Hello friends!
I recently visited Harvard Business School and fell in love with it. I'd love the opportunity to discuss my passion - business - with some of the best in the world, have incredible learning experiences and better prepare myself for making a difference in the world. I love the idea of learning and sharing with the case method and it would be a dream come true to go to HBS. This thread will provide accountability and share what I learn while on my GMAT journey.
Background
To give you some background: I got the best grades in my school's history and got top grades studying a numerate subject at one of the top universities in the world. I founded and run my own company and I'm aiming to reach seven-figures of annual revenue and systemizing everything (so I can retire from day-to-day management) before I apply to Harvard.
For comparison - an older person I know from university has already been to HBS and I have better grades and more impressive work experience than her, while another person I know from university got into HBS this December and I far surpass his leadership experience while matching his grades. With my unique experiences I know I can add a lot of value to the other students via the case method so I'm confident with my chances. If everything goes incredibly well I may apply in September 2016, but it'll probably be September 2017 before I'm ready.
I'm aiming for 780+ in the GMAT with 51 in Quant and 50+ in Verbal. I plan to take the GMAT in around three or four months.
Without any revision I took a diagnostic test earlier today. I was predicted 710-760, with a Quant score of 50+ (96%+) and a Verbal score of 39-42 (89-95%).
In Quant I am weakest at data sufficiency while in Verbal I am weakest at sentence correction. I finished with about five minutes to go in Quant and 15 minutes in Verbal. With my very numerate background I'm confident that with a bit of revision I can easily get a great Quant score - my focus will be on quickly getting to the correct answer. I've never studied English properly so there's lots of room for improvement in Verbal, particularly with sentence correction.
Strategy
This forum is an absolute goldmine!
I've been collecting lots of links to the best threads in Evernote.
Modelling successful people is a great way to succeed, so this thread is great:
Patterns among those who scored 750 what did they use (cannot post URLs yet)
It seems that many people who did well used the
GMAT Club tests and
Manhattan Prep. I'll be investing in the
Manhattan books and will get the
GMAT Club tests - with the latter, I'm deciding between getting it with the
e-GMAT Verbal or the Optimus Prep course. Both are well recommended on here and would cost the same. I may just get them both.
I will be broadly following the advice in these threads:
All you need for Quant
Study plan for VerbalAnalysis and Error Log
After every CAT I'm going to analyse every question. I use the Webclipper tool to put them into Evernote, then tag as follows:
- date
- name of test
- whether I got the question right or wrong
- type of question
- rough time it took to answer (0-30s, 30-60s, 60-90s, 90-120s, 120-150s, 150s+)
This will let me easily find certain questions again in the future.
For the questions I got wrong, I work to understand how to get the right answer. For all questions, I attempt to find a faster way to get the right answer or consider any tricks that I could apply.
This will take significantly longer, but will help me find which areas I'm getting wrong or making mistakes, and help to improve my speed and accuracy.
Action Plan
I'm planning to cover two of the
Manhattan books every week for the next five weeks while doing a timed practice test + analysis every weekend. I'll save the official GMAT tests until I've covered all the
Manhattan books. At the end of the next five weeks I want to get 760+ in an official GMAT test - if I don't I will increase my work ethic and consider investing in live courses. Once I've got 760+ in an official practice test then I'll book my real one.
I'll also aim to do 15+ questions per day plus analyze them.
I use Asana as my project management tool and I've now added my plan into Asana.
Other Preparation
Excelling in GMAT is only a small part of my plan to get into HBS. I will also be:
- working extremely hard to make my company as successful as possible
- excelling in my other leadership positions
- taking some of Wharton and Darden's business courses on Coursera
- reading as many interesting books as possible (related to leadership, marketing, sales, finance, etc)
Plan for this thread
I am very busy but will aim to update this thread at least once a week. If anyone has any suggestions or advice then I would love to hear it!