Recommendations and grouses

It is back to pushing my recommenders to make some progress towards painting my story. Not that I blame them for not putting a pen to the paper, I have been lax in giving them this little blurb I made to assist them in their work. I hope to get it to them today and then set them loose amidst the apps. With all the applications for the schools I plan to apply out already, I have no more excuses to justify the procrastination.

My Wharton essays are undergoing the review process right now. I finally felt this is somewhat decent and that it is somewhere near the form I plan to use for submission. Working on Chicago right now. My only grouse with Chicago is that the information they put out is just not at par with Wharton, which probably explains why I spent so much time refining my essays for Wharton, with in depth breakdown of courses and a well reasoned paragraph on why I wish to go to school there. But I guess Wharton is the exception to the norm, and they do concentrate a lot more on prospective students than other colleges do. I don't see why other schools don't follow the Wharton lead, and realize that thanks to its policies, Wharton is getting such a lead as the font of information that they are attracting the best applicants.

Amazing sportsmanship

I was watching the marathon yesterday and was amazed at the lack of security that allowed a bloody MORON to run onto the track and take out the leader in a tackle. Vanderlei de Lima who was leading the Marathon by almost 35 seconds lost 8 seconds in the tussle and never could regain his momentum.

Here I was feeling so angry towards that idiot Irish priest, when I see De Lima coming into the stadium with his hands to his side making airplane sweeps with a massive smile on his face. Despite having more than a fair shot at winning the gold, this guy was happy winning the bronze and there were absolutely no signs of anger at losing out on probably the greatest prize in the world.

If only our athletes could learn from De Lima, Instead of accusing people of illegal kicks or giving up because the gold was out of reach, and other such stuff, we would have won a lot more than individual gold's

Now that is sportsmanship! On a side note, the MORON got away without even a jail sentence. All he had to do was pay a small fine despite being a serial disrupter. My god where is the justice?

Repay the favor

Having been at the receiving end of a gmail account would like to payback. I have a couple of gmail accounts to give out, in case anyone from the blogging community wants one leave me a comment or send me an email. The first 2 will get the accounts, after which I will take down this post.

Edit: One down one to go. (Lunix07 snapped it up)

Not much going on besides revisions

Though I have been making progress on my essays, I really haven't gotten much done beyond a steady pruning effort that is slowing giving shape to my Wharton drafts. I am trying to put as much effort into this process as I can, because this is the corner stone of all the other apps that follow. I am still on target to come with some sort of final draft by end of this week, with slight polishing required in the future. I am also planning on filling out the biographic stuff for at least a couple of apps this weekend. For my Transcripts, I will probably ask my grad school to provide official transcripts to all the schools I am applying for, but for my undergrad I plan to self report mostly, and if granted admission will submit the official transcripts.

To all the people out there who are applying in R1, make sure your GMAT scores and if required TOEFL scores are sent to all the schools in the near future. You don't want to scramble around for that in the last minute. A number of people I know seem to be dropping out of R1 and applying in R2. I wonder if I should do the same? It would positively suck if I was wait listed, since that would mean an additional 3 months of torture. The tension is mounting and other than scramble around to get things organized there is nothing much I can do.

The question I had for the other applicants out there was, "HOW are you managing to do a good job with your apps? Considering that the app process has to be balanced with a full time job and in most cases family as well. I am curious because I find myself perpetually strapped for time and unable to focus completely on all aspects of my life. Am I alone in this? Or is it just that everyone goes through the same issues? Where is the time to do justice to everything?

Revisions do help

I have been going through my drafts after putting it aside for a week almost. And I can already tell the difference, it is easy to spot the errors in writing and disjointed sentences. Another good thing about this process is, I am looking at the essays very dispassionately, and that makes it easier to wield the red pen. I have cut more than 300 words already from draft 1, and while I have added some content or rather articulated the words better, I find myself left with a cleaner, sweeter and sharper story.

One of my friends who got into the top 3 business school sent me some snippets of his essay and that almost gave me an inferiority complex. The writing style is so crisp it makes you want to admit this person. If I can only achieve that effect, I should do well.

S2S is degenerating into a vulgar fight on some of the threads I have been following. Sometimes I wonder how some people have so much time on their hands to post such long detailed posts. Atleast AlexB gets paid to do that, I wonder how the rest get time to lead their lives.

On a side note, for people living in the bay area, we are planning a meet soon. Swoop is taking the lead on this, so if you are interested in swapping notes or strategies, drop either of us a line and we will get you on board.

Back from Chicago

Amazing how you feel the effects of jetlag after spending just a couple of days in a different timezone. But I guess the lack of sleep during the entire trip has a lot to do with it as well. My reflections on Chicago? It is a WONDERFUL city. Unfortunately I dint get a chance to visit any of the schools on my list, had to substitute as a chauffeur for someone and that took all Friday morning. Family functions on Friday and Sunday evenings coupled with a sojourn to Indiana pretty much sealed the coffin on my school visit plans.

I did get to go to the Univ of Chicago on Sunday evening, it was closed but what the heck, it was still beautiful. Wish I could have talked to people there, it would have helped form an impression about the school. But I did fall in love with the city all over again. Its been over 5 years since I visited, and the city has grown prettier than what I remember from the last time around.

Haven't had a chance to read the blogs or catch up on Olympic news, but I want to concentrate on my essays for now. With time getting shorter, I am getting nervous.

MBA world tour

The MBA world tour is coming to town. Here is the link to check if it is coming to a city near you. You can also register if you are so interested. I plan to visit the San Francisco event on September 14th.

Swoop, if you read thing and plan to attend ping me and we can carpool like last time. Anyone living in the bay area do drop me a line if you plan to visit and we can probably hook up there.

Impossible to work at home

With the Olympics these days it is impossible to work from home. Despite reading about it in the news over the Internet, I have to go home and watch the damn thing for a solid 3 hours. Sleeping at 12:00 am is spoiling my early morning runs, since I am too sleepy to drag my ass out of bed that early. Grrrr I was trying to get work done during the commercial breaks but how can you concentrate? I am only glad I am done with my GMAT because studying in this atmosphere would be impossible.

I wrote this little Java program that counts down the time to the various deadlines. Planning to add to it and schedule tasks that need to be completed by that day. Probably a bit of organization will help me get off my ass. But other than that there is no progress to report.

I noticed that Blogger has introduced a new toolbar type search on the top of the screen. So I click on the "next blog" link and it took me to some pretty darn funny websites. I thought using the Google search facility they would discern that mine was a MBA blog and put me in a container with other such blogs. Boy, was I mistaken, stumbled across a 18 year old's blog, and it was so funny to read about the things kids think about these days. *Sigh* It seems like forever that I was so young. Those simple problems that seem earth shaking at the time sound so quaint and silly.

It also gave me a greater feeling of being a voyeur in someone's life. That blog seemed more like a private diary than something to share with the world. Blogger isn’t doing anyone favours by allowing indiscriminate linking and view of people’s blogs.

Chicago application is out!

Finally! Chicago released its application for full time MBA starting Fall 2005. Go here for the application.

Cold Reality

For the applicants out there planning to apply for R1 - do note that there are only 2 months to go. I woke up with a start this morning sweating, I dreamt that today was the day. Freaked me out completely. I was out of bed at 6:00 am booting my laptop. Off course once I got online, had to go through my usual routine of checking email, blogs, news, and S2S. That pretty much killed 2 hours. And by then it was time to get to work. BUGGER!

Still I am planning to pull my socks up and suggest other R1 applicants if you aren't like Brit-Chick, (who already has drafts for 2 schools ready for review), get down to some serious business. I guarantee that the basic stuff like entering information on those webforms is going to take a lot more time than you imagine. So atleast start doing that in the free time you don't spend on your essays. (I have recruited my wife to enter the basic information on my employment history, information, etc.)

Essay Revisions

I had someone go through my Wharton drafts, and I think I got back a little more than I can chew. And going through the comments, I can only say I concur, my essays are pretty terrible. I thought I had some good subjects and interesting stories, but the key as I am coming to realize is in the telling of the story. A good story, badly written is only slightly better than a bad story. So it is back to the drawing board. I am going to make some modifications to those essays, or at least change the tone in them before tackling a new school. I think only by getting a satisfactory set of drafts out there, can I get anywhere with the other essays.

So my current state of mind is unhappy but hopefully I am motivated enough to act on the suggestions and write better drafts. I will need to pull my weight this week, cause of the upcoming Chicago trip, which will eat another of my weekends. God how time flies.

But I can have no complaints about the last weekend, it was simply great. I met a lot of new people. Mostly spouses of friends, and they were all such diverse fields that it made for some very easy conversation. Sunday was spent in catching up on chores for the week.

Nothing accomplished this week

Every since the Wharton drafts went in, I haven't had a chance to do much work on my applications. Deadlines at work and Terry Pratchett's at home have conspired to keep me away from my applications. I don't know if anyone even reads the discworld series, but if you like British humor and sharp satire then Terry is your man. Being a voracious reader, I love reading, but collecting books has slowly gown into a hobby. One reason I hate to move, and feel need to buy a house very soon, is the pain of moving all my books.

This weekend promises to be fun filled, with no chance of getting any work done. On Saturday, I am going on a picnic with friends, people I had started this non-profit organization with some years ago. We have cause to celebrate and BBQ followed by some kayaking and hiking seems to be the way everyone wants to let their hair down. On Sunday I am going for a hike on the Dipsea trail, a 14.2 mile round trip from Muir woods to Stinson beach. Should be gruelling.

But I have promised myself to work very hard next week on the applications.

Finishing touches to Chicago trip

Finally made the car reservations for our trip to Chicago, it was the only loose thread left. Priceline dint come through as expected so went with Expedia. Slightly more expensive, but having dealt with them for over 4 years now, I have no worries about the reservation or pricing.

Interestingly I know this guy, who actually knows this person who has the patent on e-tickets. And he dint think too much of her though. She apparently is this scatter brain who perpetually loses things all the time. After missing a flight too many, thanks to a ticket forgotten at home, wished that airlines could issue tickets at the counter. Thinking that there were many other people like her she patented the idea. And now that the internet boom has caught on in such a big way, that simple idea has become a HUGE money grosser for her. She apparently gets a few pennies for every ticket issued on the internet. What an amazing way to make money out of your deficiencies. Hats off to her, is all I am saying. :)

Surprising how many people have made money by catching the right wave. On the other hand I was reading about this guy who invented the road reflector. Now that is a brilliant idea, and he makes pennies every time a reflector is put down anywhere in the world.

Confusion over comments

Since I changed the format of the blog, my comments section has been giving me some problems. I thought I would stick to HaloScan and dump the comment code provided by Blogger. And while I took off that bit of code from the main page, I hadn't taken it off on the perma link pages. This has caused the people reading my blog via RSS readers to leave me comments which I hadn't noticed till now on the blogger site.

So to avoid the confusion and to have a single repository of comments, I am taking the Blogger comments section off completely, and will stick with HaloScan. It might be inconvenient to the people using RSS readers, but unless I get some major complains I will stick to HaloScan since most of the comments till date have been on it. I will attempt to move the comments over from blogger to HaloScan but it might prove too daunting or time consuming, in which case those comments will be lost forever. Sorry. :(

Finally received my GMAT scores

Finally after almost 6 weeks since taking my GMAT, I received my scores in the mail. I had almost given up on them and begun doubting if I was in their system in the first place. On calling them, I found out that they had my address without the apartment number in their computers. Something difficult to believe since my temporary scores card had my complete address on it, and I paid for the test using my credit card, which wouldn't have worked if they had my address wrong. So I am chalking it up to a bureaucratic snafu.

The results themselves, I already knew, except for the AWA scores, which completely astounded me. Not that I consider myself as being very bad at my written English or anything, but I was pretty darn sure I did badly. I had a small case of nerves and forgot my template for the second essay. I was looking for a solid 4.0, but did way way better. So now I am left wondering at the efficiency of these electronic readers. I don't think they are worth the money invested in them if they can score crappy essays so highly.

My advice to all the other applicant out there who haven't taken the AWA yet, follow the Princeton Review rules on the AWA essay:

1. Prepare a standard template.
2. Write as many words as you possibly can. Length is the key here.
3. Break the essays into a number of logical paragraphs.
4. Make no, or as few spelling mistakes possible.
5. Grammatical mistakes don't lose you as many points as 4.
6. Always summarize and conclude the essay, in case of Argument put forth strengthening points.

And that is all you need to score in your AWA. Now while the rules above will help you score on the AWA as such, it may not be enough. You will need to add some substance to the essay in case it is actually read by the AdComs. You don't even want to get them thinking along the lines of how come his/her essays are of such high quality but his/her AWA's suck. Since they will be reading your AWA with a completely different light than the eReaders do.

Do AdComs actually read through AWA's?

Chicago has moved its dates

Chicago GSB, for some reason seems to be a little slack on their application front. They have postponed the dates their application will be out from August 9th to Mid August. I wish they at least get the essays out early like Kellogg did. So looks like this is going to be Kellogg week. Team work, team work and more team work.

Done with Wharton essay draft's

Finally finished at least one draft of each essay I plan to write for Wharton. On last count I overshot essay 1 by close to 800 words, and every subsequent essay by at least 200 words each. As you can see I am pathetic with word limits. Every time I look at a draft instead of cutting it down I seem to be adding words to it :) But it sure is much easier to modify drafts as compared to staring at a blank screen while adding content.

I am going to give some finishing touches to the couple of drafts I am not that happy about, and put then Wharton essays aside for a week or two. Hopefully Chicago essays should be out today, and those will be my target of the week. Having gotten my basic themes straight I hope to do a faster job with Chicago than Wharton. I can hopefully cannibalize some of my Wharton essays to meet the bill. One word of advice I received from the alumni I spoke regarding cannibalizing essays was that if you don't answer the question asked, your essay will stink. So I don't plan to just copy and paste, instead I will rewrite each topic individually but have the prior drafts up in front for verbiage and themes in places where they fit.

Saturday last was simply wonderful. We went for a great run, recorded a real fast time for our customary 4 mile jog (thanks to the GPS we could actually profile it). Saw some brilliant pelicans along the trail, and ended up going to Berkeley for the afternoon. We spent a quite evening watching the low clouds come in while wind surfers cut up the water, hitting close to 30 miles per hour in the gusty winds of the bay. A wonderful day off, something we haven't had the chance to do in a long time thanks to this application process.

On schedule

Currently on pace to complete good drafts for all my Wharton essays by the end of the week. I have been following a simple strategy of writing about events that events that have affected me deeply. Doing so I find myself being very locacious and the drafts have been coming along very nicely. I haven't been limiting myself to the word count so far. I am instead trying to just capture all the outpourings of my mind on paper, leaving the editing for later, instead I use the word count more as a generic limit. Besides I feel it is easier to remove than add if I fall short of the word count. I wrote a draft yesterday and one today. I hope to get atleast the points of what I want to write about for Essay 3b down on paper, after getting home from work. It is imperitive to get the themes right also as far as possible, I am trying to use each essay to showcase a different side of me. This is akin to looking at a diamond (read me, Yeah Right!), from different angles.

As far as Essay 3b is concerned, I am not sure if I should write about an ethics, moral event or a personal characteristic. I used up my story for the ethics in my failure essay. I felt I learnt more from the failure than the ethics lesson which wasn't powerful enough. Guess I haven't lived dangerously enough. I don't want to write about crap like getting over paid and speaking up about it. So I might have to go with the personal trait but I have already covered leadership, team spirit and communication in previous essays, what other strong attribute do I want to portray?

Does anyone else feel that the 500 or even 1000 word limit is extremely inadequate for writing about yourself? How can I talk about such significant events in such few words.

Something hilarious I came across, a Bill Clinton blog. Good for a few laughs.

A very interesting post on S2S, some things I agree with and some I don't. This link is here.

Trip to Chicago

Booked our tickets to Chicago last week on Expedia, but for some reason they haven't billed me for the entire fare. Waiting for that to go through before I book my car on Priceline. Don't want to end up having to cancel the car, specially if the tickets don't go through for some reason.

I have finally kind of finalized on my application strategy. I plan to apply to 5 schools in the first round and 3-4 in my second. I would have loved to apply to Columbia in my first round, but I have to apply to some safe schools in R1 else this whole process might be wasted. :( I know, never apply to schools unless you want to go there, but I love Michigan and would love to go there. Same goes for Cornell, though it is my safe school, I really like the things it has to offer me.

I was vacillating between applying to Harvard or not, and I finally decided to go for it. I want to focus on leadership for my post-MBA career and nothing gets better than Harvard for that. Again I am sliding it to R2 because I can't handle more than 5 schools in R1. I dint want to even get to more than 3 in R1, but scared of complete rejection. Having read about 3app's experiences and dings, I want to be smart about my application strategy.

So the goal for this weekend is to finish one draft of all my essays for Wharton.

Essays

Finally, I feel the creative juices churning. It seems like those shots in movies where they keep flashing different images in rapid successions. All these random bits and pieces from different essays keep coming in my head. I'll admit it is kind of fun. I thought I would write all my drafts for Wharton first and then put them aside to attack it at some point of time in the future. But I am so hyper-active right now that I have already started on draft 2 for the first essay without completing drafts for a couple of other essays. Crazy! Does everyone go through these cycles?

Came across another blog that wasn't too happy about the syndication of their posts. I can understand why people want to turn off their RSS for this purpose, but it is going to make my life a little difficult. I love using a RSS reader to read all the blogs I am following (and they are quite a lot, close to 20 at last count) and I would hate to let go of this feature. While separating their MBA lives from their personal one would make for a good solution to the syndication problem for most people, it would make for very drab reading. All the current blogs I follow are very interesting because the personalities of the people who write them are so vivid and come across so sharply. Unfortunately, I have no solutions, it is a situation that each and everyone of us who blogs close to daily have to decide based upon their comfort level. I am just being selfish here by wanting status quo, which will call for the least effort on my part.

For my part, I think I have maintained my anonymity quite well. Yeah there are instances I reported upon like the r/c boat etc. that will make it very easy for my colleagues at work to identify me, but other than a couple such posts, it would be difficult for someone who I don't spill the beans too, to track me down. I did meet up with Swoop personally, but I was comfortable with having him know me on a personal basis and don't mind him reading my blog at the same time.

Blue Moon!

Did anyone catch the blue moon on Saturday last? (Blue moon - is a rare occurrence when you have two full moons in a calendar month - no the color of the moon is NOT blue) To celebrate the blue moon, I set out on a moonlit hike with my cousin and wife, we took along my new best friends, GPSMap 60C. It started out as a beautiful night for a hike, but somewhere along the way the marine layer came in, and the mountain we were climbing was soon covered by a very cold fog/cloud/mist at an altitude of 1900 Ft. So right before the summit we decided to turn back. Unfortunately, this was about when the GPS decided to act up. And I realized the futility of counting on electronic gadgets in the wilderness. Apparently, the batteries I had in the GPS were those I cannibalized from the remote control of my R/c car, so somewhere along the trail it ran out of juice and conked out. This was heart breaking since I was counting on it to tell me exactly how much distance we had to walk to get to the car. After a long COLD walk without the "blue" moonlight (shortly after starting the hike, the moon disappeared behind the clouds), it feels horrible not knowing how much longer you need to walk. Needless to say, I was teased to death by my wife and cousin, till we got to the car. Still this taught me a valuable lesson, never step out without your compass and topo.

I finally got my act together and crunched out a couple of drafts for Essays 1 & 2 for Wharton. I wasn't too sure about striking out with my #1 choice so early in the game. Wanted to work to the most important essays after getting the others out of the way. But decided to make the plunge since now I will have more time to review these drafts. I also thought that if I was so sure about what I wanted to do in life, I should be bold enough to face up to the challenge.

Thanks Dave, for pointing out that website that seems to be linking all our blogs, I guess we don't really have cause for complain because our blogs are on a public domain, and they aren't taking credit for our stories. But weird that they dint ping us or ask us for permission to link up.