The Unexpected

I had the day to work from home. I turned on my cellphone mid-morning to find a message from the associate director at Queen's.

"I have some great news," she says. I thought to myself, here we go, I'm about to get interviewed. This was expected. But, what she did say after was not expected at all.

"We'd like to offer you a seat in our program that starts in May 2009. Additionally, the admissions committee would also like to award you with a $20,000 scholarship."

What in the WORLD? I couldn't believe it. Whatever happened to the phone interview? I was so ecstatic though, I started to cry. I'm going to Queen's. My life is about to change.

The rest of the message said that she was also going to email me. I looked into my personal email and found two messages. One was from her with the same information as she'd just told me on the phone, and one from her staff, with the word version of the official letters they were going to send, and asking me to confirm my mailing address.

(I had a very merry Christmas.)

Messages Regarding Application

Queen's staff sent me three emails (that were not automatically generated) after I submitted my application.

The first one was to acknowledge that they have received my application, and are still expecting some items, namely one of my references and my undergrad transcript. I knew that they were on their way.

Each of the latter emails was to say that they had received one of the items that they were expecting.

Application Submitted

After several weeks of essay-writing and revising and getting very very neurotic over them, I finally submitted my application for Queen's before the first round deadline of November 29. They had been accepting applications since June, so I had planned on submitting way before the deadline, but trying to perfect the essays held me up.

In addition, rumour has it that people who submit really early are usually the most qualified and conscientious applicants who did all their homework and are way ahead of the game than us "normal" people. So, you want to submit early enough to ensure full consideration for both the application and possibly a scholarship, but not so early such that you're competing with all the best of applicants.

Unlike a lot of other schools, Queen's only asks for a resume, and has no detailed work experience or activities section on the application where you can elaborate up to 4000 characters per activity. Therefore, it goes without saying that it's extremely important to write a good resume. I thought it was actually good practice, because there was no pressure to write a lot, and you can choose the most important things to write for each job.

The students' advice of "really work on your essays" was very important as well. Instead of trying to impress the admissions committee, you should write with your own voice and present yourself as a whole person. I won't elaborate much here, there are many websites and articles that tells you how to write a good application.

Visiting Queen's

Appleseed documents his experience visiting Queen's here.

I boarded the train to Kingston Wednesday afternoon. With my previous experience travelling to London, I now knew what to expect as a first class passenger on a train.

I grabbed a cab after I got to Kingston, and arrived at the nice inn that Queen's set me up with. As promised, there was a package waiting for me in my room. It contained a welcome letter and a card, some placement stats, blurb about the professor whose class I was going to sit in the next day, and information on recommended eating places nearby.

Originally I was due at Goodes Hall by 8:15am the next morning, to have a brief tour of the building before class starts at 8:30. Then the lady at the office found out that the B&B served breakfast between 8 and 9, so she emailed to tell me to enjoy my breakfast, and arrive before 9:30. They would then let me into the class during the morning break. This was a minor detail that I really appreciated, and it made me feel that they actually do care about my comfort and well-being.

For the next couple of hours, I sat on my bed and read the material in the package, as well as browsed the Queen's MBA website. Since I was only going to have a "chat" the next day, I hadn't prepared anything except for a question or two that I wanted to ask.

At around 8 or 9, I decided that it would be a waste not to go out for a walk, get some fresh air, and get some food. The dinner that I had on the train before 4pm wasn't going to last until bedtime. I checked out the recommended places on the sheet and walked for 5 minutes to a nearby bar, since it was close. Got a snack to go. It was yummy. My room smelled of fish'n'chips afterwards, but no matter. :p

The next morning I got up and had an extremely delicious breakfast - I totally understood why Queen's didn't want me to miss it! Called a taxi, since I had a taxi voucher from the package, although walking to Goodes Hall would've been under 10 minutes. Arrived at 9:15.

I was introduced to everyone that was at the office at the time. The staff seemed very nice and approachable. I was then led on a brief tour of the building, and saw first hand what I'd seen in the brochure. Messy desks in the team rooms were an indicator that the students really used these rooms. They also had access to photocopier/printer/scanner/fax/etc. Fridge, microwaves, coffee machine, chocolate bars for a dollar! Overall it felt like a comfortable place to be in.

After the tour, I sat down with the associate director for our "chat". Since I hadn't yet put in an application, I spent some time telling her about myself - my background, what I've done, what I want to do. Other than that, there were basically no questions and I didn't need to say a lot of stuff. I then asked her what she thought distinguished the program from other schools, and she said that there were two things she thought were really unique to Queen's: the team-based approach and level of personalization. The Queen's website explains a lot of it. The associate director was honest in explaining that the team-based approach wasn't for everyone. She also mentioned that they use a variety of teaching methods (which is a big difference from using the case-based method only at Ivey).

She asked if I was still just looking around and comparing schools, and I honestly said yes, although by this time I had really started to like Queen's more than other places. She went on to say that the students really appreciate the "little things" that make a difference, little things such as having a team room, having access to photocopiers etc., having somebody deliver your textbooks to your desk, having photocopies of the lecture notes ready at your seat at every lecture. As I mentioned in my previous post, this was also something that really impressed me. One other thing I was told was that since I had already been invited there, my interview later would be over the phone.

We had talked for half an hour or so, when someone came in to let us know that the class had broken out. I was then led into the class to my seat at the back. Since I wasn't there for a formal interview, I had dressed myself in a nice shirt and pants, which were on par with what other female students had on, so I didn't really feel like an odd one out. There was a set of lecture handouts at my seat, and I even had a paper name plate. The student sitting next to me introduced himself and asked if I was there for the interview. I said that I was just invited to come for a "visit" and a "chat", and the student smiled and said "yeah, that was probably the interview."

When class resumed, a team finished off a presentation that they'd been doing that morning. They had been to a certain business, and were presenting their findings/recommendations. After a question and answer period and some comments from the professor, we turned our attention to today's material, which was a consulting case. It was very interesting for me, because the consulting firm presented in the case was one of my previous employers. The main character's problems as a consultant was very similar to what I had experienced. The class discussion was certainly interesting, and there was also some role-playing. This was very relavant to my job as well as my intended future career.

Towards the end of the class there was some discussion on the assignment that was just handed back, and a short lecture on six sigma. The professor had a great sense of humour and was thought provoking at the same time. It was a very good experience for me, and I knew that this was where I wanted to be.

The students I had asked to have lunch with came up and introduced themselves, and off we went. Lunch took almost two hours, during which we talked about almost anything and everything related to the program. Queen's puts you in teams, and then purposefully gives you way too much work to accomplished by yourself, so that you have to utilize your team. The professors are great. Yes, there are classes every morning and every afternoon, 8:30am to 4:30pm, but they don't feel like that's too much to take at all, because the classes are all so interesting. The printers sometimes malfuntion and it can be frustrating. Housing is cheap. It's cold in Kingston in the winter.

I told them that I was an introvert, which possibly means it'd be challenging for me to do team stuff all the time. They were quick to ease my concern by saying that I should look at every challenge as an opportunity. Your teammates have different backgrounds and personalities, and the challenge of team work is an opportunity to learn from others as well as learn to work with them. If you were really good at everything, team work being one of those things, then there would be no need for you to go back to school. An additional comment is that employers report that they could tell Queen's MBA grads apart from other grads, because of the good team work skills that Queen's graduates possess.

They also assured me that my GMAT score was definitely looked upon very favourably. That, combined with my good work experience, they thought that I almost had no problem getting in. Nevermind bad undergraduate marks, other components of my application can make it up. The one thing I was to really work on was my application essays. I needed to nail them.

After lunch, we returned to the MBA office, where I got a taxi voucher for getting back to the train station. My train wasn't until after 6pm, so after saying goodbye to the staff and students, I was off to "explore" on my own. I did no exploring. Instead, I found a spot in the library and started working on my application essays.

It was a very positive experience. The people that I met are down to earth and happy to help. Not to mention the serious level of personalization, both in the program and during my visit. I also loved Goodes Hall, it's beautiful.

Uniquely Queen's

I read the Queen's brochure, which just continued to impress me. Specifically, I was impressed with the following aspects (that I may or may not have known before, but was just outlined more clearly for me - in no particular order):

• Dedicated team-rooms. I wasn't sure that after years of being in the corporate environment, if I could stand being a student again, with no assigned desk, hauling my bags of laptop and books around wherever I went. The team rooms just make the logistics of getting around and meeting up with team members that much easier.


• Fit to lead. I hesitate to say that I'm unfit, but I'm definitely not the fittest. It should be interesting to see what this program has to offer.


• Personal assessment/coaching. Just adds a personal touch to things!


• Professional team facilitator. They're actually hired professionals, but also independent of the program, so they can focus specifically on teamwork issues that students encounter.
  
• Professional designation. I'm possibly interested in a PMP, so this is good for me.


• Incredible personal support. Somebody buys my books and delivers them to my desk. Somebody prints out powerpoint presentations and delivers them to my seat in class. This is too good to be the life of a student.

Most of these I have not seen offered at other business schools. I got very excited at the prospect of visiting Queen's.

QS World MBA Tour

I decided to go to this event and check out the schools that I was considering.

The Toronto stop was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I arrived just before 3pm, and there was a huge line up at the registration desk. If you had registered before the event, you would only need to pay $5, otherwise it would cost you $10. There were people in suits and ties and other people in jeans and T-shirts. Suit and tie was totally unnecessary, in my opinion - I think that as long as you're not in ripped baggy jeans and T-shirt with weird logos, you'll do fine.

Once I got in, my first stop was Queen's. This was also one main reason why I came to the event at all: since I was going to visit them the week after, I figured it'd be nice to say hi and get a brochure. I waited for my turn to talk to the lady I'd been corresponding with (they all wore nametags), and introduced myself. She was happy that I dropped by and said that she actually thought of emailing me to let me know that they'd be in town, but didn't get around to it. Since there were many people waiting at the table, I said that I'd chat more when I visit. Grabbed a brochure and left.

Other tables that I visited:

Ivey must've brought in a team of over two dozen people, of admissions staff, professors, and students. All of whom were busy talking to interested prospective students. It was quite the scene. I managed to say hi to the director of admissions, who remembered me from the visit a month back.

Cornell answered the questions I had about sending transcripts/proof of degree. Since I was "foreign", they had some special requests that I wanted to clarify. It turned out that because the system in Canada is fairly similar to that in the States, I could also just send a copy of my transcripts and not worry. They were friendly.

I found out that the "HEC" in HEC Montreal stood for "good school of business", or something like that. It also has nothing to do with HEC Paris. They assured me that one doesn't need to know French in order to live in Montreal. I liked the nice ladies at the table, and I also liked their program. If I didn't get into any of my top 3 choices, they would be the next down the list.

DeGroote wasn't so impressive, somehow. They were very adamant about not considering starting a 1-year program, and they say that their strength is in the co-op, which doesn't mean much to me. The admissions lady I talked to also didn't strike me as very enthusiastic.

Rotman's admissions ladies seemed like they weren't interested at all in anything people might possibly ask them. They chatted amongst themselves, I waited for about 15 seconds for them to notice me, to no avail. Since I wasn't very interested in them to begin with, I just left. Having said that, I did attend an MBA lecture given by one of Rotman's professors, and it was quite interesting. Although, I'm sure that almost any properly recognized school can put forward a good lecture, let alone Rotman. I just wasn't interested in their program as a whole.

Telfer didn't even participate in this thing. I hoped I wouldn't need to one day seriously consider the school, who either isn't in the the same or similar "league" as the other schools, or just didn't bother with these types of events.

I should mention that once you register with your email address, be prepared to be forever electronically bombarded by a hundred MBA schools around the world.

Queen's Visit Scheduled

I got a FedEx package from Queen's MBA. It basically says this:

We were very happy to recently receive your GMAT results, and congratulations on your excellent score of 770! We would like to invite you on an all expense paid overnight trip to visit Queen's, whenever you wish, during which time you would have the opportunities to sit in a class, chat with our program's Associate Director, and have lunch with students whose interests are similar to your own.

This is great! You gotta understand, I haven't even applied to Queen's yet. ALL I did was listing them as a recepient of my GMAT score report. What a deal. I had been looking for something similar to Ivey's class visit, from Queen's, but couldn't find anything. I guess it's fairly exclusive.

I emailed them back and said I'd be really happy to visit. After a couple of emails back and forth, I've picked a date and a couple of students with whom I want to have lunch. The lady in charge of this scheduled me with first class VIA rail travel and booked me at a B&B.

US MBA

Appleseed wrote a very good discussion on US or non-US MBA.

My major concern, of course, was the staggering amount of money required in order to do an MBA down in the States. I could get a line of credit, but with over 10k US dollars borrowed, the interest rate alone which I'd have to keep paying while at school, would be hundreds of dollars per month. Where am I supposed to get that money from? I would expect to be paying off the loan for several years after graduation, but it's the aspect of paying interest while I'm in the program that ticks me off. Our dirt cheap Canadian dollars don't help either - it would just make tuition and living expenses that much more expensive.

The other consideration is the length of the program. All top-tier US program are two years in length, which just adds to the time and living expenses that you spend. At this point I was really looking for a good one-year program, and was pretty much set on Queen's and Ivey.

Having said that, a good US school is recognized world-wide, and the compensation for jobs is significantly better in the US than in Canada. (I know this first hand from comparing salaries with my US colleagues who work for the same company, doing the same job as I did, only in the States.) If I can just deal with two difficult years of school and pull it off, ten years from now I would possibly be fairly well off.

Unlike Appleseed, I'm single and open to staying in the US long-term after an MBA. Although in theory you can still choose to move south of the border after you finish an MBA in Canada, in reality I believe that it'd be easier for you to stay in the US, if you had already gone to school there.

I then decided to apply to one good US school. My chances of getting into this school would be similar to my chances at Queen's or Ivey, and this would be a reputable school that nonetheless runs a program small enough to allow for personal interactions, etc. Of course, it also needs to offer a program that I like. After some research, I chose The Johnson School at Cornell University. It's not ranked that much to the top such that I likely wouldn't get in anyway, but it's within the top 20 and an ivy league school with a good reputation. Its program is small (compared to almost all other good US programs), and its based out of the small town of Ithaca, NY. Therefore, in addition to having virtually no commuter students like in big cities, housing would also be relatively cheap. Lastly, it is not that far away from home in Toronto.

I would apply to the Johnson School the same time I apply to Queen's and Ivey, and would hope that I get into a Canadian program. If it so happens that I only get into the program in the States, I would prepared myself for the long (and financially difficult) haul. I also figured that it would take the Johnson School longer to process my application, because they admit a significantly larger class. So by the time I hear a decision from them, I would already have my Canadian decisions.

AWA Results

Got emailed my official GMAT results. Way faster than I expected. Got 5.5 on the AWA, so I'm really happy. I guess all that essay preparation was worth it.

Ivey Class Visit

It was actually the first time I'd been on a first class train, which impressed me to no end. For starters, I didn't know that they would provide a meal. After a big breakfast at home, I had to say pass to the delicious-looking breakfast that everyone else was having. The attendants walked by every 10 or 15 minutes and kept offering stuff: drinks, pastries, more drinks, more stuff to eat... no wonder the tickets cost so much.

I arrived at the train station in London shortly before 10am, and got on a limo arranged by Ivey. There were 7 of us from this train that were getting picked up. Ten minutes later, we were at the Spencer Leadership Centre. The admissions director was there to greet each one of us, we had coffee and fruit, and joined the rest of the visitors in one of the classrooms.

There were about two dozens of people that came out for this visit. We first sat through an admissions presentation of mostly things I already knew - that is, easily found on their website. One thing that they really stress is that they were the oldest MBA school in Canada, and had a huge alumni network of 40 thousand people I believe. The alumni network kinda came with being an old school, and also, their alumni included both MBA and HBA graduates. The HBA is their undergraduate counterpart of the MBA, where students do work that's very similar to the MBA during the final two years of their studies, after which you can apply to do an accelerated MBA for 8 months at Ivey.

I noticed that when asked about why Ivey was not ranked as THE top school, one of the staff completely dissed the rankings, saying that there are many factors that influence the rankings, and that he didn't know at all how the rankings people came up with their rankings. I understand, but that's not really an answer. There was just a hint of arrogance, for lack of a better word, that I didn't like.

This is also a good place to mention the fact that I later noticed that Ivey was only accredited by one of the world's top three accrediting bodies. I know that this doesn't have much practical impact for an individual student, but you would expect that recognitions like this would be important for them as a school.

After the presentation, four professors took over and did a brief introduction of the academic side of things as well as a question and answer session. I already knew that they rely heavily on the case-based method. They also made sure we knew that a large percentage of the grades are based on class participation. While it was also made clear that the grading is based on the quality of your comments rather than the quantity, I don't think it would be very easy (even for a professor) to grade the quality of a comment. Also, assuming all students are of similar aptitude, the more things you say the more likely you are to hit a "good quality" comment. Overall, I think that this just puts too much emphasis on speaking up in class, and possibly pressure on the students to say things all the time.

There was a brief tour of the building after the presentation. They do have a nice-looking building, complete with places to eat, meeting rooms that you can book, and even their own gym. Lunch was then provided in a lounge, with a panel of current students who were of course very enthusiastic about the program and very willing to help and answer any questions or concerns that we had. In fact, Ivey has a "student ambassador" program just for the purpose of recruitment, where you can personally email the student ambassadors and it is their duty to attend to you.

Ivey's class schedule alternates between morning and afternoon. On any given day you would only get one 4-hour block of class, either in the morning or in the afternoon, but not both. The professors and the students think that there would surely not be enough time to do all the work, if class runs the entire day. This is interesting to note, since Queen's usually has classes both in the morning and in the afternoon, all day everyday.

After lunch, we sat in the first half of the day's class, which was accounting. We were given the case just that morning, so there hadn't been time to look through it, plus I knew nothing whatsoever about accounting, so it was a little difficult to actually understand the class. One thing that's for sure though is that the class was very dynamic, and students were VERY eager to participate. The professor acted as a facilitator to the students' discussions (this was also a point Ivey made sure that we understood).

I'd like to add that because Ivey uses only cases for the entire duration of the program, you end up with over 300 cases by the time you're done. Because cases are practical, a lot of alumni find that the higher up the ranks they are within a company, the more applicable their MBA learnings become (with regards to making executive decisions, etc.).

During the class break, we made our way to another room where a career management presentation awaited us. Of course the numbers are impressive, and I don't need to say more. As with most other MBA programs, the most popular areas of employment for grads are finance and consulting. Ivey integrates their career management course into the curriculum just like accounting or any other course, and uses cases in this career management course as well. A typical case would be like "Linda is finishing up her MBA and is torn between becoming a financial analyst and a management consultant" etc. I thought this approach was interesting enough that I should mention it.

The day ended with opportunities to ask questions to admissions and career management staff, who then arranged for those us that came by train to be picked up by a couple of limos to head back to the train station. (The first class waiting room at the London station is beautiful, by the way.)

Overall I thought it was a good experience, and good effort on Ivey's part. Apart from what I've already mentioned, here are some other things that stood out (neither positively nor negatively):

• Incredible amount of workload - students, faculty, and staff kept warning us about it
• "Transformation" - a word that's often used to describe the effect that an Ivey education has on students. I thought it was interesting.
• A lot of the staff have graduated from Ivey. The "director of admissions" is a young HBA who graduated only in 2003.

I also had the following reservations:

• For at least some of the topics, I believe that lectures (and other methods) would at least be a good supplement to the case-based method.
• They kept mentioning the HBA to an extent that gave me the impression that you'd be better off choosing the HBA as an undergrad, rather than the MBA. What's up with that?
• The issue with how important class participation is.
• Rankings and accreditation.

Overall though it is definitely a good school. The reputation and alumni network should come in very handy when it comes time to look for a job.

Appleseed documents his experience with Ivey here.

GMAT Test Day

Overall I had a good test experience. I did my homework and anticipated the potentially intimidating aspects. I knew that I was going to have my fingerprint taken every time I went in and out of the room. I knew I was also going to have my picture taken. And I knew that my watch wasn't even allowed inside. I had read somewhere that once someone had a cold and was not allowed to bring napkins into the room, so she had to go all the way out of the building every time she needed to blow her nose and lost a lot of time. This was not the case - while you can't bring in your own napkins, I was offered their napkins at the centre.

However, I was still understandably more or less nervous. More than ten minutes into the first essay, I was just beginning the second paragraph and felt stuck. My heart was beating so rapidly I had to hold on to my chest, at one point it felt like I was going to flunk this thing. Then I took a couple of minutes to tell myself that I had written these essays many times, and they all worked out okay without exception, even if I felt stuck at the beginning. Basically, I managed to collect myself and focus, and finished the first essay. The second essay went fairly smoothly.

Since my biggest roadblock was always the essays, I felt like a weight lifted off my shoulders by the first break - this had been exactly what I would feel during all of my practice tests. After the essays, I proceeded through the exam normally as I would any other practice. Yes, I wanted to take extra time to make sure that my answers were correct, but I also knew that I probably didn't have time to double check everything, and that with my extensive practice the past 3 weeks, I was very rarely making stupid mistakes anymore. I think the most important thing is to practice as if you're taking the real test, and go to the real thing as if you're just doing a practice.

I felt that the questions on the test were on par with GMATPrep, regarding content and difficulty. No odd or weird things that I sometimes encountered in Kaplan/Princeton Review. I finished the quant section about 6 minutes early and the verbal section about 8 minutes early, which was basically consistent with the timing of my practice tests. Occasionally there would be the odd question that I wasn't 100% sure about, but I also kept in mind that a lot of the questions (>10 in each section) were going to be trial questions that would not count towards my score, so I never sweat over any one single question, and nothing in particular influenced my performance.

By the end of it, I was pretty sure that I would get 700+. Although, being conservative, I also anticipated the possibility that I might get 680. I chose to veiw my score - you should always view your score, unless something catastrophic happened during the test that caused you to leave half of it unfinished, or something. The only concern is if you've done badly, but so what? You gotta retake it, but if you don't view your score, you still gotta retake it anyway. If you improve on your second attempt, it'll be viewed as a positive thing. Schools don't mind if you've taken it four times, as long as there's a general trend of improvement.

I was then presented with five choices of schools to which I would like my score report sent. Since this service is included with writing the test, one should take advantage of it. If you decide to send an extra report after you've taken the test, there is a charge of $25 or $28 US per school.

The computer took forever to calculate my score, during which time I lowered my head, prayed and kept my fingers crossed. Then, through the corner of my eyes, I saw that a scored had appeared on the screen. I took a deep breath, and looked up.

770

Oh my god. Reality check. Yes it's real. Go me!

In total it took about 3 months of preparation, including trying to decide on materials at the beginning. Much of this preparation was for the essays - my time would probably be much shorter if I wasn't so neurotic about AWA. Incidentally, 3 months was a good preparation timeframe suggested by GMAT instructors. If you take too long, you start forgetting what you did when you first started.

The Day Before GMAT Test Day

Even though I made mock-testing a daily routine, I did nothing the day before the test. I was too nervous and neurotic to do anything. I tried to look at some of the most difficult essay topics again (since I had forgotten about some of them), but didn't get too far. Basically I just lazed around and browsed the internet.

GMAT Practice Tests

Undoubtedly, this was one of the most important components of my preparation, and anyone taking any standardized test should invest a significant amount of effort in practice tests. I took a couple of tests when I first started studying, and then realized that I would be making less mistakes if I took these tests after reviewing all study materials. Hence, I stopped doing full tests and concentrated on getting through the essays and the Manhattan GMAT books/problem sets.

As I said in my previous post, after I was through with reviewing everything, I booked the real test for three weeks down the road, and started doing one full 4-hour test each weekday for the next 3 weeks. It's very important to do the 4 hours, including essays - while you don't have to do it for 3 weeks (I was getting very annoyed by the final week and wished I booked the thing for earlier so I could get it over with already :p), I think it's a good idea to do this everyday for at least a week, so it becomes part of your daily routine (like eating and sleeping), and you get used to having to sit through the 4 hours. When I took the first couple of practices before the majority of my revision, I realized that I had a problem with the verbal component, simply because I was getting very tired towards the end and just could not absorb anything I read. Making the test part of my daily routine helped a lot with building the stamina I needed on test day.

The other thing about doing practice tests is that you should take into consideration the time of the day of your real test appointment. My test was at 12:15pm (did not want to do 8am or 6pm, this was the only other option), and I was to arrived 30 minutes prior. I saw a potential problem with the scheduling of my lunch - I needed to either take it at maybe 10:30, or postpone it until after the test. I decided to go with the latter, so for three weeks, I would get up and have a gigantic breakfast. I would then start my 4-hour test at around 12, and have a light meal after that. During my breaks, I would have a sip of water, a 2-minute snack, and use the washroom, just as what I would do on the real test. This is something else that's important to note - you should always try to duplicate real test conditions. Unplug your phones. Come back to the computer a couple of minutes earlier to make sure that you're not late.

A note about AWA: after a couple of practice tests, I stopped writing essays from Kaplan/Princeton Review/Manhattan GMAT/etc. The reason is simple: they're prohibited from using actual GMAT essay topics so they had to make up their own, but we have the real topics. I used a random number generator to randomly pick my topics from the list of real topics, and those would be my essay questions for whatever test I'm taking. I had the PDF file of topics on the top part of my screen, notepad at the bottom, and an online countdown clock on the side. This was a modest duplication of the real split screen for essay questions.

Here's a brief review of the tests that I've taken:

GMATPrep: of course this is a must-have. I took one at the beginning of my preparations and another one three days before the real test. There was a 40-point increase in scores, which gave me a boost of confidence. I would recommend using this software this way, so that you can see how much you've improved, and you have the most accurate estimate of your real score close to the test date.

GMAT past paper exams: these are probably neglected by most test takers, but they're an excellent source of real past GMAT questions. Some of the questions are duplicated in OG, but most are not (or I couldn't tell). They are from a decade ago and tend to be easier than current questions, but I used them mostly for the purpose of practicing more real questions, and building the stamina needed for the 4 hours. The format is also different, so I rearranged the sections so that it was 75 minutes of each of quant and verbal, instead of 6 little sections. I didn't pay much attention to the score, since the questions were easy and scoring mechanism was different (they deduct points for wrong answers, so you're not encouraged to guess).

Princeton Review: I really needed that boost of confidence from GMATPrep, because of other tests that had been giving me really low scores, including some from PR. Their quant sections seemed way too easy (I would finish 20+ minutes before time was up), and some of their verbal answers just didn't feel right, even after I read their explanations (this is where I lost most of my points).

Kaplan: unstable and unpredictable scoring. The quant and verbal questions were okay, with the exception of extremely hard-to-understand reading comprehension passages on one of my tests. They also had the weirdest essay topics - I even had trouble identifying whether one was an argument or an issue. (This was when I decided I wouldn't put up with these topics anymore.)

Manhattan GMAT: definitely has the best questions. The quant questions were MUCH more difficult than those on the real test, nevertheless they were very good practice. I also liked the verbal sections, and even the essay questions were very similar to real GMAT topics. If you do these tests within the time limit, you will get a fairly good prediction of your score. However, for me this required a slightly different strategy for the quant section. I never had issues with timing for any other practice test, and MGMAT were the only tests in which I had to hurry and guess answers at times when I knew I could do them if I had more time. I would recommend top scorers to go through all MGMAT tests - with time constraints if you want a more accurate score, and untimed (for quant) if you want to focus on the contents, which I think is worth doing.

Ivey Class Visit Scheduled

When I'm not doing the mock tests, I browse the internet and find out about the schools I'm interested in. Ivey offers a class visit every month, when they welcome a bunch of prospective students to campus, sit in a class, sit through presentations, talk with profs/students/admissions people/etc. This is all expense paid if you live in southern Ontario, up to $600 reimbursement if you lived in North America (I think), and up to $1200 reimbursement if you're anywhere else in the world. If you fall under the reimbursement category, you do actually need to apply to Ivey for the next cohort, before you can get your money.

This is open to pretty much everyone, as long as you're more or less eligible to apply to their program. They do require your resume before they can confirm your booking.

I registered online and someone was quick to get back to me. They needed to know how I wanted to get myself to London. From Toronto, I could either drive and receive a gas card (forgot how much), or I could opt for first class train travel. I opted for first class train travel. Its net worth was more than the gas card, and I could relax instead of concentrating on the road. I was put in touch with a VIA rail booking agent, and I was now booked to visit Ivey on August 14th.

GMAT Scheduled

At this point, I was done with reviewing all the materials. I think it was a good move to book the test at this time, for three weeks down the road. This allowed enough time to still get an appointment time slot that was good for me. In addition, booking the test meant there was no turning back, no getting neurotic and thinking I needed more time, and giving myself more time. It was already mid-July and I still needed to take the test and do the applications. My plan was to do one mock test (almost) everyday, up until test day, so that test day would just be like a normal day.

Choosing Schools

Of course, preparing for the GMAT wasn't the only item on my agenda during this period of time. If I wanted to make it to the next class, I still needed to make some decisions about where to apply, and craft my applications. I also didn't want to be too late in the game, especially this year when many people are choosing to go back to school because of the recession looming in the background.

Believe it or not, my choices were actually very limited. As I've mentioned before, I have a weak undergraduate GPA. Specifically, most of the Canadian programs have a hard GPA requirement of 3.0, which I don't have. Now that I think about it, this was also part of the reason I put off doing the GMAT two years ago - I didn't think I had a chance of being admitted into a reasonable school.

With this in mind, the most popular schools in Toronto where I'm at - Rotman (U of Toronto) and Schulich (York U) - were out of the question. I had no doubt that they would not waive this requirement under any circumstances, partly because I've personally experienced the bureaucratic ways of U of T, and partly because there's surely no lack of good applicants that meet this requirement, so there would be no need for them to make exceptions.

On a side note, Rotman and Schulich rarely interview applicants. Rumour has it that if you had a stellar GPA/GMAT/both, you're pretty much guaranteed a spot in the program. This means that you might get a classmate who is an expert at studying (on their own) but lacks other essential skills.

I also figured that I didn't want to stay in a big city anyway, with commuter classmates. I wanted to go somewhere where the MBA class is way more than just schoolwork. I wanted an entire community, complete with networking, socializing and forming friendships. I didn't want to be in a class with people who disappear to go home after class. I also wanted to attend a small program, so that there's enough personal attention and less bureaucracy to go around.

The other thing I prefered was a one-year program, instead of two years. Basically, a one-year program does not contain much less material. First, a "two-year" program really only uses 8 months in a year, so it's only 16 months, versus the 12-months of the one-year program. Secondly, these 16-month-programs are way less intensive - specifically, many of them don't have classes on Fridays, for example.

The only real drawback is the lack of internship opportunities in a 12-month program, but considering that I want to stay in consulting, I don't think that it is necessary for me to have this internship experience. I'm not getting any younger and would rather just get it over with in less time.

Appleseed also briefly discussed the pros and cons of a 12-month-program here, as well as posted a very comprehensive list of what to consider when choosing a program here.

Eventually, without visiting or talking to any school (due to lack of time), I narrowed down my choices to three schools (links on the right):

Queen's School of Business
Richard Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario)
The Johnson School (Cornell University)

One thing that these schools have in common is that they're all relatively small programs in small cities, and most, if not all, of their students relocate for the year. I will talk about my experience with each of them individually in later posts.

I thought that my odds of getting into each of these schools are similar, and so applied to them all at around the same time.

I also picked out a few safety schools, and was going to do another round of applications in February if I didn't get into any of my top choices:

HEC Montreal
Specifically a business school with no other disciplines. Like Queen's, this place is accredited by all three of the world's leading accrediting bodies. One-year program, has a consulting focus that I'm interested in.

Telfer School of Management (University of Ottawa)
One-year program also with consulting options, accredited by 2 out of the 3 accrediting bodies.

DeGroote School of Business (McMaster University)
This made the list because it was close to home, although I was increasingly leaning towards not going there. They only have a 2-year program without a consulting focus, and an admissions lady at the MBA fair told me that their strength was in the co-op program, which is mostly for new grads without work experience.

GMAT Essays (a.k.a. AWA)

Procrastination was obviously not the way to go. This is how I got over my fear for the essays.

I searched online and got a grasp of what the structure of the essays should look like (intro, 2-3 points, conclusion, each point in a paragraph - here is one of the many similar templates online). Also, luckily, we're given the topics beforehand, and I knew that the only way for me to beat the essays was to go through every single topic. There are about 300 topics, so I figured that if I went through 10 topics in details every day, I would need a month to go through them all, and that seemed like an attainable goal.

I started this mission of familiarizing myself with all essay topics right around when I started reading the MGMAT materials. For each topic, I would think of at least 2 to 3 points that I could talk about, together with examples. As I've mentioned before, I work flexible hours (and mostly from home), so it was very convenient that I had quite some time to spend on studying. At the beginning, I would get lazy on some days and do less than 10 topics a day (or skip a day if I had a lot of other stuff to do), but I knew that I didn't want my 30-day schedule to be significantly delayed, and quickly got better at sticking to what I had planned. If I was fairly busy on any day in particular, I would consider doing less studying on other topics, but stuck to the 10-per-day self-imposed essay quota. As time went by, I also became faster at thinking of points to make, as well as more familiar with some of the topics that were foreign to me (issues regarding the arts, etc), and I saw that as an improvement.

I finished outlining all 300 topics in little over a month, and then concentrated on quickly finishing off the rest of the MGMAT syllabus within the next few days.

The Real Start and Study Materials

I stopped overworking myself for large consulting companies and started to work for my friend's start-up business, with a very flexible schedule, so that I can devote much of my time to getting into an MBA program. I was serious now, and with the current economic conditions, I believe that going back to school would be a wise step.

After I decided to take the GMAT for real, I spent quite some time deciding on the approach that I should take, while simultaneously doing timed questions from the official guides. I attended free workshops offered by different prep companies, trial classes, etc. Looked up books and reviews on amazon. Browsed the internet for ideas. In the end, I decided not to pay and take a class, because I had a fairly good grasp on the content as a whole, and half the time I would just be sitting in the class waiting for other people to understand.

Having said that, I did want more preparation materials than just the OG, and eventually decided on the set of Manhattan GMAT books (which are thin red booklets - not to be confused with "Manhattan Review", which are blue). I also downloaded the MGMAT syllabus and loosely followed it, so that I was alternating between different verbal and quant topics, not doing too much of anything at once and getting sick of it.

Study Materials

The only books I used were the MGMAT series (all 8 books) and the official guides. By the time I started the MGMAT series, I had already done over half of the official guide problems, in sequence. Here's a brief note on how helpful I found each book, keeping in mind that it only applied to my background:

Official guide: get all 3 books, and do each question at least once. Doing REAL questions are very helpful. Two years ago I never bothered to get the quant book. Then I figured that no matter how well I think I can grasp the concepts, it always helps to go through all official questions. And I was right.

Manhattan GMAT:
Sentence correction: yes, this is a must-have for anyone hoping to improve their sentence correction skills. I did the suggested exercises in the OG/VG after each chapter (including the ones that I had done before), and saw that most of my mistakes were about topics that I had not yet covered. It was also because of this that I decided to hold off doing the majority of my practice exams until after I was completely done with the reviews.

Critical reasoning: personally this was not much help to me. I'm fairly logical to start with, and I found that the best way to improve my CR was to do lots of practice and study each individual question that I did wrong, on a case-by-case basis. This way, I eventually learned to identify some of the things that were more subtle to me at the beginning. My revision of CR was more about doing the problem sets grouped by the type of reasoning (ie, strengthening, weakening, inference, etc) - this grouping may or may not have helped me, but I imagine that it would be more useful to someone who's weaker in CR.

Reading comprehension: since I sucked the most in sentence correction and reading comprehension, and I made an improvement in sentence correction, reading comprehension became my worst area. The guide wasn't completely helpful to me either - I would have no time to "actively" read by outlining the passage as I go along, and I didn't find this particularly useful either. But, I liked some of the points they have summarized at the end, one of them being making sure that you can account for EVERY word in your answer choice.

I knew every single concept in the quant books, but some of these books were still helpful:

Word translation: I really liked this because it gave some neat time-saving strategies that would be very useful for the more difficult problem, and it also had a good supply of extra practice problems. In general, their strategies can apply to all levels of questions, easy to difficult.

Number properties: again, I knew all the concepts, but it was very nice to see them systematically written out. I also was not familiar enough with this type of GMAT questions in general, so this provided just the extra review and exercises that I needed.

The other 3 quant books: not particularly useful to me - I've known all of these by heart since grade 3, no kidding. But they do look like good review material if you need help in any of these areas.