Important announcement (Drum sounds!)
Juggler has completed her Kellogg essays. More importantly, they have lived through the wrath of her critical eye.
Bow! Applause! (Receding drum sounds...)
Ok I will drop the third person now. It is just the lingering effect of writing the "Critical Assessment" essay. I don't know if I should attribute it to writing in the third person, but it was undoubtedly the easiest one to write.
Now I'm on to Wharton's essays. Thinking of calling it a day and beginning afresh tomorrow. Maybe I will fill some applications now or read a book or watch some tv. Wow! Life is suddenly more beautiful and relaxed and there are so many nice things to do. G'nite blog...
Yippie! I'm done with the all-encompassing Career progess, Goals, Why MBA, Why now, Why Kellogg essay (I've not yet answered why Kellogg though, 'coz I have to mine through my research for that). I rewrote it 6 times. Fitting all that I want to say in 2 double spaced pages was an uphill task all the way. Now I'm panting and wheezing :-), but I feel much better because this essay figures in 5 of my schools in pretty much the same form. Despite all my whining, I really enjoyed writing this essay :-)
I have 4 more days off. So tomorrow I will work on Harvard's Ethics essay and Kellogg's Evaluative Assessment essay. Then it's on to Wharton. I really need to think about the failure essay, I've not written something like this for Harvard or Kellogg. So it's going to be a completely new one.
I have a great update on the recommendation front too. I sat with one of my recommenders and discussed Harvard's recommendations. I showed him my Career Vision essay and we discussed on how he should integrate my goals into his responses. Now he will answer the questions and send them away in a couple of weeks. All the other recos should follow suit too. So that's a big job done! I have to do this exercise with my other 2 recommenders next week sometime.
It's so nice to wake up really late and not have to worry about getting up early for work the next day. So I'm going to be my good old nocturnal self and go to bed at 4am :D. It's like I'm in college again! And yeah, I bought 2 Calvin and Hobbes comics (I have 5 in all now) to fill the 5 minute breaks I take while writing essays... they are so much fun and help me unwind instantly. And of course, all the laughing keeps me from obsessing endlessly about my essays and this and that. I'm off to read one of them now. Ciao!
I am done with 4 of the 6 Kellogg essays. I am left with career progress and critical assessment essays. And I've been really struggling with the career progress one. I know what I want to say, but I simply cannot decide how to say it. Everything I write sounds terrible to me. I already rewrote it 5 times in 5 different styles. I can't believe this is happening :-( I'm giving myself until Friday to complete all Kellogg essays. I really hope I get a major brain wave this evening.
I have 5 days off starting Saturday. I want to be done with Harvard, Kellogg and Wharton completely at the end of this loooooong weekend. Then I can take the rest of the month for Stanford! This is the ideal scenario. There's no way I'm going to meet these deadlines if I'm gonna be stuck with such a huge writer's block :-(
Back to work, will lament about my dismal progress later.
The title of this post was inspired by a cool book by Dave Eggers. But the actual reason to celebrate is that I've written up 3 (4A, 4C,4D) of the 6 Kellogg essays. In just 3 days. Now that's what I call speed!!!
I'm pretty satisfied with one of them, I'm gonna edit the others till I feel the same about them too. I've reserved this weekend for the all encompassing Essay1. Essays 2 and 3 should not take more than a day each. So by Wednesday I should have all the rough drafts for Kellogg ready. Yippie!!! (Maybe I'm cheering too soon, but I'm happy with myself for being so disciplined...) And yeah, I got so engrossed in the Kellogg essays, I forgot about doing Wharton parallely. Duh! But it's worked out pretty good, so I guess it's okay. I will begin with Wharton soon...
It's 2AM and I really need to sleep. It's gonna be a long day tomorrow. Sigh... Gnite blog!
After a lot of deliberation, I finally decided to apply to Kellogg also in R1. That makes it 5 online applications, 25 essays, 1 resume, transcripts and 12 recommendations to be completed by end of September. It seems like a lot, but I've made a plan which makes it look achievable.
I hope to complete all essays of Wharton and Kellogg by the end of August. I want to finish all parallel essays between these 2 schools before I tackle the disjoint ones. By answering common questions (rather those that have common answers :D) asked by both the schools at one go, I will save a lot time, coz I don't have to think about the same topic from scratch again. I'm taking this approach only for these 2 schools coz I feel I will be customizing the same stories for both. For all other schools I will take same route as I did for HBS, complete the whole set of essays before I move to the next school. W and K in one month is achievable, but I'm stretching it considering that I'm going on a 4 day Kodaikanal trip, which will invariably give me at least a 2 day hangover... Will give it my best shot anyway.
I want to give Stanford's "What matters most..." essay as much time as possible. This essay is particularly special to me. I know the answer to the question, making the reader see my passion is the challenge. So I feel I can edit this essay infinitely. It's going to be really difficult for me to become happy with this one... My plan is to start on this essay right away and keep writing till I'm happy. I have to finish it latest by mid-september, which gives me a month and a half. As for Stanford' other essays, I already have all the content on paper in some form or the other. I will work on these in the first week of September.
That will leave me with Chicago. There are 2 important essays, the other 3 are 100 words each. So I'm planning to do Chicago last and want to finish it by midseptember too. By then I would have written the same career progress, goals, why MBA essay thrice. So fleshing it out a bit shouldn't be too much of a problem.
I want to spend the rest of September, having a look at each school's essays as a single story and add some final touches.
This weekend I will start on my online apps and send out the recommendation requests. One of these weekends I should also work on my resume and transcripts.
Whew that was one big plan!!! I will come back to this post now and then and make sure I'm keeping up these promises.
Essays update:
HBS - ethics essay is pending and some rework is needed on "other info" essay
Kellogg - "Outside of work I..." is almost done
Chicago - "Value to your study group..." is done
The weekend was not completely useless as I expected. 5 out of the 6 HBS essays are in "almost final" stage. I will improve them if I get ideas from other schools' essays. Otherwise I would dare say that I do like them as they are now. It's a luxury to say that after one month of toiling on these essays. Now that I have most of the stories on paper, that too with such stringent word limits, I hope to move faster with the other schools' essays. Being a self-proclaimed creative writer doesn't hurt either, I experiment a lot :D
Stanford is shaping along nicely, only in my mind though :) But I do have an idea of what goes where just the way I promised yesterday. Staring at the essays does help I guess! As for Chicago, first of all I don't know why I picked it, maybe because the 100 word essays seemed like a real challenge. And you bet they were. But I wrote only the "value to your study group" essay. I have figured out which book/play/movie I will recommend, but I'm yet to write about it. I blame my slacking partly on my illness and more so on the fact that I hate the 100 word limit. How the hell am I supposed to wax eloquent about the book I love in just 100 words? As for the "one thing that most people do not know about me" essay, I can think of such things, but none that I would want to reveal to the admissions officer :). What a question! God!
The weekend has been pretty good on the non-MBA front. I slept well, did some quality reading and yes, I shopped. Bought some clothes and a long desired scented candle- one of those short stout ones and yeah the scent is lemon meringue (dunno what I'll do with it though, I definitely don't want to light it up when the power goes off... :D)
Now I'm off to watch some tv and will hit the sack by 12. Gotta be in office before 8 you see.... Ciao!
I'm floating in the air. My feet are so numb with cold, I cannot even feel them. My head is weighing a ton and my back threatens to ache till I die. I'm running a 102 degrees temperature and I cannot taste a thing.
Does this sound like a great Saturday??? Why can't these disasters strike on a week day, I could at least take a day off :D.
To put the cherry on the cake, I'm not too sure if I can keep up with my essay plan for the weekend. I wanted to do the following:
- Become happy with my 5 HBS essays. (Simply put- edit them. The ethics essay is still non-existent to me, I'm trying very hard not to think about it. Maybe I should be thinking about it. Whatever....)
- Write the three 100 word essays of Chicago.
- Make an outline for Stanford essays. Figure out what goes where. (Stanford has made life extremely complicated with the 2 "recent experiences" short essays. I don't know which ones to choose. I'm very excited about the "What matters most to you?" essay and hate the short ones at the moment.)
As far as HBS essays go, I'm reasonably happy with 3 of the essays, but would love to revisit them. I need to work a lot on the remaining 2 essays. I've written one of the Chicago 100 word essays and I think 100 words is simply RIDICULOUS!!! I stared at the Stanford essays for an hour and of course, I'm still stumped :(
It's Saturday afternoon already, I'm not able to sit in front of the comp, my eyes are beginning to burn. So I'm off to sleep. There goes my weekend plan :(
I might just sit up tonight and get back on track. I really hope I have such an achievement to boast about tomorrow :D
Yesterday was a good day for my writing. The words flowed effortlessly. It felt like I'd had a couple of vodkas :-). I made a reasonably good rough draft of my "Undergraduate Academic Experience" HBS essay. It was fun to recreate those 4 years on paper! It got pretty nostalgic...
I just came back from gym and lunch. My energy level peaks after every workout. So a visit to the gym just before lunch keeps me wide awake for the rest of the day. I'm barely awake all morning. But that's a totally different issue altogether :D. I start work at 8am, that's all that matters. I'm waiting to go back to my nocturnal self after october. But then again, maybe I won't, maybe I will stick to my new reformed self :-)
Today I have to write up a draft of the "Other Information" HBS essay. Then I will be on schedule to complete rough drafts of all 6 HBS essays by the 31st July. If I don't ass off, I could even have a couple of "nearly final" ones. Looks like I don't have to kick myself after all. And I can go back to loving myself! :D
I'm simply not happy with my progress. Last week has been extremely unproductive with respect to essays. So I'm in a state where I have to complete 3 essays in 7 days to meet the deadlines I'd set. Sigh...Otherwise the weekend seemed long for a change. I watched a play, Hysssteria, by Evam. It was a nice way to spend my sunday evening, for it's been a really long time since I watched a good play. The Electricity Board of Bangalore has this crazy "Load shedding on Sundays" mania. So there was no electricity from 10am - 6pm yesterday. Why on Sunday dammit?!!! But the truth is I don't miss anything but the internet. The weather is so amazing that I can spend the whole day on the terrace. So fan, a/c, cold water etc. are not concerns at all. I can still write essays on the laptop or on paper if it comes down to that. I catch up on quite a bit of reading on such Sundays. And of course, the day turns out to be mcuh more fun than sitting in front of the tv/comp or day. Still it's my birth right to crib...So that's it for now. Remind me to kick myself if I don't stay on schedule.
I saw 2 movies last weekend - Before Sunrise and the sequel Before Sunset . The movies are worth the mention for their subtleness. There are just 2 characters, an American guy and a French girl. And all they do is walk (talking all the time) around Vienna in the first movie and around Paris in the sequel. The movies are all about the dialogs...How do we fall in love? We don't always pick up someone at a bar, wash down a couple of drinks, end up in bed and find the person irresistible. That happens only in hollywood movies! We don't always catch a person's eye, pretend to look away, keep bumping into each other, shake a leg to a few songs, run around a couple of trees (in Switzerland, of course) and fall in love-pronto. That happens only in Bollywood movies! In reality, we meet someone, maybe he/she looks good, maybe we've not even seen each other yet. But we go yak yak yak. We talk about our lives, convictions, families, memorable anecdotes, everything under the sun (from how we love the rain to how much life sucks) , till we find each other irresistible. Love, I feel, happens when we find an amazing intersection of ideas or values, or when we supremely admire each other for being someone we can never be, the "complement" in a word. Now, that's real life!"Real life" is what these movies captured. As I said, these movies were all about the dialogs. The director has so subtly transformed a chance meeting to love, not through a series of disjoint events, but through continuous conversations, one seamlessly flowing into the next. I'm not one for super-romantic movies. But the subtleness in these got to me:)It's been a long time since I saw a movie I could so relate to. Hence the rave review. I know it's as far as it gets from MBA applications, but what the hell, I had to blog it!
I want to have a common place from where I can track the infosessions. I'm just compiling links that will take me to the info session announcement page of each of my target schools.
HBS
Wharton
Columbia
Stanford
Chicago
Kellogg
I've been meaning to write this post on safety schools for a couple of days now...
The concept of safety schools itself is sort of crude. A safety school is one in which you have a very good chance of (still not 100%) getting admitted with your credentials. But it does not stop there. You should still love the program and you should still be able to get where you want to be after you graduate. So you should be spending the same amount of time for shortlisting a safety school as you would for a dream school. Be it researching the school, talking to an alum/student, making a school visit or attending an info session, a safety school is as important as a dream school.
Personally, I am of the opinion that you should consider a safety school only if at least one of the following situations applies to you:
- You absolutely hate your job and simply have to escape the grind this year to keep your sanity.
- You have a plum job waiting for you (at your current employer's or elsewhere) and they don't give a damn which school you are from as long as you've got an MBA.
- You are a rich(or not so rich) already successful entrepreneur and just want to learn stuff, you don't care about the school's brand, the alumni network etc.
- You are just looking for a refreshing change for a couple of years while you pick up a cool degree. You have no clue what you want to do with the degree.
If you don't belong to these categories but are still thinking of safety schools, think twice. Don't you have enough grit in you to wait it out another year? Don't you want to give your dream schools another shot? Isn't there anything you can do to improve your chances next year?
This is the thought process I went through before deciding that I don't want safety schools this year. I am willing to wait another year, or as long as it takes, or till I feel I have to get into B-school that year no matter what. I guess this explains my highly ambitious list of schools. I want to give it my best shot this year before I think of safe options. Yes! Ever the optimist, that's what I am :D
Essays Update:
All my 5 schools (for round1) have released their essay questions :) And guess what? Looks like my story fits in pretty well in each school's set of essays! Cool huh? :D
As for my progress, HBS' "Career Vision" essay and "3 Achievements" essay are ready for review by friends. And as I promised in my previous post, I started on the Significant Leadership Experience essay and have completed the first draft. So I can goof off tomorrow:) !!!! I love being on schedule. This is turning out to be a great weekend already.
Oh yeah, gym routine is on full swing ***Grin***. I totally love myself now.
HBS' Career Vision essay is almost a finished product now. Yippie!
I've also written up the 3 Achievements Essay, but it's far from finished. Hoping to wrap that up by this weekend. And of course I also have to begin another essay and bring it to some shape by Sunday. That's a lot of work!
I was in Chennai last weekend and on Monday for my dad's birthday. It was blazing hot. All I did was sleep at home, eat yummy food made by mom, and write essays. And yeah I met one old school friend after 6 years, we had fun catching up on each other's lives. I feel so grown up at times :( But I'm just 23...
Have some thoughts which I will blog tonight. It's back to work now!
After nearly two months of mercilessly deleting/ shelving everything I wrote, I have finally been able to like (only slightly, mind you) what I wrote in my HBS Career Vision essay today. I guess the key is to bring out the passion. Oh yes! All the stuff I've written so far had all the facts, answered the question bang on, were grammatically correct, had a decent structure....blah blah... but it was not my voice, not my life. In fact I would have hated my life if it really was like what I'd put down.
So the moral of the story: Of course we all know what we want to say... But are we saying it right? We better, 'coz no B-School wants a sputtering, confused, disoriented twit. Or anyone who sounds like one.
So after all the self deprecation, I'm smiling today... While I should actually be sleeping for I have to be at work before 8 tomorrow. (Did I mention 8 AM???)
And the gym routine is really suffering... :(
TOEFL is also out of the way now. It's full of sitters, definitely too easy for Indians. I scored 243-300, which means I can actually max it if my essay gets full marks :D.
The school selection was wierd. There were 2 Harvards, Harvard-Radcliffe and Harvard- something else, didn't know which one has the business school. But because there is only one HBS I'm hoping it will reach the right place. If not I can always get TOEFL waived off. I don't see why they should have a problem after my 42 in GMAT Verbal.
It's just 7.40 pm and I'm home already. It's been really long since I did this, it's almost nostalgic. I'm trying to contact students/alums of my target schools. But seems like no one checks e-mail ( Feels better than thinking they don't reply...). Sigh!
Anyway it's coffee/music/essay time. S'Long blog :)
This weekend has not been too great. That's because the week's been so tiring. I slept for 5 hours during the day yesterday and spent most of my time watching Friends on DVD and catching up on my books/blog reading. Today there was a scheduled power cut from 9am to 3pm. But there was no power till 6pm. So I read Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis today, it was slightly depressing.
I have a rough draft of my career vision essay for HBS. I'm yet to answer the why HBS question. Nevertheless it's nice to see my "vision" on paper. Hopefully I will wrap up the draft by tonight.Which reminds me, I'm taking my TOEFL at 9am tomorrow, so I have to sleep at least by 2am :(
I cooked very nice pasta for dinner yesterday and had it with some yummy coffee. These days the weather is perfect for coffee anytime of the day!
I really need to get back early from office at least 2 days a week, it never seems to happen :( And yeah, I also need to hit the gym everyday starting tomorrow. Sigh! I make so many empty promises to myself.
Ok I'm off...Back to coffee and career vision! Oh and I'm going out for dinner so gotta get ready too... So that explains the "hit the gym" resolution :D
I'm absolutely lovin' writing my essays. I have figured out what I want to write in each of the HBS essays. I started with a draft of "What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such?" yesterday. I've written about two accomplishments. I can edit the essay endlessly. But what I really like is- I'm always thinking about the whole story instead of essay by essay or paragraph by paragraph. I place every line against the background of my entire story and see if it fits. If it doesn't I change the idea, rephrase it or delete it completely. It's really difficult to make myself forget about the word limit for the moment, but I'm pulling along just fine.
Now that I've actually started the "process", my needs have become very minimal. Just food, water and showers. But the weather outside is heavenly, cool breeze, light drizzles, the sun feels like a warm kiss... it's just perfect! And it is just not helping my cause. So I've resorted to strolling on my terrace- really helps me think. My story is getting better, but gradually...
Yippie!
Finally HBS has announced its essays and I have something concrete to work on. Deadlines are in the sidebar. So scratch yesterday's targets. The "Recos for dummies" is ready anyway :)
I will begin with Harvard's essays today.
I have been doing some more B-School research. I find Stanford and Columbia incredibly attractive! But I cannot apply to 7 schools in R1. I just cannot do it with my work load. So after a lot of thinking and re-thinking and talking to people, I have decided to push Kellogg and Ross to R2, I may not apply to them at all, I may change the list, but these decisions can wait.Columbia, by virtue of its rolling application process, has a deadline around the same time as R2. So that's one school I can work on after September. Stanford's customized curriculum looks exciting, so I went with my gut feeling, I'm going to apply to Stanford!As for the essays, I have a rough draft of a rough draft of a rough draft of a rough draft of... my goals and my career progress. Lot more work needs to be done to get it in shape. I also have an idea of how to answer the "Why X school?" question for Harvard,Chicago, Columbia. I'm putting together the facts now. That leaves Stanford and Wharton.Target for this weekend:1. Put together a file for my recommenders to prepare for the process. "Recos for dummies!!!"2. Tackle the uniqueness question3. Put down the "Why X school?" answers on paper (This is stretching it!)4. Update the progress here on Sunday/Monday. I've really been neglecting the blog :(
I've had a series of false starts on my goals essay. I've changed what I want to say and how I want to say it a dozen times. So I switched to more holistic approach and I think I finally have the whole story sort of figured out now. I've also decided which part of the story goes into which essay.
It's taken quite bit of soul searching, disappointments and gnashing of teeth to get here. Today I will have a rough draft of my goals ready. And then it's on to career progress again.
My schedule at work is not helping at all. Weekends are becoming increasingly crucial...
Back to work!
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