Hi guys,
I actually took the GMAT one month ago but it is still such a relief to looke at the report, I want to share with you my story.
Basically, I realized I needed to have my MBA in mid November and found out I had little more than one month (Christmas vacations are HOLYdays) to round 2.
Contrary to many of you, I am not good at multitasking, so I had to prepare all the application steps one at the time. I had spent the first week to prepare for the TOEFL (116 with effort), so It was November the 24th when I started preparing. My exam was on December the 4th. I could have scheduled it a bit later, but I needed time for my my essays.
Unfortunately, the first weekend down the road was my wife's birthday, so studying was de facto impossible: 7 days to sharpen the swords...
Given my job as a top management consultant, I had to take vacations if I wanted to stand a change, an option that I would recommend.
My strategy has been:
1. Understand what the test is with the Kaplan guide
2. Take the prep test by MBA.com to assess my strenghts
3. Adjust preparation for my profile: I had good quant, but awful verbal, so:focus with the OG on the verbal and leverage the OG Verbal addendum.
Time allocaiton: 75% on the verbal part 20% quant rest of the time AWA (important for a non-english student with strongly analytical background as I am).
4. Take the GMAT simulation again at 2 days from the exam to see what is missing. In my case still verbal, so I stopped quant excercise and did only.
Probably I exceeded with my focus, since the day of the exam I was not as fresh as I wanted to do calculations (damn excel, you destroyed my calculations ability
).
Anyhow, the result was absolutely astonishing for me, from a supposed "math wiz", I had become a "poet":
Verbal 39 (87%)
Quant 48 (84%)
AWA 6.0 (87%, a special thanks to Kaplan's strategies here)
Overall 710 (92%)
So my learnings work only for those of you who have very limited time and one shot only. RELAX (I preach it, although I was not super at it)! there is no reason to believe that if you can do something good now, you will forget in a few days then:
1. isolate from the world (vacations, switch off mobile, etc.)
2. you don't have time for anything that is not essential: work only on your weaknesses and just keep alive your strenghts.
3. use simulations to steer your preparation at the beginning and close to end
I actually took the GMAT one month ago but it is still such a relief to looke at the report, I want to share with you my story.
Basically, I realized I needed to have my MBA in mid November and found out I had little more than one month (Christmas vacations are HOLYdays) to round 2.
Contrary to many of you, I am not good at multitasking, so I had to prepare all the application steps one at the time. I had spent the first week to prepare for the TOEFL (116 with effort), so It was November the 24th when I started preparing. My exam was on December the 4th. I could have scheduled it a bit later, but I needed time for my my essays.
Unfortunately, the first weekend down the road was my wife's birthday, so studying was de facto impossible: 7 days to sharpen the swords...
Given my job as a top management consultant, I had to take vacations if I wanted to stand a change, an option that I would recommend.
My strategy has been:
1. Understand what the test is with the Kaplan guide
2. Take the prep test by MBA.com to assess my strenghts
3. Adjust preparation for my profile: I had good quant, but awful verbal, so:focus with the OG on the verbal and leverage the OG Verbal addendum.
Time allocaiton: 75% on the verbal part 20% quant rest of the time AWA (important for a non-english student with strongly analytical background as I am).
4. Take the GMAT simulation again at 2 days from the exam to see what is missing. In my case still verbal, so I stopped quant excercise and did only.
Probably I exceeded with my focus, since the day of the exam I was not as fresh as I wanted to do calculations (damn excel, you destroyed my calculations ability
).Anyhow, the result was absolutely astonishing for me, from a supposed "math wiz", I had become a "poet":
Verbal 39 (87%)
Quant 48 (84%)
AWA 6.0 (87%, a special thanks to Kaplan's strategies here)
Overall 710 (92%)
So my learnings work only for those of you who have very limited time and one shot only. RELAX (I preach it, although I was not super at it)! there is no reason to believe that if you can do something good now, you will forget in a few days then:
1. isolate from the world (vacations, switch off mobile, etc.)
2. you don't have time for anything that is not essential: work only on your weaknesses and just keep alive your strenghts.
3. use simulations to steer your preparation at the beginning and close to end
all the best!
