CATs and school visits

I decided to take a GMATPrep CAT every weekend for the next seven weeks. I plan to take the actual test in the first or second week of July.

I spoke with admissions at each of my target schools. I will visit three of my target schools in the third or fourth week of August, in Boston. Then, in October, my fiance and I are off to my dream school in North Carolina.

Other than this... I did some DS review problems from GMATPrep software. I got 13 out of 15. Not bad.

Will write my debrief about the second GMATPrep CAT some time over this Memorial Day weekend.

Cynthia Cooper

I just read an interesting article about a very old event. It covers the exposure of WorldCom by Cynthia Cooper. I bring up this article because it points to an interesting issue that I've never considered. It refers to a person who exposes illegal practices as an "insider outsider." The author also points out that the best candidates to serve in this role happen to be women; it also so happens that Enron and WorldCom were both exposed by women. Part of the reason for why women become insider outsiders is an "old boys club" mentality at many of these companies; where dare-do and sheer old balls to go beyond what is reasonable is valued more than prudence and precision. I thought this is an interesting sociological point to raise. Just wanted to share it with others. As always, comments are welcome.

And, for you reading pleasure, here is also a TIME interview her...and one with CFO.

More on recommendation letters

Just found out that the president of a company I interned for will write me a recommendation letter. This pretty much seals the deal as far as recommendations go.

Now I have to wrap up with the GMAT. I am taking one more CAT before the end of May. In June, I plan to take a CAT every weekend. This will really show me how prepared I am. I will most likely take the GMAT in either the 1st or 2nd week in July.

I notified my manager that I will be leaving for a short "vacation" at the beginning of August. My fiance and I are going to Boston, to visit three of my target schools. I also plan to visit the fourth school at the end of September, in North Carolina.

I hope to have all of my material together by the end of October or beginning of November.

Recommendation letters secured

At this point I can say with confidence that I have secured the recommendation letters I need for schools I plan to apply to.

I think this must have been the quickest response I have ever had regarding such a serious matter. My second recommender - a former professor of mine - responded to my e-mail to him within an hour.

I now have two recommendation letters, both from former professors. This is not the most ideal situation, as I do not have any PROFESSIONAL recommenders, i.e. former bosses. However, I have two people who are absolutely my fans and genuinely like me. In his book, Richard Montauk says that the best people to get recommendations from are: 1) those who are really familiar with you and/or your work and intellectual abilities, 2) people who genuinely like you. The former will provide recommendation letters that will highlight your skills and capabilities in ways that a person who has known you for maybe 3 to 6 months won't. The latter group of individuals will be your true ambassadors, and will promote you almost as a brand.

I feel very lucky at this point to have two individuals who are able to do both. Certainly, they have not observed me as an individual in the corporate world. Nevertheless, they have seen my analytical ability on more than one occasion. I have written long papers and reports for them, which dealt with big issues and involved a lot of research and data analysis.

Since I am really applying as an change-of-a-career candidate, all of this plays to my advantage. If I worked for an accounting firm for two years and could secure a professional letter of recommendation for accounting programs, that would look bad. However, at this point I have spent 5 months at a human resources solutions provider and a little over six months with a third-party logistics firm. These are not industries that are exactly close to accounting. So, people who can speak about my preparedness for intensive graduate study in a new field seems to be a smarter choice than individuals who have known me on a MONTHS basis. My professors have seen my work and observed my growth over a period of 3 YEARS.

At any rate, I am still waiting for my former supervisor. If he does not get back to me by the end of this week, I will contact him by Tuesday to see where we stand.

Also, I found a pretty cool website with some interesting statistics.

Data sufficiency and recommendation letters

I did some DS problems tonight, from the OG quant supplement text. I noticed that more and more I have been using an approach championed by the MGMAT folks. They are all for rewriting and rephrasing the DS problem and statements. My approach is a bit modified. I do not rephrase the problem. Instead, I summarize it using algebra and/or symbols to focus my attention on what is really being asked for and to save myself time by NOT having to go back and reread three or four sentences. For the statements, I write down statement numbers and I try to figure it out visually. For example:

1) blah blah = blah + 4blah/2

2) blah/3 =6blah - bleh

By doing this, I keep the two statements isolated, which eliminates the chances of me carrying the information from statement 1 into statement 2. When I write it out, I actually see what each statement has and does not have and can make my evaluation accordingly. I think that it is worth it to spend a little extra time and answer the question correctly.

In other news, I still have not heard from one of my recommenders. So, I took out an insurance policy, and contacted another potential recommender. I am pretty sure he will provide me with a reference letter, because he has written references for me in the past and told me that I am more than welcome to come back to him for grad school recs. Also, I am thinking of asking for a recommendation from one of my current managers at work. She and I started off on a cool note. However, our relationship at work has grown quite warm and during my evaluation she has had nothing but positive to say about my performance. However, I will have to ask her for only ONE letter for one of the four schools that I plan to apply to. This will be tricky as I will pretty much be telling her that I will be leaving the company. I will have to think this over more than twice, but if push comes to shove, I'll just have to take that risk.

That's all for now. Time to hit the shower.

GMATPrep Test #1 - Attempt 1

Sooo... I took my GMATPrep for the first time, about 3 hours ago. I was pleasantly surprised. I got a 640 with 41 in quant and 36 in verbal. I thought that I was going to score lower on the verbal given that I have not practiced it in 2 weeks. In total, I got 24 questions wrong with 12 in quant and 12 in verbal. GMATPrep is different from the PowerPrep software in that it assess you on all of the questions you answer, whereas PowerPrep only scores and shows results for questions that "count" [it throws in experimental questions].

I was angry about one things though: The GMATPrep tutorial tells you that you can hit the "Explain Question" button to see how to solve a problem. However, I did not see this button in the question review mode. I posted a question about this on beatthegmat, and will see what the response is.

Here is the breakdown:

Quant:

Again, I saw a pretty shocking pattern. I answered 7 questions wrong, in a row (#9 to 15). The rest of the question were pretty spread out.

I made two stupid mistakes, where I got the wrong answer because I did not pay enough attention to the problem.

I guessed on 8 questions (2 were somewhat of an educated guess). Of these, I answered 3 right. Two of these were the two where I made an educated guess, and one was a wild guess in the end. I ran out of time on the last 2 questions (40 seconds left). Both were, of course, wild guesses. I got one of these right, and it was also a question that I would have answered correctly if I had the time, so I feel pretty good about it.

I saw a comb/perm question for the very first time, and answered it correctly. I feel good about this, for I did not study these question types. It was not straight forward question, either. You had to really work the problem. I saw the common mistake that is made on that specific question right away and the rest was my memory of formulas and concepts from about 3 months ago - the last time I read anything about these problem types.

I am also happy to say that I did tremendously better on number properties questions. I actually think I got almost all of them right.

Verbal:

I made one stupid mistake...really stupid mistake. I answered a RC question before finishing the passage. After hitting confirm answer, I decided to finish reading the passage, and at once saw that I answered the previous question wrong. Just sheer stupidity on my part.

On 4 questions I switched from the right answer choice to the wrong answer choice. On 6 questions I was able to eliminate enough choices to get down to two, but then chose the wrong one.

SC = 6 wrong; CR = 5 wrong; RC = 1 wrong (thank goodness... no science passages!)

According to the OG my scores are (roughly since these number are from 2003 through 2006):

Quant = 64th percentile; Verbal = 80th percentile; Overall = 80th percentile.

Next CAT is in two weeks, on May 24th or 25th.

GMATPrep and quant supplement

I decided, today, to download the GMATPrep software and practice with the more recent real thing. I think that I have been postponing it because I was afraid of the results I might get. However, it is really stupid to postpone until the last few weeks before the actual exam. So, I decided to start practicing with it now. That is not to say that I will abandon the PowerPrep tests. However, I am more interested in my results on the GMATPrep CATs, as they are the latest and, as I understand, have a more updated algorithm.

Another thing I did was #1 through 20 in the OG quant supplement. I got 5 wrong, and these were pretty easy questions, and dumb mistakes. I just could not focus. The reason for this is the following:

Two days ago I finally got up the courage to e-mail my second recommender about.. well... the recommendation letters for the schools I plan to apply to. My first recommender got back to me very quickly and was as accommodating as can possibly be. I was pretty much told that she will do whatever needs to be done. This made me feel great. However, this second recommender is yet to return my e-mail. I am heavily relying on this guy, because he is the president of a company I interned for. I did a lot of projects for him and he really knows my work and personality. I am just hoping that he is a really busy guy and, as I know from our previous communication, is making some sweeping changes at the company. I am hoping that he did not get back to me because of his busy schedule at the moment.

So, I kept thinking about that as I did the problems, and that affected my focus tremendously. I have to stop thinking about it and just remain patient. I plan to take the first GMATPrep test this coming Sunday. I must focus and review my flashcards before this weekend. On Saturday, I am going out with my fiance until about 6, so I won't really get any work done. This means I have to plug tomorrow, after work.