My Background : I'm a corporate lawyer. I have been working for the last 3 years in the general corporate and investment funds practice area in a firm in Mumbai.
Reason to do an MBA: As a corporate lawyer, I work on a lot of acquisition transactions and various kinds of corporates, and fund formation. I got to learn a lot about how the commercials of each transaction were really understood in detail. All this got me interested in planning my MBA journey.
My GMAT Journey I started taking a look at what the format was like, what were the subjects that went involved with the GMAT. Thankfully I had done Maths in the 12th grade. However, I knew this part would definitely require extra work. I wanted to be as productive as I could with my time, which is why I started looking for institutions like Crackverbal who were experts and they would be able to save a lot of my time doing research. They (Crackverbal) already have a formula which is optimized.
As a lawyer I always thought Critical Reasoning and RC should come naturally and to a certain extent it’s true, but I had my own challenges!
Critical Reasoning was a little easier, but actual real life skills and testing format skills are two very different things. You still need to mold and understand what a particular question requires and how you can do that in the two minute time period that you have.
Sentence Correction on the other hand had me lost in the beginning. I would say that I am decent at English, but the granularity to which GMAT tests you is different. That's not something I was used to even as a lawyer.
GMAT requires you to be very comfortable with your quant skills. It's not just about knowing the formulas, it's also about how to apply them. And you need to really understand what a formula is intended to do. And that was really a steep learning curve for me.
Once I started attending the Crackverbal live classes on the weekends it gave structure and consistency to my prep. I learned how to drill down the concepts and was able to apply them when the question came up. To address my weakness in SC, I worked on 15 SC questions everyday. Analysing the mistakes and working on them the next day.
Aiming to reach a goal of 760!I also took help from Crackverbal for personal tutoring. My first attempt was 690 and I had to improve my Quant scores. Juggling work and studies had become an issue at times because of the responsibilities on both sides. It does become a priority issue.
However, what really worked for me in the end was the fact that I created a very rigorous schedule. I set a schedule and followed it. I would time every test I took. I had made an Excel sheet with the Quantitative review and the
OG where I'd split up questions. 31 questions each.
I would analyse my mistakes every time. I followed this for every test I took. And somehow I think that conditioning really helped me. I would take one hour off of work everyday and focus on taking timed tests.
Working with the Crackverbal team helped as my mentor clarified a lot of the concepts for me, because I had taught myself almost entirely the last time around. These strategies helped me solve questions across the board. That's really what made a lot of difference to me.
If I have to really cull out three things that made a huge difference, I think one would obviously be my personal tutoring with Crackverbal.
Second thing would be the fact that I learned how to solve questions in a more efficient way.
And lastly, what I learned really well is that all of us come from this approach from school that, you know, if there are 10 questions, you should get 9/10 or 10/10. But on the GMAT, you need to be a lot smarter than that.
I had made my peace that there are certain topics which I am okay with getting them wrong. I accepted that I was not good at them or would need more than 2 minutes to solve. So I focused on giving 100% on everything I was comfortable with.
This approach of being realistic did save me a lot of time on the test.
Taking practice tests I took all the GMAT prep tests and the topic-based tests by Crackverbal. I timed all my tests meticulously. I also created tests for myself from the
OG questions. Analysing all the tests is the key to making your prep effective.
Just before I took the GMAT all my mock tests (GMAT prep) were around the 750 - 770 range.
I did take the last month very seriously with my focus on preparing for the test. I took tests everyday and focused on understanding my mistakes and working on those topics. This approach made a lot of difference. I also made sure I took my mocks the same time I planned to take the real test too.
I took the offline version of the test. It was a very comfortable setup with proper COVID regulations. I was wearing a mask throughout the test.
After the results were out, I was thrilled to see the 760 score on the screen!
My advice to all aspirants Be consistent with your prep.
Take timed tests.
Create and stick to your test taking strategy.
I hope my debrief helps all those who are preparing right now. I wish you all the best! A big thank you to the Crackverbal team, the mentors and everyone who was part of my GMAT Journey.
Regards,
Madhura