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.

This Friday I take the test. Or should I say, the test. The 4+ hour long test, with essay questions for goo’ness sakes. I haven’t taken a test like that since my SAT’s <cough> years ago.

I’m seriously nervous. I know I shouldn’t be, since I’m good at taking tests like this (sadly, test-taking skill doesn’t always predict skill in real life).

The essay questions didn’t look that bad. They’re kind of a series of questions looking for logical holes in a short argument. Go to MBA.com to download some examples. There have been enough documents, technical and otherwise, created by my little typing fingers to give me plenty of experience putting words together.

I have to say that MBA.com does provide some nice tools. They have a sample test you can download and run and they have some study materials online. Every one of the essay questions is provided ahead of time, too. 45 pages worth with about 8 per page. Hmmm, I think I’ll memorize answers to all of them!

Breathe in, breathe out. Relax. Crack my knuckles. It’ll be okay.

The other cool thing is that you get a “provisional” score right away. They must either base this on just the multiple choice questions or they have some neat software that attempts to understand your essay answers. I admit I’m a computer geek, and I know just enough about language processing to know that that would be a pretty kewl program if it worked with any accuracy. Actually, though, keyword lookups would probably give a pretty good first cut. As long as they have real people reading them for the final score.

I also know enough about writing to know that I need to end with something snappy that summarizes everything and makes you, the reader (both of you) want to read again tomorrow. Hmmm.

Hmmm.

Ah, well….

MBA, uh, GMAT, uh, snap! See y’all tomorrow!