The MBA Journey

This week I took the first official step towards earning my MBA... the GMAT!

 For me, the GMAT was a really pivotal point in the journey.  My dream is to go to Harvard.  No matter how I did on the GMAT, I was planning on applying to Harvard, but my performance on the GMAT would determine what my back-up schools would be.  Now that I've written the exam, I can start paring down my list to a handful of select schools that I will apply to.  Of course, this still isn't an easy fate... there are a lot of different programs out there, and a lot of options.  Each school has many factors: program focus, program structure, location... and I'm sure there are many, many more.  From what I've heard, the application process is intense and expensive, so it's good to have an idea of what you really want before you begin applying.

 For anyone out there who hasn't written the GMAT yet and is looking for advice, here's mine: just relax!  The GMAT is generally a good predictor of your performance, so once you've done a bunch of practice questions and reviewed all that high school math you tucked back into the recesses of your brain, there's not much else you can do.  One thing that really helped me was to just focus on each question as it came.  This sounds obvious, but the GMAT is structured such that you get harder questions as you get the earlier ones right, and easier questions as you get the earlier ones wrong.  Knowing that the questions are supposed to get harder if I'm doing well often leads me to question whether my current questions are indeed harder... But the truth is that there is nothing you can do about the past questions, so it doesn't matter how well you did on them.

Anyway... the next step of my journey is to decide where to apply.  I am definitely applying to Harvard, and Northwestern and Stanford are high on the list as well.  Dartmouth and the London School of Economics are also up for consideration, but I'm not sure...