Beginning at the End

Hi All,
I Decided to get an MBA a long time back, but didn’t had a slightest of idea about where to start from and where should aim to reach. So I was just waiting for something to happen and show me a way. I didn’t wanted to do MBA from IIMs because apart from the getting a world class knowledge I also wanted a an International exposure, wherein I could interact with people from different cultures and backgrounds, wherein I could go places I have never been, and mostly importantly learn things by sharing with my batch mates and by doing rather that just reading them from the books. My preference for learning things by doing rather than reading stems from my past experience that I had during engineering, the things that I learned by doing or out of my own interest are still fresh in my mind whereas most of the other stuff that I read from the books just a couple of days before the exam started to blur out as soon as I came out of the examination room.

Till this point I have at least decided on one thing that I want to get an MBA from somewhere place which has a diversity in student body and has a teaching method, with a greater emphasis on doing rather than cramming. With all this in my mind first took TOEFL and then took the GMAT. All the time I had between securing the GMAT appointment and my taking the actual GMAT, was spent on looking at the various options that would be available to after I get a decent score. I came up with a lots and lots of options, the every second school that I looked at seemed be like a prospective school, for which I would give away anything, in fact I now feel that I over did all this, and neglected the GMAT a lot more than I should have, but no hard feelings because once done its over, and I am not of those who would keep crying over spilled milk ;)

Now that I have the GMAT score of 680 at my hands (Q90, V69, Total 90) I have to be realistic about the options that I have on my hand, well its bit late to get realistic but hopefully not too late, ideally I should have become more realistic before taking the GMAT and should have started preparing for the exam much earlier than I actually did. (To be true I started preparing for GMAT just 14days before the exam and took my first test about 6days before the actual date). But I have always been living on the edge and always passing (luckily) through a narrow margin. Overall I feel that 680 is not that a bad score, even though normally Indians do score around 750, but given my work ex (or perhaps more accurately the lack of it) which would be around 23 months by fall ’06, I think that I should be modest in assessing my chances of getting into a B-School, I am not taking a chance in top 20.

Well sometimes I feel that for me its like a blind date because I started of with the almost no idea of where I was heading, I just kept going on my gut feeling, thinking that something might happen which would show me the way, and indeed it turns out that way, and I am very happy that my GMAT score has really narrowed down the choices for me (Although I believe not a lot of people would like it to be this way).

Well the title says "Beginning at the End", its because to start with I thought that taking the GMAT would be the end of my problems and dilemma but as I see now it’s a beginning of a whole new array of challenges for me, the GMAT is a really very small piece of task when compared to the application process as a whole.

Anyways I feel a bit tired and hungry now, so would go and eat something………….I would soon be writing about how to prepare for GMAT, though most of people would say that I don’t have any authority over it as I myself didn’t got a great score, but I feel by sharing my experience I could at least help people not repeat my mistakes…hope I would find some takers for this argument…. ;)