Grad School Application Update

It's been almost a month since I updated you all on the status of my grad school apps, so I thought it would only be fitting to do one to complement my recent GMAT update. After retaking the GMATs, I thought it would be relatively easy to have the schools that I applied to consider my new score with my application. Sadly, it's been MUCH more challenging than I had previously noticed.

Fuqua has been the only school that has made this process easy and guaranteed that my score will make it into my file and be considered with my application. Kellogg will do their best to make sure that my new score gets considered with my application, but they cannot guarantee it. MIT apparently didn't consider my score because they rejected me just 4 days after supposedly receiving my updated score. Oh well, MIT wasn't my top choice.

Haas, however, has been much more challenging. It took me several emails to get through to the admissions office and when I did they told me that I'd have to move my application from Round 2 to Round 4 to have my new score considered. That seemed odd. So I consulted Clear Admit and they agreed that I should attempt to get my score to them and not move it to R4. Sadly, I learned today that after all of that, my scores didn't make it into my file and may have contributed to the reason that I didn't receive an interview invitation for Super Saturday at Haas this past weekend. At this point, it's looking like I pretty much have to move my application so I can avoid being denied from Haas in R2. All of this is particularly sad since Haas is my top choice and I know that my chances of being accepted are much less in R4 than they would have been if Haas had just considered my new GMAT score in R2.

So, now I'm down to just 3 schools. I'll hear from Fuqua in the next week or so, then Kellogg by the end of March, but I will have to wait until the end of May to hear from Haas now that I'm moving to R4. Oh well, I'll just have to find some patience. Good luck to the rest of you waiting for them to decide your fate for next year!

Finally Done with the GMAT!!!!

Yay yay!! I'm finally done with the GMATs. I took the GMAT for the second time on 2/23 and I have to say that I've learned a lot from this experience. My key lesson was around JUST BEING RELAXED! I do so much better when I just relax and let my brain work. All of the information is in there, I just need to let it out.

I purposely waited a month after my last business school application was completed to take my GMAT again, so I'd have plenty of time to do thousands of practice problems and as many practice tests as I can possibly get my hands on. Of course I relaxed a bit after I finished my applications and before I knew it I had lost a week, then I had family stuff that I had to deal with for another week or so. All of this meant that I didn't get through nearly as many practice tests or problems as I wanted to. I realized to that I was doing great on timed problem sets both in terms of finishing them in the time limit and answering the vast majority of them correctly. Then, I'd get to a practice test and not be able to finish it in time and score in the very low 600s. It was rather frustrating, but I worked to get my game face on for test day.

On test day, I told myself that my score didn't matter at all. My schools that I had already applied to would never see my score from this test unless I sent it to them. I just got to spend the morning of my day off answering a bunch of questions before I got to spend my afternoon doing fun things. This totally took the pressure off. I knew I was going to be ok when I finished the math section barely in time. Yes, the last 5 problems or so were a bit rushed and the last couple I did have to rule out 1 or 2 options and then guess, but I finished all of them which I hadn't during my previous test.

I have to say to all of those of you still studying for the GMAT out there, you should practice being relaxed just as much as you should practice the problems and study the material that is on the test. Honestly, I think that's the reason that I did so much better this time around despite not much additional studying. Good luck!!

Fuqua Interview!!

I heard late last week that I got an interview for Fuqua! Very exciting. Luckily with all of the other insanity that's happening in the next couple of weeks at work, not at work and with GMAT stuff, I'm very glad that I got a phone interview with an Admissions Officer and do not have to travel to Durham, NC. I do want to travel to Durham at some point, hopefully for an Admitted Student weekend or something.

Now back to the remaining GMAT studying and interview prep for the weekend...

Grad School Update

I know I've been posting about all sorts of things lately from the etchings that my grandparents gave me to Dessert Night's first birthday, but I haven't let you know what's been going on in my life on the grad school front. Honestly, it's been a bit quieter lately which is refreshing after all of those nights being up super late working on essays. That aside, there have been 3 major things that have happened lately:

1. Stanford rejected me. Honestly, I wasn't super surprised about this one, just rather disappointed as I had been hoping that Stanford would be my new home as of next year. They seem to be one of those schools where everyone who would consider applying has a chance of getting in, but really no one has a GREAT chance. So, it was worth the shot to apply. I think I liked their application the best of all of them too.

2. I had my Kellogg interview! Before any of you go getting too excited, getting an interview for Kellogg doesn't mean what it does for other schools. Kellogg interviews everyone who applies (assuming you don't live in a remote village in the middle of Sudan or something). Luckily, there are a lot of alumni scattered about so not everyone has to make the pilgrimage to Chicago in the middle of winter. I met with my alumni interviewer at a local Starbucks and we chatted for about an hour. All of the questions that he asked me were questions that I had prepped for care of the ClearAdmit interview wiki. I felt really prepared and we had a great discussion. All in all, a good contrast to my Stanford rejection.

3. I'm retaking the GMAT. Did you let out a groan too? I can't say that I'm excited about this fact, but I could use the opportunity to bump up my score a few points. Historically, I've been a bad test taker, but it's all mental so I want to use this opportunity to change that for myself. (Though it's not going great so far, as I'm writing this post to procrastinate taking a practice test.)

That's all of the recent happenings on the grad school side of things. I will be sure to keep you updated as I hear back from my other 4 schools. Good luck to all of you fellow applicants!! The end is in sight!

Happy Birthday Dessert Night!!!!!

Wow, it's really hard to believe that it's been a whole year since the very first Dessert Night. I had no idea what to expect at the beginning. Would people even come over? Would there be so many people that they wouldn't fit in my living room? Would I really be able to keep this up? Well, it's been an entire year and we've made it all work. I have really appreciated other Dessert Night Goers really stepping up and helping out when I had grad school apps and GMAT prep that kept me from having time to bake. You have helped me keep Dessert Night alive despite everyone's busy schedules.

To make Dessert Night's birthday special, we had several desserts. I had made Peppermint Marshmallows just for fun and we enjoyed those and some hot chocolate. Also, ChuThis gave me some cookie dough for her fabulous Chocolate Toffee cookies which were amazing. Finally, I wanted to make a dessert with the rest of the awesome apples from Mariquita Farms. I found a recipe for Caramel Apple Pie (since we couldn't have plain apple pie because we had that back in April 2008). Williams-Sonoma has tried and true always tasty recipes, including the one for the pie.

All in all, it's been a great year for Dessert Night. Many thanks to NG for Dessert Night's birthday candle! That's a tradition that we'll have to keep up.

Here's to another great year for Dessert Night!!!!

APPS ARE DONE!!!

I was thinking that I should start this post by apologizing for my recent silence lately, but then I realized that there was absolutely nothing to apologize for. I've been working like crazy to get my last application in!!! Luckily, I just made it and so did some awesome last minute essay feedback from J.

I know, I know, you're saying that you were done at noon on Tuesday and you waited until Saturday morning to blog about it?? Yes, I know. I'm sorry. Not only have I been celebrating the completion of all of these applications, but I've also been catching up on sleep and all of the other things that I've put off to get these essays done.

To those of you still working on your applications, good luck!! I hope they go well. To those of you who are anxiously awaiting to hear back from your Round 1 apps, I totally feel ya and I hope that you can just celebrate the accomplishments that you've made thus far and continue to realize that each of us is going to get into the schools that we're meant to go to regardless of what we want.

In the mean time, I'm just enjoying being done and having time for fun things, like making marshmallows (I will post pics of that too)!!

Sunnyside Up's Best of 2008

Since everyone else has been doing a best of 2008 blog post, I thought I should join in and pull one together as well. I'm borrowing the format that JulyDream used in her best of 2008 post to use in mine. I aimed to come up with the best 25 things of 2008 because I turned a quarter century in 2008, but I was only able to get to 17, so here goes the best 17 of 2008! (Note: these are in no particular order)

1. the beginning of dessert night
2. starting the business school application process
3. taking the GMAT finally
4. the Valentine's Day pillow fight (well the whole valentine's day experience)
5. the beginning of Sunnyside Up!
6. switching to a new job that didn't require traveling
7. leaving that new job and moving to one that required my brain
8. Spinsters' Annual Ball
9. J's Hanukkah adventure
10. MixMatch's trip to Baltimore
11. discovering Lululemon & Bar Method
12. Elizabeth's wedding trip to Longmont, CO
13. getting my dream Kitchen Aid mixer
14. the puppy cam
15. the Fois Gras appetizer at Ecco (technically discovered in 2007, but so tasty that it carried over)
16. finally getting decent knives
17. learning to wakeboard and ski

All in all, 2008 was a great year. I can't wait to see what 2009 has in store.

The Home Stretch!!!

I have to say that I'm very excited to be in the home stretch of the application process!!! Wow, I really never thought that I'd see this day. I'm still only exactly half of the way done with my applications thanks to Kellogg's 2 part application which I know others of you are wading through at the moment. I can't wait until next week when I get to celebrate being done. Until then, I'll be pondering influential life experiences, challenges and what I will bring to my peers at b school.

Good luck to all of the rest of you Round 2 applicants out there! Get through this final push on apps and we can spend the rest of our time awaiting the decision of our fate!

2 Down! Now Onto the Next One

This week I managed to get my Haas Round 2 application in a whole 5 hours prior to the deadline!! Wooo! It was fabulous! This extra time allowed me to take a brief nap and actually get to enjoy dessert night. I'm very excited to have 2 applications already turned in. Now, if only I could start hearing back from these schools...but that's another story.

Compared to my Stanford application, the one for Haas seemed a bit more generic. There were only a few questions that I got really excited about answering because the rest of them seemed pretty bland. Given that there were a ton more essays for Haas than Stanford, I didn't get to really reuse many of my Stanford essays. 2 of them fit the questions that Haas asked, but definitely required major tweaking to get them to match Haas's word limit.

All in all, I'm definitely happy with myself for getting these applications in and now I think I'm pretty good to go on getting through the rest of them a bit more easily. Thank you so much to C & J who helped me read all of the drafts for these essays and let me know when they were lost, what was good, and when I forgot that darn Oxford comma! I really appreciate it.

Now, if only I had a better GMAT score... that will be another thing to work on.

GMAT Attempt 1 and Another Week Another Grad School App

This week has already been a busy one. Luckily, last week was a short week because of Thanksgiving. I actually strategically planned my GMAT test date for the Monday after Thanksgiving because I wanted to be able to relax at home and I knew that I'd be getting more sleep and not have work on the brain because I would have a few days off.

I definitely think that this strategy helped me be more relaxed when I took the test, but it was not enough to really let me relax and not psych myself out, particularly on the math. The Quantitative section is not the type of math that's interesting to me, so it's hard to make yourself really care if Sally contributed twice as much as Joe and 2/3 as much as Sam how much they all contributed. Give me a mathematical model and I'll happily spend the next 3 days constructing it and improving my assumptions. Also, I tend to just finish all of the questions in this section in the nick of time, so I don't really have time to take a breather and re-center myself in the middle of the math section because those precious minutes are needed to answer each question. I think that's why I did so much better on the verbal. I took the time to breathe and relax in the middle of the exam because I knew that I would still finish early and that the additional relaxation would help me do better. I am still waiting to hear how I did on the writing portion, but I'm not too concerned because I generally write pretty well and schools don't put as much emphasis on the writing for me since English is my first language. All in all, it was an alright first shot at the GMAT. I'm not satisfied with my score, so I will be taking it again, but that's something that I'm doing for me.

Now that the GMAT's over with, well at least for this week, it's on to another grad school app! It seems like almost each week in December I need to switch my focus to a new app. Another week, another app is the motto for December!

One More Week!!

Yup, that's right folks!! I have one week of doing hundreds of multiple choice problems left! I can't wait to be done and back onto essays for my next grad school app.

While I'm incredibly stoked to be almost done with the GMAT, I'm quite nervous because I haven't been scoring as well as I would like to be on my practice tests. I have at least 4 more to take between now and next Monday so hopefully that changes soon!

Training Tips for the GMAT Marathon

A GMAT survivor and I were discussing the GMAT last night and he framed my thinking of how to go about the GMAT in a very interesting way. He used the analogy of a marathon.

Honestly, that's kind of how I feel about the process right now is that I'm in the middle of a long marathon and am doing my best to not get tired. But his analogy was different. He looked at the studying process for the GMAT like one would train for a marathon, with actual GMAT test day being race day. I could no longer think of GMAT studying as just the memorization of formulas, grammatical rules, and practice tests. Instead, these were some of his thoughts.

1. Train for endurance. When you train for a marathon, you run for increasing lengths of time until you've almost reached the 26 miles in one sitting. The GMAT is much the same. You cannot do small problem sets of 10-20 problems and then take a break and then go back. On test day, you will be doing 35-40 problems in 75 min blocks. Why not train that way? Do 60 problems at a time, then when you get to test day your brain things "wow, only 35 problems? easy!"

2. Train for a time. Many marathon runners train with the goal of the completing their marathon in a certain time. We GMAT takers HAVE to complete the GMAT sections in their allowed time or suffer a serious blow to our score. Why not train that way? If you have to do a problem in under 2 mins, but you practice doing them in 3-5 mins, then you're not helping yourself. Stick to the practice test time limits and then this will be no shock on test day.

3. Improve your strenghts as well as your weaknesses. I guess this applies more to triathalon runners, but if you're very good at the swimming leg of the race, work on getting faster at that too. All it does is improve your performance in the end. The GMAT is the same way. If you're good at math, an amazing math score will compensate for a slightly weaker verbal score, resulting in that overall high score that top B-schools want from you.

These tips will definitely result in a different studying approach for me for my remaining 2.5 weeks before my test. Hopefully, they will help others as well.

GMAT Crunch Time

Now that I've managed to get in my first B-school app, I'm buckling down on my GMAT studying once and for all. I have less than one month until my scheduled test date, so must get down to business.

Here's my quick and dirty study plan:
-Week 1: math review, practice math bin questions, & take a practice GMAT
-Week 2: finish math review, review concepts from missed practice problems & take a practice GMAT (2 if possible)
-Week 3: switch to verbal problems & take a practice GMAT (2 if possible)
-Week 4: finish review of verbal problems, do practice essays, & take a practice GMAT

As you can see, it's a pretty tight schedule, so if I'm not blogging regularly you'll know what happened.

Good luck to all the other B-school applicants out there.

The First B-School App is in!!!

Wednesday was the big day! I finally finished my essays and completed my application in time for the Stanford Round 1 deadline. Thank you SOOOOO much to ChuThis, Ben, Gabe, and J for all of their help reading my essays, applications, and making sure that I remained relatively calm and focused throughout this crazy process.

Good luck to all of my fellow applicants for the Stanford GSB Class of 2011!!

Now begins the waiting for my interview invitation.

Forte Foundation MBA Fair

After my first experience at a full blown MBA fair last weekend, I really didn't have many expectations for the Forte Foundation's MBA fair on Tuesday night at the Westin St Francis in downtown SF. I was pleasantly surprised. They had all of the top schools that I was interested in all in one room, great food for those of us who hadn't been home to snag some dinner yet and a really informative presentation.

I got to wander through the ballroom and talk to Admissions staff from Haas, Wharton, Chicago GSB, Fuqua, Kellogg, Sloan and even some more local colleges like Mills and USF. It was great talking to all of the admissions staff and some alumni that they had on hand. I picked up a ton of literature that I will have to read through at some point soon and start plotting my plan of attack.

The presentation that I was able to attend (I missed the second one because of dessert night) was a great reminder of why I think I need/want to go to business school. They had a pannel of 5 women who had all gone to business school for a variety of reasons at a variety of times in their lives, including one who just graduated in May. It was a great reminder how people in all sorts of different places in life and industries can all benefit from a business school education.

All in all, it was a really well put together event that even included prizes (no, I didn't win any sadly). I'm really glad that I attended this event and I really should have just gone to this one instead of the other MBA fair that I went to last weekend.

Way to go Forte!

The MBA Application Season is in Full Swing!!

Yup, it's that time of year. MBA applications are starting to come out and this year's applicants are buckling down to study for their GMATs and get started on their applications.

It has been great fun living vicariously through this time when others have been going through this process previously and now it's my turn. It has been great fun reading the blogs and hearing from friends about their experiences in their first month of business school! JulyDream, you've got it all under control and thanks for sharing all of your adventures and trials with us!

Recently, I've been buckling down on both my GMAT studying and my applications. I was pleased to see that I had improved almost 100 points from my first practice test to the one that I finished last weekend. This makes me feel a bit better about succeeding on the actual test and motivates me to study more. Thanks to ManhattanGMAT for the free online practice test and analysis!

Now, it's on to applications. Luckily a lot more business schools are accepting GRE scores, which I happen to have for my previous applications to Economics grad schools. I've started with all of that useless information (you know, your name, address, work history) and am starting to give some thought to those all important essays. Fortunately, I now have MS Word on my new mac just in time! Thanks J!

Along with all of the applications and studying, come the MBA fairs. San Francisco is a hotspot for all of these events. Here are some of the ones that I will be checking out in the next couple of weeks:
-Forte Foundation MBA Fair
-World MBA Fair
-The MBA Tour

It's going to be a busy application season, but if it means going to my dream school, then it's totally worth it!

Motivation, Fear, Laziness, and Standardized Tests

Standardized tests have always instilled a certain amount of fear into me. Ask me to write 5 essays...no problem. But ask me to choose between those 5 ever so common answer choices and I get that deer in headlights look.

Apparently, when I was younger, I wasn't so fearful of these tests. My mom tells me that I got 100% on the SAT tests that they give to First Graders. Too bad that's not still the case. In high school, the PSAT started the fear because all of my classmates were so terrified of the test and the school tried to tell us that we needed to do well on it or else (not sure what the "else" was but Catholic nuns are good with the whole instilling fear thing). Since that test and especially the SAT which determined your fate for college, I have tended to over think tests and second guess myself, often selecting the correct answer only to change it to a wrong one at the last minute.

The first time I took the GRE, I was so terrified of not scoring above a 750 on the math portion that I probably wouldn't have been able to tell you my name. This resulted in an embarrassing score of 220. It took many months of thinking and cheering and poking and prodding to get me ready to take it again without this terror. Once I relaxed, I did MUCH better!

Given the effort that it took for me to get to a point where I could successfully relax to do well on my last round of standardized testing, it's easy to see how I'm not chomping at the bit to do the same for the GMAT. I don't know if it's laziness or a lack of motivation or just really not wanting to go through that again that makes this so hard for me.

Nonetheless, I continue to try. Last night's GMAT practice test was a lot better than the first one. Now I know that I need a serious review of Geometry, Combinatorics and logical reasoning. I will continue on this trek and hopefully make the process less painful than it was the last time.

(Note: The Oxford Comma has been added for Mr. J and his grammatical and punctuational happiness.)

I Can't Believe It's Already August?!?!?

It's just SOOO insane that it's already August. Were did all of the time go? It feels like it should be the beginning of July or even earlier! I was just starting to stop wearing sweaters to work (ok, maybe not since it's freezing in my office) and all of the summer fun was ahead of us.

Perhaps it's because I use the impending date of my birthday to judge how much summer is left and since it's already this weekend, I'm feeling like this summer is already over. It has been a busy summer. I've been home to Monterey probably about 4 times, maybe more, been to Colorado with J, been to concerts, birthday nights out, eaten tons of crepes at the best crepe stand in the city (thanks Alan for introducing us to it), and we're getting ready to go to Baltimore for the Virgin Mobile Music Festival this coming weekend. All in all, despite the speed at which life is flying at me, it's really good. I really like my new job a lot. I have a great set of friends that I've done all sorts of fun stuff with this summer.

In spite of all of the good things, it is a harsh reminder that I'm rather behind on a lot of the things that I wanted to do this summer. It's good for me to see my friends head off to their new adventures for the school yeah and either start business school, head back to law school or finally join the real world after finishing some sort of post-grad work. I see that perhaps that's something that still might be interesting for me despite the fact that I really have no reason why I want to go to business school anymore and this might not be the right time in my life for what I thought I wanted out of business school (but I'm not going into a philosophical discussion in this post, I promise).

I'm just shocked at how fast this summer's gone! I guess it's time to buckle down and start really making a dent in all of those things that I wanted to accomplish before the summer's officially over.

The GMAT Giant

Ok so the title of this post is mildly misleading because the GMAT is big, but hundreds of thousands of people have survived and overcome this giant so it is not insurmountable.

As a college senior, I somehow managed taking the GRE, the grad school application process, 2 theses and a host of other fun and academic related things so I know that it's definitely possible for me to still have fun, get my work done and do well on the GMAT. Nonetheless, balance in life is hard when you try to do everything.

Looking around at the world more since college, I've seen lots of really successful who don't work at maximum capacity and tons of sort of successful people who put in little to no effort at all. This has allowed me to start to relax my idea of what hard work really is or how time consuming it has to be. Also, for the last 5 months, I've been only working a 40 hour week which was something really unusual to me. I really didn't have the option of working more if I wanted to mostly because there was no more work to do and if there was work, it was boring so I didn't want to do it. This left lots of free time for fun so the balance in life has swung towards "life" instead of work.

Now, I'm back in a job where I could work 24/7 if I wanted to. At the moment, I'm still enjoying my "life" so don't want to work too much. But now GMAT and grad school applications need to make their way into that life. I know that I will have to make sacrifices and not be able to do everything to buckle down and study for the GMAT. I know I can do it, but I've always hated missing out on fun things.

The GMAT isn't insurmountable, but it definitely means that key sacrifices will need to be made. I just have to keep looking at the end goal of 2 great years in grad school, but first I have to tackle the GMAT Giant.

It's all about finding that balance between things that need/have to be done and the things that I want to do. But, that's life and we all keep learning.