First Week of Real Classes

Let me start by saying that last Saturday night we had a kickass transition event organized by members of last year's class, who sent us running all over Kingston on a scavenger hunt, which ended at a pub, where more fun activities happened.

This week has been a full-blown week, with classes 8:30-4:30 everyday and four assignments due. And we did it! Challenging as they are, I'm having a great time doing crush assignments (where you get the actual assignment after lunch, and you have from 4:30pm to midnight to finish it with your team).

Here's Appleseed's account of his week, and I just have a few things to add.

We did not end up getting home at 3am last night! Our team went home after we handed in the assignment at midnight, had a great night's sleep (much needed because of the combination of late nights and early mornings this week), and came for our presentation this morning after 11, which went very well.

I'm loving every moment of my time here at Queen's, even though sometimes it's just struggling to not fall asleep. The classes have been amazing, and I'm just constantly in awe of what excellent teachers the profs are, and what everyone in the class has to say from his or her own experience and perspective. It definitely promises to be one of the best years of my life.

I haven't heard anything official on starting up the .4 club, I'll wait and see. The election for the executive council is going to be very soon (Monday, if I'm not mistaken).

I'm going to go freshen up now for a wine and cheese this afternoon with alumni who graduated 5 and 10 years ago. For the rest of the weekend, I'll squeenze in as much reading for economics next week as possible. I've wanted to read some economics before I came to Kingston, but never ended up doing it. I've heard that the prof is such a pro on the subject that the basic concepts are just second nature to him, so it'll be challenging for those of us who never did anything on the subject.

Orientation Week

This week is the official start of the program. It's been so overwhelming that it feels like much more than a week has passed. I am tempted to just link to Appleseed's experience of his first week here and skip writing about it myself, but there are a few things I would like to add.

Appleseed's first week

I too am very tired from this week, but unlike Appleseed, I don't get to sleep in tomorrow, because some of us have our team facilitator meetings at 9am. Queen's assigns each team a professional facilitator, and a brief introduction can be found here. I am truly impressed of the amount of effort put into the two distinguishing factors that sets Queen's apart from other business schools: the team approach and the level of personalization. Teambuilding is such a conscious activity here, there is so much time (and money) invested into getting our teams to the high performance level. I'm very excited and look forward to working with my team. In addition, although I've heard a lot about the personal service that the students receive here, it's not until I experience it myself that it truly dawned on me. I'm sure everyone really appreciates having everything delivered to our desks (binders/textbooks/documents/gift baskets!), and it just impressed us to no end when one of the ladies in the program office sent us all an email, asking the six people who bought their textbooks from the bookstore to bring their receipts to the office to get reimbursed. How did she even know? I would never have imagined being a student and receiving this level of service.

I would write more, but I've written the highlight and I should really get back to my readings for next week. It looks like next week is going to be one of the busiest weeks of the entire year: it's the first week of "real" classes and we have four assignments due, with a team presentation on Saturday. Go team!

Housing and Unofficial Start

I've settled nicely into the house I found. I might as well talk about my housing situation here. I was well aware of the intense workload of the MBA program, and figured that I likely won't have much time to prepare food for myself. Since I'm pretty serious about food, my number one priority was to go for a meal plan. I had initially wanted to rent a 1-bedroom apartment or the grad residence, and go for the meal plan that the university offers. But, the university meal plans have assigned time slots for when you go for your meals. If you miss it, you stay hungry until the next meal. With crazy MBA schedule, I didn't want to be confined to these time slots three times a day. Besides, if I were to go for an apartment, I'd have to worry about furniture, since furnished apartments that are within my price range are pretty much nonexistent. And of course, I didn't want to be bothered to think about furniture.

Then I found out about co-op, which offers furnished rooms with meal plans. Great, except the meal plan isn't offered in the summer. The university doesn't have a meal plan in the summer either. Looked like I couldn't escape cooking for the summer in any case, so the next item on my agenda was to find a place for the summer where I can comfortably cook. I could've stayed at co-op for the summer as well, but with ~10 people and one kitchen per house, I doubt it would work out nicely. After searching around on the internet, I found a nice house to share for the summer with a couple of other girl grad students. The AMS Marketplace is where I found this place, I think this is one of the lesser-known sites for some reason. The internal portal provides a list of sites to search for accomodation. In addition, check out craigslist.

A couple of suggestions regarding housing:

• While it might be tempting to try secure housing as early as possible, realistically there's no need. When it gets closer to the date of your intended move-in, more places become available, and at lower prices.
• If you look for a private apartment within a house, be sure to personally pay a visit, or have someone check it out for you. I've heard horror stories of apartments that are not suitable for human habitation.
• You may hear about various rules governing the application process for the grad residence - don't pay much attention to them. In the end, if you apply, you'd probably get in. I know people who applied the very last minute and still got a spot.

In other news:

I finished all prep materials. I'm finding that I'm way ahead of a lot of people in the class in this respect, I guess I have it easy, not having a lot to do for work in the past couple of months.

A whole lot of us met at The Tango last night, it was great fun. I heard that some people also went for poutine afterwards - gotta stay in the loop and join them next time!

Had our first pre-MBA workshop today, on "Basic Math and Spreadsheet Skills for Business Analysis". I was less up for the "basic math" and more for the spreadsheet skills, but the prof spent most of the time doing basic math (starting from 2 + 3 = 5), and went a little fast, in my opinion, with the spreadsheets at the end. I didn't think people needed to relearn math that's THAT basic (since we've all done our GMAT), so would've been nice to spend more time with the spreadsheets, or possibly extend this to beyond one day.

Tomorrow is Finance. I haven't bothered much with looking at my calculator, it's the only "prep" that I haven't done. I figured I'll do it once I have a better grasp of doing the same things on paper first.

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.

Prelude

By summer 2006, I had had two years of full-time work experience, which prompted me to start contemplating the MBA. I knew that a GMAT score is valid for five years, so I could start preparing for the GMAT and get it out of the way first. I ordered the official guide (orange book) and the verbal guide (purple book), and started doing the questions timed. With my background in math, I didn't think that I would need the quantitative guide (green book).

However, I started to procrastinate after a little while, because I did not want to start the daunting task of preparing for the GMAT essays. I downloaded the topics and tried a couple, and my best record was an hour for an essay. How was I supposed to accomplish it in half an hour, on the test, twice?

Then work got busy, so my GMAT books sat on the shelf collecting dust for the next year and half.

For the record, when I did the diagnostic test from the OG 2 years ago, I got "above average" for reading comprehension and sentence correction, and "excellent" for the other sections.