The GMAT

Last few months have been a whirr. The best part could be the single yet visit Amar and I managed to the Chidren's Lovecastle Trust, Bangalore. This is actually in relation to my previous post The Light. CLT works with Digital Study Hall to create content that supplements the Government School education in about 40 villages in Bangalore. Its a wonderful Organization and am very excited to contribute something tangible to it.

Apart from the above, what kept me busy for the most part of the last few months has been the dreaded GMAT. After the debcble of the CAT last year, i decided that i had to take GMAT. Though an MBA abroad was always my first preference, i decided to take CAT because of monetary reasons. Somehow i was always not quite comfortable with listening to lecture with a bunch of fresh college grads. In any case, after visiting Stanford last April, i subconsiously developed a deep urge to hear those bells chime for me :). So here it is, I am finally done with the GMAT with a score of 770 (Q51, V44). To the uninitiated, those are the raw scores on 60 that GMAT gives. Q - Quantitative, V - Verbal. This is about 99 percentile as per the official score sheet. I also seem to have scored a 6.0 on the Analytical Writing Ability part!

I am done also with another dread called TOEFL. I dont know why would somebody need to take TOEFL when the GMAT itself demonstrates the Verbal abilities of a candidate. Some say, Indians can get a TOEFL waiver from MBA Schools, after all English language is the one good (or bad??) heirloom the Brits have passed on to us. Some other say that all schools may not graciously agree to waive off this requirement. Anyway, i scored a decent 112 on 120 in the TOEFL iBT, with minor hiccups on the "Speaking" section.

This is just the beginning and a fairly decent start, if am permitted to think so :). I need all the energy i can muster for the next few months to brave through the admission process. But, i am definetely not feeling smug, as i am very aware of the fact that, however stellar the scores are, schools wont even give a rat's ass :), if there is no story to tell. So...Miles and Miles to go. At least, I am almost done with short-listing of the schools, will post information on the same soon. But the sketch looks like:

1. Kellogs
2. Darden
3. Ross
4. Tuck

I am also thinking about London Business School and Insead. Need to research on these schools more.