Longer than i expected.
I am done with three of the four essays though. The all important "What matters most..." Essay has been completed to my total satisfaction. I showed the essay to a new reviewer and she absolutely loves it. I have also finished the two smaller essays.
The one i am fighting with it the "Career Aspirations..." essay. I am finding it extremely difficult to freeze the why Stanford part. Well, it is a problem of a plenty :) Stanford is one of those schools which boasts of the unimaginable stretch of resources it can offer to its students. I am trying to put the right things on paper based on what i am most interested in, and i am finding that i can at most dedicate one line to an entity. I am unsure whether it is right or wrong. There's just so much to say :)
I have an essay which is just a tad more than 3 pages long, which again i am not sure abt. If i have to shorten it, then there goes some more space. I have decided to stop it for the day and get working on it again tomorrow. I have completed everything on the online data questions and so i can submit the app once I upload the essays. Looks like i will be able to stick to my Wednesday deadline.
My manager still has to submit two of his Recos - Kellogg and Stanford. He's on an unexpected vacation till Wednesday :( I am hoping he would be able to take some time off and submit the recos. I just sent him a mail reminding abt the Kellogg deadline. If he doesn't do it from home, we might have to fight with the busy Embark Application server :)
That reminds me, this week there are 2 deadlines I'm interested in - Chicago on 18th and Kellogg on 20th. All the best to all u folks applying to these schools.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Friday, October 13, 2006
Time to seal the Stanford App
I've been idling around for quite some time now. The Stanford deadline is around 10 days from today and i better get going. I am not quite far behind, but there is still a lot of work to be done.
The good thing is that i have completed the online app. So once i finalize the essays, i only have to upload them and then i can hit the submit button. Aah - after 4 submissions, hitting the submit button doesn't seem to be such a difficult thing after all :)
As far as the essays are concerned, i started a penultimate round of working on them this week. I did some slow progress and as of today 90% of the famous Stanford Essay:1 is complete. I want to remove one paragraph, which i don't think fits in the essay, and replace it with a futuristic paragraph, which i think keeps within the concept of my essay. This is the penultimate paragraph and i have my conclusion well written, verified and reviewed.
Speaking of reviews, i now have one more reviewer who's services i can use for the Stanford essays. She just reviewed the second essay and i have some comments from her which i need to incorporate. There is also some major rework to be done in the "Why Stanford" section, for which i have been collecting additional data for quite some time now. Looks like i need to do some more research on this before i sit down to write it.
Apart from these two, i also have to finish the other two essays. I am hoping to finish them during this weekend, get them reviewed, do the necessary re-work and probably submit them on or before Wednesday - which is a full one week before the deadline. Let's see how things progress.
My mentor has submitted all 5 of his recos. This happened more than a week ago. Once he was done, he sent me a mail "All 5 done man! Send me the invite for the 6th one." :) Well - that's him. My manager has only submitted the recos of the first three - HBS, Wharton and Chicago. His Kellogg reco is under production and his Stanford reco is yet to be begun. I am hoping i can get him working on these two during the weekend and make him submit them by early next week.
Seems like this weekend is gonna be one busy one. Lemme go get some sleep and allow my body and mind to rejuvenate itself :) ciao
The good thing is that i have completed the online app. So once i finalize the essays, i only have to upload them and then i can hit the submit button. Aah - after 4 submissions, hitting the submit button doesn't seem to be such a difficult thing after all :)
As far as the essays are concerned, i started a penultimate round of working on them this week. I did some slow progress and as of today 90% of the famous Stanford Essay:1 is complete. I want to remove one paragraph, which i don't think fits in the essay, and replace it with a futuristic paragraph, which i think keeps within the concept of my essay. This is the penultimate paragraph and i have my conclusion well written, verified and reviewed.
Speaking of reviews, i now have one more reviewer who's services i can use for the Stanford essays. She just reviewed the second essay and i have some comments from her which i need to incorporate. There is also some major rework to be done in the "Why Stanford" section, for which i have been collecting additional data for quite some time now. Looks like i need to do some more research on this before i sit down to write it.
Apart from these two, i also have to finish the other two essays. I am hoping to finish them during this weekend, get them reviewed, do the necessary re-work and probably submit them on or before Wednesday - which is a full one week before the deadline. Let's see how things progress.
My mentor has submitted all 5 of his recos. This happened more than a week ago. Once he was done, he sent me a mail "All 5 done man! Send me the invite for the 6th one." :) Well - that's him. My manager has only submitted the recos of the first three - HBS, Wharton and Chicago. His Kellogg reco is under production and his Stanford reco is yet to be begun. I am hoping i can get him working on these two during the weekend and make him submit them by early next week.
Seems like this weekend is gonna be one busy one. Lemme go get some sleep and allow my body and mind to rejuvenate itself :) ciao
Thursday, October 12, 2006
My date with W-AdCom
Not exactly a date! I should probably call it a month and based on whether i get an invite for interview or not, it might get stretched to two months or two years :) Today is officially the beginning of all of it.
Yes!!! Even as the deadline for Wharton's R1 is passing by, wharton's AdCom came out with this great post where they explain what might happen to our applications. I really like this part of Wharton. They understand what we, as applicants, go through and try to reduce the anxiety as much as it is possible. There is still anxiety with so many internal deadlines though :)
But atleast the process is clear as water - the unpolluted kind ;)
So yeah - I am being evaluated by the AdCom and i really hope they like me.
And to all the other fellow applicants - a very warm ATB. While the fingers of my right hand are crossed for my sake, the fingers of the other one are crossed for all of you :)
Yes!!! Even as the deadline for Wharton's R1 is passing by, wharton's AdCom came out with this great post where they explain what might happen to our applications. I really like this part of Wharton. They understand what we, as applicants, go through and try to reduce the anxiety as much as it is possible. There is still anxiety with so many internal deadlines though :)
But atleast the process is clear as water - the unpolluted kind ;)
So yeah - I am being evaluated by the AdCom and i really hope they like me.
And to all the other fellow applicants - a very warm ATB. While the fingers of my right hand are crossed for my sake, the fingers of the other one are crossed for all of you :)
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
What's happening at Wharton after GND was lifted.
I was pointed to this article in Wharton Journal by this post in the Clearadmit blog.
What i read in the journal is serious stuff. The stuff about people padding up GPAs by scraping through waivers exams in preterm, about people with the attitude of "I come to school to learn and i learn irrespective of my grades" losing out in the GPA race coz of such behavior from the above mentioned group and finally the part where the author says he would not have attended Wharton if he had known this would happen at school - interesting. This is not some person speaking, this is a first year student at Wharton speaking. The author tries to play middle man in the obviously debatable subject. Dropping GND has a few advantages to the people who perform. Someone making into the Dean's list and not being able say that to the recruiters is really wrong, speaking from the perspective of those students. Performing well and not being able to say it is a seriously offensive rule :)
When i was discussing the issue of Caste Based Reservations with my mentor (i was against it and he was for it), he suggested this nice way to use the policy. He said that the government is bound to provide the interests of the underrepresented group, which is true. But it can actually be upto the individual castes as to how they use the policy for their benefits. I was arguing that reservations must be on the basis of the economic situation of families, but he argued that they are almost always on the lower rung of the economic scale also. So he said that it must be the responsibility of the boards of these underrepresented groups to use the reservation based on the financial position of the families under their board.
This was his suggestion - which made sense to me. The Govt allocates percentages of seats in institutions and instead of a rich person of a community (who's had the best of education right from PreKGs) taking up that seat, he must be made to go through the open category and the reserved seat must go to a person who has financially struggled his way through basic education. And when this is controlled by the underrepresented board, there is no external intervention and so no one complains. If the group disagrees regarding who gets what seat, they rot to death fighting within themselves and no one gets affected outside this group :) It made sense.
Similarly - i guess the GND issue must be left to the student body. The school forcing a ban on grade disclosure is doing injustice to the top performers (read dean's list members). The school forcing a grade disclosure means that the "learners" and career switchers are at a disadvantage. So i guess the best way to handle this would be to not force a disclosure and ask the student body to decide who specifies their grade on the resume and who doesn't :)
Aah - if only everything was so simple.
I am sure the folks at Wharton (and possibly the others also) are thinking about different ways to solve this out and whatever is happening is only the system going thru the evolutionary stages.
What i read in the journal is serious stuff. The stuff about people padding up GPAs by scraping through waivers exams in preterm, about people with the attitude of "I come to school to learn and i learn irrespective of my grades" losing out in the GPA race coz of such behavior from the above mentioned group and finally the part where the author says he would not have attended Wharton if he had known this would happen at school - interesting. This is not some person speaking, this is a first year student at Wharton speaking. The author tries to play middle man in the obviously debatable subject. Dropping GND has a few advantages to the people who perform. Someone making into the Dean's list and not being able say that to the recruiters is really wrong, speaking from the perspective of those students. Performing well and not being able to say it is a seriously offensive rule :)
When i was discussing the issue of Caste Based Reservations with my mentor (i was against it and he was for it), he suggested this nice way to use the policy. He said that the government is bound to provide the interests of the underrepresented group, which is true. But it can actually be upto the individual castes as to how they use the policy for their benefits. I was arguing that reservations must be on the basis of the economic situation of families, but he argued that they are almost always on the lower rung of the economic scale also. So he said that it must be the responsibility of the boards of these underrepresented groups to use the reservation based on the financial position of the families under their board.
This was his suggestion - which made sense to me. The Govt allocates percentages of seats in institutions and instead of a rich person of a community (who's had the best of education right from PreKGs) taking up that seat, he must be made to go through the open category and the reserved seat must go to a person who has financially struggled his way through basic education. And when this is controlled by the underrepresented board, there is no external intervention and so no one complains. If the group disagrees regarding who gets what seat, they rot to death fighting within themselves and no one gets affected outside this group :) It made sense.
Similarly - i guess the GND issue must be left to the student body. The school forcing a ban on grade disclosure is doing injustice to the top performers (read dean's list members). The school forcing a grade disclosure means that the "learners" and career switchers are at a disadvantage. So i guess the best way to handle this would be to not force a disclosure and ask the student body to decide who specifies their grade on the resume and who doesn't :)
Aah - if only everything was so simple.
I am sure the folks at Wharton (and possibly the others also) are thinking about different ways to solve this out and whatever is happening is only the system going thru the evolutionary stages.
And Finally...
I got to see "Lage Raho Munnabhai" last night.
A lot has already been said abt the movie and how good it was. So I am not gonna ramble abt it all over again. It was a great movie. Definitely worth a watch, make it two for me as I think I will go see it again :)
But is it worth an Oscar nomination?
Does it deserve to win over the other films in the competition??
Or simply, how does it fare against India's Oscar nomination "Rang De Basanti"???
As I was going through various degrees of laughter in seeing the movie, I was actually trying to evaluate it on those scales. To tell you frankly, there is not a lot to choose one between RDB and LRM. Both of them are the kind which can stir your mind and make you think, in totally opposite ways. Think about it - students doing a terrorist act in one and a metro city gunda preaching Gandhi-ism in the other one. It is extremely difficult to pick one out of these two.
But I think, atleast for me, RDB beats LRM. It is extremely close though.
A lot has already been said abt the movie and how good it was. So I am not gonna ramble abt it all over again. It was a great movie. Definitely worth a watch, make it two for me as I think I will go see it again :)
But is it worth an Oscar nomination?
Does it deserve to win over the other films in the competition??
Or simply, how does it fare against India's Oscar nomination "Rang De Basanti"???
As I was going through various degrees of laughter in seeing the movie, I was actually trying to evaluate it on those scales. To tell you frankly, there is not a lot to choose one between RDB and LRM. Both of them are the kind which can stir your mind and make you think, in totally opposite ways. Think about it - students doing a terrorist act in one and a metro city gunda preaching Gandhi-ism in the other one. It is extremely difficult to pick one out of these two.
But I think, atleast for me, RDB beats LRM. It is extremely close though.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Chill...
Yeah - that's what i am doing now with 4 of the 5 apps submitted and the essay drafts for the fifth one ready. Okay - i only said drafts. They are not final yet. I have to work on them but not now. This week i am on rest.
So what did i do - watched the boring Champions Trophy cricket matches on TV, caught up with sleep (actually had lots of them), played games on my PC and finally read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The book is awesome - i liked it very much. This, i guess, is how the full of November is gonna be. I am planning to prepare for interviews once i submit all the apps. There is atleast one place from where i am getting an interview invite - Kellogg.
I also had some long chat sessions with another applicant. She wanted to see my Chicago essays and after seeing them, she had some really interesting remarks reg them. Some of them were negative too :) She was impressed with the content but she was not too happy with the presentation. She was like "There is so much GOOD stuff there and it can be said differently"! I was like "Yeah right!". And then i saw her essay and realized why she said what she said. It was so different from mine. I guess it is a case of difference of opinions :) Some of the stuff she mentioned made sense on a global scale. I am now gonna make those changes to the Stanford Essays and Columbia essays. Nothing major though.
Okay - time to get back to some silly show being shown on the television :)
ciao...
So what did i do - watched the boring Champions Trophy cricket matches on TV, caught up with sleep (actually had lots of them), played games on my PC and finally read the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The book is awesome - i liked it very much. This, i guess, is how the full of November is gonna be. I am planning to prepare for interviews once i submit all the apps. There is atleast one place from where i am getting an interview invite - Kellogg.
I also had some long chat sessions with another applicant. She wanted to see my Chicago essays and after seeing them, she had some really interesting remarks reg them. Some of them were negative too :) She was impressed with the content but she was not too happy with the presentation. She was like "There is so much GOOD stuff there and it can be said differently"! I was like "Yeah right!". And then i saw her essay and realized why she said what she said. It was so different from mine. I guess it is a case of difference of opinions :) Some of the stuff she mentioned made sense on a global scale. I am now gonna make those changes to the Stanford Essays and Columbia essays. Nothing major though.
Okay - time to get back to some silly show being shown on the television :)
ciao...
Thursday, October 05, 2006
The transcript tour and HBS submission
I'm back to town after the one day trip to my college to request for transcripts. God knows why those folks want a week to xerox my originals and attest them. Anyway - i have spoken to the concerned people and i am hoping everything will get done in time. I cannot believe that i did so much out of my plans to be able to submit my app to one school, Kellogg. Anyway - what had to be done has been done and so be it :)
And what better way to celebrate the return than to submit my HBS application. I had a 99.5% app ready when i traveled on Tuesday night. That night in the train was one heck of a journey, with me totally obsessed with the entire application thing. Whenever i closed my eyes attempting to find some sleep, my mind was full of essay questions and answers :)
Not surprisingly, i figured out the last 0.05% of HBS during that journey. It was perhaps the logical conclusion to that career goals essay and it was escaping my mind for sometime now. So once i got that sealed, i was waiting to come back and finish that portion and submit the app. Once i was done with that, i had to do some chopping work with that essay to fit it into required word limits. When i started uploading my essays, i dint like the way had ended the "Undergrad experience" essay and so modified that too. With these changes, i uploaded all my essays, paid the US$235 and hit the submit button for the 4th time in a week :)
Now - all that is left for me to tackle is Stanford. I am burnt out beyond belief after the 2 days of travel and the week-of-4-submissions. So the logical next step is a break. I am not doing anything tonight and tomorrow night. Back to Stanford essays from Saturday morning. I guess i will submit that one sometime in the next week :)
On the reco front, my mentor has submitted all 5 recos. He sent me this cute mail today morning "Hey! I'm done with all 5. Send me the request for Columbia" :) I am going to do that now. My manager has submitted the recos for HBS and Wharton. So the immediate danger is out of the way. He has promised to finish the remaining three over the weekend. Let's see how that goes. His 3 and the Stanford peer reco is all that is left now. So - i don't foresee any major troubles there too.
All in all - am feeling good abt how I've handled the whole thing till day. By this month end, i must have submitted all 6 of my first choice apps. Then begins the long painful process of waiting :)
And what better way to celebrate the return than to submit my HBS application. I had a 99.5% app ready when i traveled on Tuesday night. That night in the train was one heck of a journey, with me totally obsessed with the entire application thing. Whenever i closed my eyes attempting to find some sleep, my mind was full of essay questions and answers :)
Not surprisingly, i figured out the last 0.05% of HBS during that journey. It was perhaps the logical conclusion to that career goals essay and it was escaping my mind for sometime now. So once i got that sealed, i was waiting to come back and finish that portion and submit the app. Once i was done with that, i had to do some chopping work with that essay to fit it into required word limits. When i started uploading my essays, i dint like the way had ended the "Undergrad experience" essay and so modified that too. With these changes, i uploaded all my essays, paid the US$235 and hit the submit button for the 4th time in a week :)
Now - all that is left for me to tackle is Stanford. I am burnt out beyond belief after the 2 days of travel and the week-of-4-submissions. So the logical next step is a break. I am not doing anything tonight and tomorrow night. Back to Stanford essays from Saturday morning. I guess i will submit that one sometime in the next week :)
On the reco front, my mentor has submitted all 5 recos. He sent me this cute mail today morning "Hey! I'm done with all 5. Send me the request for Columbia" :) I am going to do that now. My manager has submitted the recos for HBS and Wharton. So the immediate danger is out of the way. He has promised to finish the remaining three over the weekend. Let's see how that goes. His 3 and the Stanford peer reco is all that is left now. So - i don't foresee any major troubles there too.
All in all - am feeling good abt how I've handled the whole thing till day. By this month end, i must have submitted all 6 of my first choice apps. Then begins the long painful process of waiting :)
Monday, October 02, 2006
A silent day...
After submitting three apps within 24 hours, today was a lot less eventful. I am not complaining at all as i have loads of time to do. I only have two apps to work with, surprisingly the one with the first deadline (HBS) and the one with the last deadline (Stan) :)
I spent a good chunk of today editing my Career Goals essay for HBS. In it's original form, the essay was a good 500 words long. And i had shrunk it to 500+ from a huge essay of 650+ words. I have spoken about the "Why MBA + goals" part so much in my longer essays. I was tired of editing the essay the other day and so i left it at 500+. Today i started the work again and the break did prove helpful. The essay is now down to 450 words and i am satisfied with it. I even showed it to a new reviewer who like it very much. I guess i will submit it as such. I need to just check the last paragraph once more and spruce it up as much as possible. Then i will be done.
Once i finish that, i am all set to submit my HBS essay. I don't know when i will be doing it because i am traveling tomorrow night and will be back to my PC only on Thursday night. So i guess i will be submitting HBS after i return. It may get pushed to the weekend as i don't want to submit it after a hard day's work. No fixed plans.
Okie - end of a long weekend. A really substantial one in my life as i have started a journey on three different paths which might take me to my destiny. There are still two more to be added to this list.
Let us see how far i travel in each of them :)
I hope atleast one of these has an all-green future :D
I spent a good chunk of today editing my Career Goals essay for HBS. In it's original form, the essay was a good 500 words long. And i had shrunk it to 500+ from a huge essay of 650+ words. I have spoken about the "Why MBA + goals" part so much in my longer essays. I was tired of editing the essay the other day and so i left it at 500+. Today i started the work again and the break did prove helpful. The essay is now down to 450 words and i am satisfied with it. I even showed it to a new reviewer who like it very much. I guess i will submit it as such. I need to just check the last paragraph once more and spruce it up as much as possible. Then i will be done.
Once i finish that, i am all set to submit my HBS essay. I don't know when i will be doing it because i am traveling tomorrow night and will be back to my PC only on Thursday night. So i guess i will be submitting HBS after i return. It may get pushed to the weekend as i don't want to submit it after a hard day's work. No fixed plans.
Okie - end of a long weekend. A really substantial one in my life as i have started a journey on three different paths which might take me to my destiny. There are still two more to be added to this list.
Let us see how far i travel in each of them :)
I hope atleast one of these has an all-green future :D
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Kellogg Part 2 and Wharton - Submitted
Drum rolls!!!
I again hit the submit button. TWICE!!!
I spent the whole of today finalizing my Kellogg essays (god there were six of them) and reviewing them again and again. Just uploaded the essays and closed the deal. This is one school where i have an interview for sure!!! And then, Wharton essays and application were already complete! So i uploaded the Wharton essays, verified them and closed another deal!
For all the hard work that went into the whole application process, submitting two applications in a day seems something like an anti-climax :)
I guess i am speaking like someone who expected fireworks on the screen after submitting the apps and is now thoroughly disappointed coz he saw none :D
3 down, 2 more to go...
And then i get to go through the whole rigor with the Columbia application :)
My reviewer sent me her review comments on the Stanford essays today. This is what she had to say abt my response for the What matters most to you, and why? essay
I wud be so very modest if i just say i was glad :D
I again hit the submit button. TWICE!!!
I spent the whole of today finalizing my Kellogg essays (god there were six of them) and reviewing them again and again. Just uploaded the essays and closed the deal. This is one school where i have an interview for sure!!! And then, Wharton essays and application were already complete! So i uploaded the Wharton essays, verified them and closed another deal!
For all the hard work that went into the whole application process, submitting two applications in a day seems something like an anti-climax :)
I guess i am speaking like someone who expected fireworks on the screen after submitting the apps and is now thoroughly disappointed coz he saw none :D
3 down, 2 more to go...
And then i get to go through the whole rigor with the Columbia application :)
My reviewer sent me her review comments on the Stanford essays today. This is what she had to say abt my response for the What matters most to you, and why? essay
xxx is a good answer.
I have seen a few answers to this kinda qn, and so far xxx is one of the best :)
I have seen a few answers to this kinda qn, and so far xxx is one of the best :)
I wud be so very modest if i just say i was glad :D
Chicago - Submitted
Woo Hoo...
I hit the submit button. I really hit the SUBMIT button.
I completed my Chicago application and submitted it yesterday night. That's really my first serious submission as Kellogg part 1 had no essays. Believe me, it is such a huge relief to hit the button. I was so obsessed with work that dint even realize i was gonna hit the submit button. I filled the info in the application, uploaded the essays, reviewed it a good three times, paid the application fee and submitted the button - all in one go. And then i suddenly realized, i had just submit my Chicago Application.
So very obsessed :)
Okay - one down and four more to go.
I hit the submit button. I really hit the SUBMIT button.
I completed my Chicago application and submitted it yesterday night. That's really my first serious submission as Kellogg part 1 had no essays. Believe me, it is such a huge relief to hit the button. I was so obsessed with work that dint even realize i was gonna hit the submit button. I filled the info in the application, uploaded the essays, reviewed it a good three times, paid the application fee and submitted the button - all in one go. And then i suddenly realized, i had just submit my Chicago Application.
So very obsessed :)
Okay - one down and four more to go.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
Posts
