Getting My MBA

It’s over! I took the big old nasty GMAT! It seemed to take forever and turn my brain inside out, but it’s over. I didn’t get my official score yet — that’ll take about 3 weeks — but my preliminary score was over 700. Out of a maximum of 800, I think I did pretty good. If you can believe the percentile, I’m smarter at math than 82% of the people who think they’re smart enough to go to grad school. In verbal, I got 97th percentile. I think I got an edge here because I’m a native English speaker. I know plenty of people who have English as a second language who do a terrific job, but even for them there are some odd corners where things get tricky. Hey, if I took a Spanish test I’d get a percentile of about 4 — in Hindi, I’d get a solid 0

The agreement I signed says I won’t go into details, but I think it’s okay to say stuff that mba.com posts on their site. There are two essay questions, a bunch of math (qualititative) questions, and a bunch of verbal questions. Every section is timed.

I think I nailed one of the essays and did a pretty mediocre job on the second. This shouldn’t affect my overall score but there is currently a blank spot for the essay problems.

That’s really good, and I’m glad I did well and especially that it’s over. If you still have to take it, just go for it. Definitely take the time to review using the program that mba.com provides.

I’m going to be a rebel. Yep. I’m normally a pretty straight-laced, follow the rules kind of guy. But this time, they’ve gone too far. They’ve pushed me beyond what any reaonsable human being should be forced to endure.

My grad school is telling me to buy a Windows PC. bleech, as Mad Magazine would say. What a waste! I’m going to get a free laptop, but it’s going to run Windows?

Well, actually, yes. I’m going to get a MacBook Pro. If I absolutely, positively have to torture myself by running the abomination from Redmond, at least I can do it in a closable window in Mac OSX.

In the bad old days, there used to be a program called Virtual PC. This let you run Windows on a Mac. It was slow and painful, but it worked. You could have Mac goodness most of the time and jump into the slime-encrusted pit of that other thing only when necessary. Did I mention that it was slow?

But now, Macs run on Intel chips. Not only are they seriously fast and competitively priced (for what you get, no stripper models here), but they’ve got all the right stuff to run, well, you know. Apple provides one solution called Boot Camp. This works really well and fast but you have to stop running OSX when you need to go slumming. The better solution, for me, is something called Parallels Workstation. It uses some tricky goodness baked into the Intel processor so Windows thinks it has the computer all to itself. It does what Virtual PC used to do, except it’s way faster. Did I mention that Virtual PC was really slow?

So, being a rebel doesn’t involve a motorcycle, a leather jacket, or flower power anymore. Maybe the punk kids’ll even think I’m cool! Naaaah.

Too much studying? Tired of worrying about paying for grad school? The walls closing in? Annoyed by an itchy spot on your shoulder blade? Well, take a break and go read Infection by Scott Sigler.

Maybe “read” is the wrong word. It’s a podcast novel, brought to you by the guy who did the first podcast-only novel (Earthcore) in the whole entire world, despite what some careless British reporters might say. It’s a barrel of fun, and I dare you to listen without developing some strange symptoms of your own….

WARNING: if you don’t like violence, strong language, or triangles, you might want to stay away from this one.

Have fun!