hard on my score. I would not say my verbal was too good, but at least I found it better than my Math score.

As with everyone else, RC is the weakest area, where I could not find much room for improvement, even after trying out different strategies. How much every modes I try for RC, during the test, all that stays in my mind is that I quickly finish off that particular RC quickly and move on. It came to me as a big blow on my G-Day.

Though my target score is very high, I consistently scored between 600 and 660 in all my practice tests. It was already a disappointment for me, as it is said, whatever you score in your practice tests is close to what you will score on test day. And something kept telling me, that I will score 650.

The Day:

My exam was scheduled at 10:00 am in the morning at a center just 11 km away from my house. So I decided I will start 2 hours early keeping in mind the traffic constraints. I started at 8:10 am hoping to reach at least half an hour before the scheduled test time. And to my disappointment, the traffic blocked me from all sides. Whichever different route I took, it was full of vehicles blocking the road. The biggest mistake I did was to drive my bike that day to the test. I reached the exam center sharp at 9:57 am, having informed the test center of my situation. I finally reached the center totally exhausted. And to my disappointment, the lift was nowhere close to stopping, when I reached the building.

The center was in the 6th floor and to add to all the traffic tragedy, I had to walk up all 6 floors by stairs. By the time I reached the 6th floor, my knees went shaky. I spoke to the center official, and I drank some water, and got ready for the test in the next 5-7 minutes. Given all the confusion, my mind was totally blocked, and was not functioning as much as it did during the practice tests. With just a few points to highlight my point of view on the issue and argument, I took a quick break of 5 minutes, had some fruits, and had water and started off with the Math section.

Math seemed good initially, but slowly the tiredness started creeping in. Towards the middle of the Math section, I was totally blank, and could do nothing but skip questions to compensate for the time loss. And so many DS questions at a stretch took a toll on my concentration levels. I have a mindset that I am weak in DS, and this added to the bad moments.  I was sure that my score was going down towards the end of the Math section

The break after the Math section, boosted me up at little, and verbal started off well. Though I took my chances on 1 or two questions, here and there, I was not completely off at any point of time. And I was sure that my score was not going to touch my target score.

And after scrolling through the pages after the test, I got my score.

A 650 with Q-44, and V-35 --- A mind game.. That’s what I thought, and that’s what I got.

Obviously not satisfied with my score. I have scheduled my GMAT #2 for October 31, 2011. Hope things work well this time. I am meanwhile taking a short break off preparation, reading through articles ob BTG, gmatClub forums. Any tips/suggestions to boost my score in my upcoming GMAT is welcome!