nEXT? NUS?

After applying to HKUST and Goizueta, I am thinking about .. what next.
I was considering NUS, AIM and CEIBS. AIM last date is in April so I am not thinking about it right now. About CEIBS, I will decide after the results of HKUST. And now I am left only with NUS.
I am not getting that feel to apply to NUS.
I have heard lot of a good things about the college but still I am thinking. May be after 2 months of real hard work, I am running away from working hard again. But yes, I need to start again and think about it in a few days. I will decide whether to apply or not by this weekend and start with my essays.

Ding from Goizueta!

I didn’t want the first post of new year to be this one. Got a mail from adcom which says:

Dear McCoy
Thank you for applying to Goizueta Business School at Emory University. We appreciate the time and effort you have devoted to the application process. The Admissions Committee has carefully reviewed your application and regrets that we are unable to offer you admission to the Two Year MBA program.......
We hope this decision does not discourage you from pursuing your MBA. If in the next year you have additional information which you feel would strengthen your application, we welcome you to re-apply to Goizueta..
Sincerely,
……

H K U S T submitted

It’s such a relief. I submitted my HKUST application today (my second app). In the beginning, I didn’t expect my essays to go really well considering the word limit of 200words/1200chars for each of 6 essays. But I am pretty satisfied with 5 of them.
It was the last day of first deadline. There are still 5 hours to go before midnight but due to time difference, it is safe to submit it early. The deadline is specified as 17-Dec and no time is given, i.e. HK time or GMT. When I submitted my application fee on the night of 11th Dec, I got a message on screen – “your payment has been received on 12-Dec, 1:43am”. So it must be HK time only.
I slept at 4 in the morning. Very tired.
Thanks to my B-San and my friends who reviewed my essays and provided valuable inputs.
Thanks

GMAT – Step 1 & 2 - Registration & Collecting Stuff

This post is for my friends who have started thinking about an MBA in US.
If you are targeting fall 09, then you must have taken your GMAT by now. If you are targeting fall 10, then it’s a good time to start thinking about GMAT.

Go to MBA.com and take the date if you are serious about it. $250 is what makes you have thoughts like “Am I ready to take the test?” Take the date and you ll be ready in no time. Take the date now for Feb, March end or April first week so that you have good enough time for introspection and research about colleges after the GMAT.

3 months is a good enough time for preparing. I didn’t score the dream score of 770, just managed to score 7xx in 3 months. Someone can do it in 2 months and someone like me may not be able to do it in 6 months even. So it all depends on you.

So start collecting the stuff..
 GMAT 11th edition
 One more book you need - princeton/kaplan/etc ( I went for Kaplan and found it worth)
 Power prep tests (the very first thing you need to do is take these tests)
 Online tests for practice( I went for manhattan tests)
 Spidey’s notes
 Manhattan Sentence Correction (it’s a real good one)
 GMATprep tests (these you ll get from MBA.com once you have registered for the test). Save them for the end. They are really precious.
 And lot more..

Let me know if you I can help you with anything.. I have lots of lots of..... stuff

Make a folder in one of the drives of your laptop.
Put the stuff there ..
And get going..

More on how to go about it.. later
Ciao

P.S.
Feb, March dates are easily available. Just checked it on MBA.com. I guess there is fight for dates from May onwards.

Tough Times..

Just getting the taste of tough times. I always thought I will sail through easily.
Application process, work (a lot of), professional issues, personal issues seem to take a toll on me. And the financial turmoil had its first direct impact on me when I reached office yesterday morning. No no.. I didn’t get a pink slip. Each and every employee of the company is affected and is sad.It is something that can have impact on my full one year plans. Yes, I can feel the impact of financial crisis. Yes, I am hit too, Directly.
One major problem I am having these days is that sometimes in my dreams, I am writing essays and filling forms with million of other things. I watch/see hundreds of dreams every night. Its because I have been thinking about lot of things, and all seem to be important. I think I need to relax a bit. But after taking some time off every time, I think the same.

I am done with 3 essays of HKUST and there are 3 more to go. Then I have to get them reviewed and have to get my recos ready too.
Reco questions are a bit different from Emory so I have to ask my recommenders to think something different and nice again.
The good thing is that I do not need to send my transcripts to HKUST by post. They asked for only scanned copies and will be asking for transcripts at the time of admit. I will be more than happy to submit the original transcripts.
Need to get ready with essays before Sunday as I have to go to a marriage on Sunday and I cannot afford to delay it further. 17-Dec is the day.

Emory submitted, HKUST next

Yesterday, I submitted my Goizueta Business School application. My recommenders still have to submit the recos in a day or 2 and my application will be complete.
It is such a relief to submit essays. Thanks to my reviewers, they did a great job in pointing out gaps, mistakes in my essays and adding a lot of value.
It was my first application and I took a long time to complete the process. I hope that the process for next applications will be accelerated as I know things better now. I thought to take a day off and I did.
Due to time constraint, I had to push CEIBS to 2nd round :(
HKUST is next
But now I realize the next deadline is just 2 weeks away. I need to start working on the essays, though not from scratch but HKUST people are not very generous with word limits. There are 6 essays and word limit for 4 essays is only 200 words and for rest of them, its 300 words.
How am I going to compress everything to just 200 words?
I have got a bag full of things and I need to put everything in small pockets now. Lets see how things go with HKUST.
The first deadline for HKUST is 17-Dec. I will need to submit everything by 14-Dec so that my recommenders get good enough time to submit the recos.

HKUST Essays:
1. Please tell us your motivations to pursue an MBA program, and why is now the best timing to do one.

2. Please elaborate on your career goals. How will your academic training, professional experience coupled with an MBA education at HKUST help you achieve your goals?

3. If admitted, how can your participation at HKUST MBA enrich fellow students' experience inside or outside classroom?

4. Please pick and answer ONE of the two topics in the space below.
4a. Describe a situation where your initial attempt to solve a problem failed. Tell us how you get around to finally solve the problem.
Or
4b. Describe a situation where you created opportunities for yourself and led to a favorite outcome.

5Please pick and answer ONE of the two topics in the space below.
5a. Tell us a situation when you experienced challenges in team setting, and what you have done to help the team achieve its goals.
Or
5b Describe a situation when you got frustrated over differences in culture or work style. What have you learnt from that experience?

6. What do you want the Admissions Committee to know about you as a person?

Zaijian (Good bye)

First Interview Call

One must go to all the MBA fairs happening all around in Sep-Oct for many reasons. You get to know a lot more about the schools when you meet the alums, current students or some one from Adcom who come as a representative of the respective school.
I went to one such MBA fair at the Intercontinental in New Delhi, on September 27, 2008. It was great to hear from the representatives of the schools about the school, course structure, scholarships, fee, student profiles, numerous questions from applicants and answers. I met 2 of my batch mates too and we exchanged our phone numbers. :)
Because of attending just one fair, I got umpteen mails from many schools. 2 days back, I got a call from recruitment officer of HULT International Business School. He was calling from Boston, and at first I thought it was a friend calling from US :)
Then I realized it was someone else. So I apologized and started a conversation. He offered me an interview which was to be held today. I had heard about this school but had done no research. I accepted the offer as I had nothing to lose. If the school is good I would go for filling applications, if not then it will be kind of a dry run for things coming in future.
The time was set 4:30pm New Delhi time but I got a call at 4:38pm. I was told that we would be talking about my career till date and my short term, long term goals in the next 20 minutes. Simple questions were asked and I was ready for things to come thus did a decent job.
US schools and may be all global schools except Indian schools, want to know more about you, your goals, where as in India, their focus is more on asking questions like finance, current market situation, companies and their CEOs and they judge you on how much you know what is going on. US schools ( I have read so much on threads and blogs) ask about you, your goal clarity, why MBA and why their school/university.
I will not be applying to HULT because of many reasons but it was a good experience.

Emory still not submitted and CEIBS first deadline is approaching. m dead.

Zai Jian (its pronounced as Chai chian, correct me if m wrong)