I have quite a non-traditional background for an MBA applicant. I went to what is one of the top fashion schools in the world, London College of Fashion, to study fashion design for my undergraduate degree. I then worked at a digital fashion startup, designing avatar skins and virtual reality experiences for fashion. And now for the past 1 year, I’ve been at Meta, previously known as Facebook, working on digital fashion R&D.
My first mock test score was 650- Q41 V37, after about 1.5 months of going through the GMAT official guide.
I started prep in about October using the official guides, but then November was Diwali, December was Christmas so I was in India and then in Bangkok so after that first mock test in early November I didn’t do almost any studying for about 2 months until I got back to London in mid January. That’s when I started using TTP.
I got an email about TTP from GMAT club. I didn’t know what to expect but it seemed to have good reviews so I signed up to the 1 week trial, and that’s when I was super impressed.
I had signed up to take the actual exam on April 4th so I decided to get a TTP subscription for 2 months, which lasted until a few days before the exam. So in all, I used the platform for about 9 weeks.
I used the accelerated version of the TTP course because although I hadn’t done anything quant related in over 7 years, I was good at quant in high school so my concepts were still clear. The main things that I needed help with were 1) Avoiding silly mistakes- this involved a lot of practice, especially of problems that I had a tendency to mess up, 2) Learning the tricks and shortcuts to doing problems quickly. And TTP was perfect for those things. There were just so many problems to practice, from all chapters of all levels, and the explanations for the answer were crystal clear. The video explanations where multiple methods are explained were also great to learn tricks that work for you.
Being able to create custom tests was a very beneficial feature- I was able to practice only the questions that I had bookmarked or gotten wrong previously or took a long time to do. This made it very easy for me to track what I was getting wrong often, and then do those topics tens of times until I felt 100% confident about them.
I found TTP to be extremely useful, just on its own. I did all the problems on the platform and went back to practice the tricky bits diligently. I didn’t have to spend my time making a study plan because TTP did that for me. So I just had to sit down everyday and keep working on it.
I managed to go from 41 to 50 on quant in about 6 weeks, and I felt extremely confident about the 50 because I knew that I’d done so much practice on TTP that I couldn’t screw up even if I wanted to. It just felt like I knew every kind of problem like the back of my hand.
It was only after I felt confident about 50 on quant that I moved onto verbal. For verbal, I did the opposite of what I did for quant. I didn’t do too many practice questions. Instead I focused on reading all the theory to really understand the intricacies of the grammar rules. This boosted my score from 37 to 47 but I didn’t do my best on the day so I ended up with a 42.
I think it’s very important to be confident and believe in yourself if you want to do well on the GMAT. I did enough problems on TTP and mock tests with zero distractions, so I felt confident that the mock test scores I was getting were a true indication of my capability, and that there’s no way I could screw this up. That helped massively.
When I first started prep, I remember hoping to touch 700 eventually. My dad actually told me I should aim for 750 but I thought he was being extremely unrealistic. 710 seemed like a stretch. After my first mock test, I knew there was room for improvement but I wasn’t sure how to get there. It felt like a lot of effort to even make a plan, and I didn’t know how much I could really drive my score up from 650. TTP made my journey so smooth and easy that before I knew it (and after ZERO meltdowns!!!), after 6 weeks of prep, I immediately went up 100 points! Thanks to TTP, I enjoyed the GMAT rather than dreading it. I was excited to take the test and get my score!