My MBA Journey -Part 11 (GD-PI Prep 2)

In this post, I will share some of the learning from my GD & PI experiences.

GD Leanings:

• It is recommended to start the GD .But it is a high risk high reward venture. One needs to be absolutely sure of the topic if one wants to start. Most important point to remember here is to give direction to the GD and set the stage for discussion. If you have no or little idea about the topic, better let somebody else start the GD and you chip in afterwards. However the earlier you enter the GD the better. Make sure to make your presence felt at least once in first 2 minutes of the GD.
• Never take a stand upfront in a GD. Try to cover all possible aspects in the GD. However if you take a stand, make sure you stick to it. Moderators penalize heavily in case you change your stand afterwards. Changing your stand shows that 1) you don’t analyze the situation thoroughly and 2 ) You are a “follower” who is easily convinced by some “leader” of the GD.
• In a 10 min GD, enter the discussion atleast 4-5 times. There is no ground rule on how much you have to speak in each entry but make sure what you speak is at least audible to moderators.
• Make heavy use of 3Ls: Listen, Listen, Listen. You have to be a patient listener (at least show that on face even if you are abusing the other person from inside :)).
• Never make an eye contact with moderator. Always address all the members in the GD. Never ever ignore even a single member while talking.
• How to deal with “Fish Market”? In case you are stuck in a fish market kind of GD which is highly probable, make sure you don’t get nervous or desperate. Try to calm the group. However if group is really gone out of control, better be a patient listener. I have seen many groups which were disqualified within 4 minutes of start of GD and only members selected were those who kept quiet during the fish market.

During mock and actual GDs , I faced both extremes :very peaceful to almost War sort of GDs. My strategy however used to be more or less the same for each flavour of GD . In my IIM Lucknow GD, which had 10 people, I was 3rd to enter the discussion. And I made some 8-9 entries in 20 minutes. Each time I tried to speak new point .I was also successful to give an entirely new avenue for the group to think and discuss in one of my points. Btw GD Topic was “You have to break a few eggs to make an Omellete”

Now I move on to the next section of the post viz. PI Preparation, learning, experiences….

For PI, as mentioned before, “Malay Ray” was the man. Apart from that I had already prepared answers to all the commonly asked questions in PI such as Why MBA, Why Now , Why this IIM , What you will be 5 yrs , 10 yrs down the line …… Make sure you rehearse the answers pretty well to these questions. Any goof –up in these answers could turn out to be very costly.
Also “Pagalguy” – forum for MBA Aspirants, was of great help. There I could get a repository of all the questions asked in the previous year in IIMs and that helped me prepare accordingly. I also made extensive use of “Wikipedia” for building my database.

Remember with limited time at your disposal, you have to be very selective in what you need to prepare/study and what not. So make sure to research well on the kind of questions asked in PI of a particular b-school.

I will end this post with some points which a candidate should bear in his mind for a PI:

• Never try to befool your interviewer. He/She knows a lot more and can easily see through your tricks. If you don’t know an answer simply say “I don’t know”. Interviewers will almost always appreciate your honesty.
• At times, interviewers will make fun of you or try to stress you. Do not get irritated or frustrated under such condition. Interviewers simply want to test your mental stability. FYI… I was stress interviewed in IIM Lucknow for 5 min which I handled without getting agitated or nervous
• At the end of the interview, if prompted by interviewers to ask a question, ask a genuine query and do not ask just for the sake of asking. Irrelevant or naïve questions could attract –ve points.

My-mba-journey-part-10 (GD & PI Prep )

It's been alomost a year since I wrote on my Blog. And the credit for this goes to IIM Lucknow, popularly known as HELL :) (more on IIM L and beyond in upcoming posts). Now I know why they say that MBA is not a piece of cake when they say it. But now when I am in realtively chilled out phase my MBA (thanks to my intern company), I commit to finish the series which I started a year ago.

So here I go with my GD & PI prepartion....

With barely less than 2 months in hand, I joined TIME , Career Launcher and Malay Ray. As I was working in Noida , it was convenient for me to join Noida centres of the above institutes (For Malay, obvioulsy I had no other option but to go to Delhi thrice a week)

Advice for prospective CAT takers: Always try to join nearest coaching institutes unless u get some coaching which is worth the extra travel and energy and money.These 2 months or so are very valuble and each second saved/waisted could make or break things on D-day.

I attended some 10-12 GD sessions in all with each session having 2-3 GDs .And there almost all type of GDs were covered (abstract/case studies/role play etc. etc.) But as mentioned earlier TIME GDs were always very fruitful, both beacuse of the manner in they were conducted and beacuse of the feedback provided by moderator.

Also there is a much hyped workshop of Career Launcher called "Boot Camp" specifically meant for IIM call getters. In "Boot Camp " students are taken to some resort outside the city for 2 days .And various events such as mock GDs, PIs , games etc. are held. I personlly don't have too favourable comments for this programme but almost everyone who attended it spoke highly of it (so future MBA aspirants could plan accordingly)
FYI.. We were taken to some place in Gurgaon and next morning, feeling bored, I ran back to Noida.

Similar worksop is conducted by TIME also at Delhi centre. It is conducted almost within a week of CAT test results. I found this worksop better than the Boot-Camp of CL.

After having attended , numerous mock GDs and actual IIM GDs , I can safely vouch for the fact that content is important but more important is how convincingly you say it. Moderators always look for person who can contribute effectively. Effectiveness includes (in no order) :-

• Speech delivery style
• Body Language
• Listening skills
  
• Content
• Leadership Skills
• Communication Skills/Englisg fluency/Accent (least imporant)

Of the above points, I believe " Leadership Skills" is most imporant and in this is embedded all other aspects of effective GD particpant. Coaching Institutes will provide you enough gyan on how to exhibit leadership skills etc (read how to fool moderators into believing that u can be a good leader:)). during that 10-15 min . So I will skip this part.

To not lengthen this post, I will contine GD&PI part in next post.

As always my 2 cents worth follow:

• There is big myth that one needs to have good communication skills to master GD. Moderators look for leadership skills and thinking ability not how well an aspirant could speak angrezzi

• Always use pen/paper and note down (after the GD) useful points which other particpants threw during the course of GD. And yes, review them regularly. This not only improves your knowledge of the topic but also provides many valuable pointers for upcoming GDs (and interviews as well)

• Read atleast 1 National English Daily such as HT/TOI/Hindu and one Business Newspaper (I recommed Economic Times for people with limited finance knowledge. Other business papers were all Greek to me :)) . Make sure you form an opinion on all the burning topics.
  

• Make extensive use of your most trutsed pal "Mr. Google" and "Wikipedia"
  

My MBA Journey -Part 8 (Preparing B-school application)

As mentioned in my last post, I started working on Cambridge and Oxford applications simultaneously. Although each school offers its own application in its own format, some of the questions ("essays" in b-school jargon) more often than not do appear frequently in most of the applications (wordings of the essays could be different).

From my experience, I can vouch for the fact that knowing the answer to the question “ WHY MBA” is extremely extremely important and I have seen most of the students faltering in answering this or lacking clear vision/understanding as to why do they really need an MBA degree. Plus there are many other questions which are also important. And so it is extremely important to know the answer to each of them very clearly (that would help you in your interviews as well).

If you try to directly answer a b-school essay before doing your homework, chances are high that you will end up missing/losing some of the good points. So before starting to prepare a b-school application (or even looking at the essay questions), kindly spend sufficient time to write down in as much verbose form as possible the answers to the following questions in a word file (the more the effort and time you spend here , the better will be the quality of your application and hence higher the chances of your selection)

1. Why MBA?
2. Why now? (or why not 5 years hence or 2 years ago)
3. Why this college?
4. Why are you unique? (or why should the college select you over others)
5. What are your short/long term goals? (or where do you see 5/10 years down the line)
6. What are your 5 strengths and 5 weaknesses?
7. Detailed summary of your key accomplishments/achievements in a) academic life and b) professional life
8. 3-4 leadership experiences in a) academic life and b) professional life
9. 3-4 mistakes in professional life and the learning from them
10. ......

(The list is long and if anybody wants the entire list (with some rough answers), kindly leave your email ID in the comments section)

Frankly speaking, preparing application is a bed of nails and the biggest nut to crack in applying to a foreign b-school.

This was the phase where I spent countless hours trying to figure out who really I am. I had to go through my entire life of 25 years to pen down each and every important /not so important incident that had happened in my life. This was the time when I felt like giving up; I kept on getting frustrated but still somehow managed to survive this atrocious phase.

Once I was ready with my initial list of answers to the questions mentioned above, I started to draft the answers to the essay questions asked in Cambridge and Oxford applications. Simultaneously, I made many new friends (b-schools’ alumni) via Orkut communities, LinkedIn and other social networking sites.

I kept on sending the drafts of the essay answers to my newly made friends and I was very lucky that many of them did send back the reviewed documents in time, again and again. This process started in December 2008 and went on until Feb 2009 when I filled up my last application.

Finally after about 50 days of gruelling hard work, multiple reviews of essays, endless communication with innumerable alumni and unthinkable irritation, I was able to finish my first 2 applications. Because I had put my best foot forward in the last few weeks (at least I think so), the journey ahead (as far as the applications of the remaining schools are concerned) was not as rocky and bumpy. There were some hiccups but otherwise I was pretty comfortable with the remaining applications. And this happens with each and every candidate who does the maximum hard work in the beginning.

Tips /Advice for students in the phase of preparing applications:

• Do connect to as many alumni/current students of the b-schools you intend to apply as possible
  
• Spend as much time as possible in preparing the 1st draft of every essay question
  
• Take the review of b-schools’ alumni/current students very seriously and do incorporate it in your next draft of essay answer
  
• Pray regularly to Almighty and do interact a lot with your parents (as only they are the ones in the entire world who will give you the best advice unselfishly )

PS: All those interested in some reference material on b-schools applications (or sample b-school essays), please leave your email ID and small introduction in the comments section.

My MBA Journey –Part 7 (Selection of international B-schools)

Until I had plunged into the next phase (which I will cover in this and subsequent posts) I had not discovered the real meaning of joy, irritation and hard work all at the same time. Now onwards was starting the real journey and what preceded was only the trailer.

It was already late Nov ’09, time was running fast and I had very little time to select the list of foreign b-schools. And the decision was a key decision as it would have a long-lasting effect on my career .Also, doing an international MBA needs huge investment (see point 3 below) and as this probably would be my last degree on my resume, the decision was all the more important.

For the last 3-4 months I was constantly in touch with alumni of some of the most reputed b-schools in the world who had been kind and gentle enough to give me precious tips on selecting b-schools. Alumni tips, suggestions from my friends pursuing international MBA, learning at MBA fairs and discussions with like-minded people on various forums on net allowed me to come up with the various reasons a student looks for while selecting or prioritizing a b-school:

1) Duration of the b-school
12 months programme (such as SAID, JUDGE, INDEAD and most of the European MBA programmes)
18months programme (CEIBS, NUS etc.)
>20months programme (LBS and most of the USA universities such as Harvard, Wharton, Stanford)

2) Reputation/brand value/ranking of the b-school
Students consider various rankings such as Financial Times ranking , US News ranking, Top MBA ranking etc. to decide on the reputation of the college prevailing among aspirants, current students, alumni and the industry. Plus there are many other resources on net/outside net which could help an aspirant decipher the real brand value of the college intellectual capital wise and most importantly in terms of long-term benefits.

3) Financial burden while pursuing the MBA course (probably the most important factor of all)
As mentioned earlier that international MBA is a huge financial investment. For example, tuition fee of 2 year DUKE MBA is 100,000 US dollars i.e. around 48 lakh rupees .Add to it other expenses and total expenditure would be around 70-80 lakh. Similarly 1 year Cambridge MBA (JUDGE) costs 35 lakh (tuition fee) + accommodation +food +travel+... and total would be around 50 lakh. So think twice before you finalize on the school.

4) Location of the b-school
Some students prefer to study (and marry a firangi girl :)) in US, others prefer Europe, some like Asian colleges etc.

5) Reputation of the college in the country in which the student wants to settle down
Suppose my home country is India and I want to come back to India after 3-4 years post-MBA. In such a scenario I would prefer a University which gathers higher respect among organizations in India than say a similar or even higher ranked college (as per the Global rankings) which is relatively less known among Indian professionals in India. For example Cambridge MBA (Judge) is ranked 17th while CEIBS in China is 8th but reputation of Judge in India far exceeds that of CEIBS.

6) Other factors such as faculty reputation, course content, specializations on offer, school strength, international student diversity etc.

Based on the above factors, I was able to come up with the list of the schools I would apply to after mulling over for more than 2 weeks. I had finalized:

In Europe: Cambridge MBA (JUDGE), Oxford MBA (SAID), Cranfield, Rotterdam, Lancaster
In Asia: NUS Singapore
In Australia: Melbourne Business School

Earliest deadlines of all were of Cambridge (9th January ‘09(round 2)) and Oxford (16th January ‘09(round 2)) followed by NUS (31st Jan ’09).Cranfield, Rotterdam, Lancaster and MBS had rolling admission.

So my strategy was:

• Prepare applications for Cambridge and Oxford simultaneously
• After 16th Jan (deadline for Oxford)prepare application for NUS
• After 31st Jan (deadline for NUS) , prepare applications for rest of the colleges starting with Cranfield

I was perfect with my strategy only that I had forgotten that CAT written test results would be out on 9th Jan ’09 and if I am shortlisted for GD & PI of IIMs where the hell I would get the time from to prepare for the same.

Anyway, completely missing the above point, I went ahead to prepare my first b-school application.

Advice for students in the mode of selecting b-schools: Always prepare a list that contains 2-3 dream b-schools (schools that you would join without an iota of doubt if offered an admission) , 1-2 back-up schools(schools that you would join if not selected in any of the dream schools) and 1-2 safe schools(schools that you would definitely gain an admission into).

My MBA Journey- Part 6 (Kinds of B-schhol application processes)

Because I had kept the international b-schools’ applications preparation on hold until the CAT 2008 exam, I had taken a very serious risk. Before I discuss the risk, let me spend few lines explaining the application process to international b-schools.

There are 2 kinds of application processes

• Staged process
• Rolling process

In staged application process, the application cycle is divided into rounds and each round has a deadline. If you apply by that deadline, your application would be considered for that round otherwise it will be considered in the next round. For example, ISB Hyderabad (in India) has 2 rounds: Round 1 and Round 2.Application process for admission to session starting in April 2009, opened in July 2008.Dealines for round 1 and round 2 were 15th September 2008 and 1st December 2008 respectively, This means all the applicants applying to ISB between July and 15th September (included) would be considered in round 1 and those applying between 16th September and 1st December in round 2.

Applicants applying in earlier rounds are always at an advantage (in the above case round 1 applicants would have better chances of getting an interview call than round 2 applicants). Reasons for this are:

• There is no fixed percentage of seats that get filled up in earlier rounds i.e. if the school gets high quality of students in round 1, they might end up filling more than 50% of the total seats in this round itself. So round 2 would have less than 50% of the total seats and hence more competition in round 2
• Every b-school has fixed the percentage (not made public) of students they want to select from each category of applicant pool (IT engineers, female candidates, international students, sports persons etc.). And if a b-school happens to get the required number of students for a particular category in earlier rounds, then it is highly unlikely that a student from the already filled up category, applying in later rounds, would get selected

To make my point clearer, let’s take an example.

Suppose total number of seats available in ISB for 2009-2010 session is 500 and ISB wants to select max. of 50 IT engineers. Now say 3000 people apply in round 1 and 3000 in round 2. Of 3000 in round 1, 100 are IT engineers and same is the case for round 2.Now it so happens that ISB is impressed with the quality of the candidates in round 1 and it makes offers to 300 students (i.e more than 50% of the total seats available) of which 30 are IT enginners.So the equation for round 2 changes to 3000 students vying for 200 seats (and 100 IT engineers for 20 seats). While the situation for round 1 comes out to be 3000 students vying for 300 seats (and 100 IT engineers for 30 seats).Even if the quality of students is better in round 2, students in round 2 would have to face a stiffer competition.

So the bottom-line is “Apply in the earliest round possible”.

Other process is the Rolling process which works on the simple methodology of “first come first serve”. There is no such thing as “rounds”. For example applicant applying on ,say, 3rd December will get his application decision earlier than someone who applied on 15th December who in turn would get the decision earlier than the 25th December applicant.

That means in both the processes, applying as early as possible ensures a better chance of getting an interview call/selection.

Few examples of b-schools following different models are (especially mentioned for curious minds :) ):
ISB (staged with 2 rounds)
NUS (2 rounds with rolling approach within each round)
SAID/JUDGE/INSEAD (staged with 4 rounds)
Cranfield/Lancaster/Rotterdam/MBS (rolling process)

Now I return to the risk I had mentioned in the 2nd line of this post. It was already November 2008 and since the application process for admission to the 2009 fall session had already started in September-October 2008 timeframe, I had missed the 1st round of almost all the foreign b-schools. And similarly for schools with rolling admission, I was getting late.

Not to talk of the fact that I had not started preparing my applications (biggest challenge in applying to a foreign-GMAT based b-school) which easily takes 2-3 months depending on the number of schools one is applying to and number of essays per application. To make the situation worse, I had not zeroed in on the b-schools I would apply to (which I realized later to be an extensive time taking task).

All this pertain to the fact that if I put my best foot forward I could be able to apply earliest by January 2009 and that means I would be placed in round 2 or round 3 of the b-school and obviously too late for rolling-admission based schools.

With no choice, I started on my next leg of the journey: selecting the b-schools.

PS: My advice for aspirants taking GMAT is to make sure you take GMAT early enough to have sufficient time to prepare and submit your applications in round 1 itself (Most of the schools have 1st round deadlines in late September/early October for classes starting in the fall next year)

My MBA Journey- Part 5 (Strategy for 2nd CAT attempt)

After deciding that I would take the CAT again, I had to come up with a plan to prepare for CAT 2008 which was just over 3 months away. This time aorund,I had the luxury of CAT 2007 and GMAT experience(which I had taken barely few days ago).

I believe every CAT aspirant is weak in some areas and strong in others and so the preparation strategy would change based on the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses.
Two common mistakes which many candidates make while preparing/taking CAT are:
1) Blindly following the approach/strategy of a candidate who has already been successful in cracking the CAT in the past
2) Sticking to a FIXED strategy to solve any format of the CAT exam (CAT conductors change the exam format practically every year which takes majority of CAT takers with surprise .FYI…In GMAT format is fixed )

In CAT 2008 though I did not commit the first mistake, I was not lucky to have not committed the second one. My strategy was to devote equal time to all the 3 sections in the CAT paper irrespective of the number of questions, difficult level of the questions etc. and this cost me 3 IIM calls. Because CAT 2008 had 25, 25 and 40 questions (40 in English); it was needed to devote more time to English section vis-à-vis DI and Quant.

So 2 cents of advice to all the CAT aspirants “Listen to successful CAT candidates but form your own strategy which should be customizable at the run time depending on the format of the paper”

Now coming back to how I prepared for the exam.
Though everyone knows it but still I want to re-iterate the golden rule : The better your preparation is, the better would be the results.
Keeping in mind that I did not have the luxury of ample time, I followed the following approach:

1) I ensured to take mock CAT every Sunday (TIME coaching tests are the best followed by Career Launcher followed by IMS) and analyze the answers of each and every question in the paper irrespective of whether I attempted the question or not. This had helped me in
a) knowing the method to solve a question which I could not solve during the exam time
b) understanding the correct way to solve a question which I had incorrectly solved
c) learning the better /faster way to solve a question which I had correctly solved
d) and most important of all : Designing a strategy to improve the sectional and overall score
2) As I was aware that my weakest area was English and strongest was DI, I spent maximum time preparing English followed by Quant followed by DI
3) Did not do any coaching though used both the Career Launcher’s and TIME material to prepare on my own. I personally feel going to coaching for preparation is a waist of time. These coaching institutes provide very good material and anyone could study on his own.
FYI…. Career Launchers’ material is better than TIME’s in terms of content but TIME’s material is more organized and hence I read some chapters from TIME’s and some from Career Launcher’s books
4) Made sure to study around 6-8 hrs per week initially and then increased the time to 10-12 hrs per week towards closer to the exam date.

I followed the said approach and kept on taking mock CATs. Scores in mock CAT used to vary drastically and I could not see any pattern among the scores of various weeks. My percentile ranged from 89 to 99+ in 3 months but every single time the bottleneck used to be English. Hence I was pretty clear that English would be the deciding factor in the real exam and it turned out to be the same.

On the 3rd Sunday of November, I was yet again face to face with the monster .I came back home after riding the Tiger, in the evening checked the answers of Quant and DI but did not have the courage to check English answers .Still I was pretty sure that I had goofed up big time in English and left everything to destiny.

Now I had 2 mammoth tasks again awaiting me:
1) Long wait till 9th January 2009 when the results of CAT would be out
2) International b-school applications’ preparation

And so I continued once again on my long journey…………….