Submitted my first B school app (harvard)

Submitted my first application Harvard on 30th, just a day before the deadline. Feels good after writing essays and spending time with my recommendors. It was indeed a complex process and took a lot of time. But the whole process was fruitful and spending time on it was worth as you end up figuring out something about yourself from a new perspective.

First of all, let me talk about my essays, first question was "What are your three most substantial accomplishments and why do you view them as such?". I got a good chance to look at all my achievements and it would tough to narrow down to three. In the end I chose two from my work at cisco, one involving a leadership experience and once involving a technical /functional team setup. And for the third one, I chose to write about my venture mprogramming.com, a unique Mobile Programming IDE which allows users to leverage the advantage of web and cloud computing and to program on the go.

Second question was "What have you learned from a mistake". Well this was a tough one. I finally caught 3 such incidents and chose one from my days at college where we had made a big mistake.

Coming to the optional essays, I chose the one on academic experience and community experience. I have portrayed my role in a club called as LUG @ NIT Durgapur.

Am keeping my fingers crossed.
Need loads of luck :)

At the same time, have started working on my next fast approaching deadline: Yale 8th oct

B School Application

Well now that I am done with step 1 i.e. GMAT, I am proceeding to the next step B School Application. From my experience till now, its extremely complex and does take a lot of time. After a certain point personal Choices do weigh more than rankings. However, Business week's b school rankings were helpful coz of the amount of info it contained. Business week does a wonderful survey and populates data starting from no. of applicants, success rate, how many are interviewed, scholarship amounts, avg gmat, avg gpa, work exp to mention a few. It as really useful in shortlisting the univs in a short time with a busy work schedule. After pondering over all the options wrt US, UK, Australia, Europe, Canada and Singapore, I have zeroed in on a few univs from the US. As of now, I plan to apply to the following univs

1 Harvard,
2 Chicago Booth
3. Duke Fuqua
4. Cornell Johnson
5. Yale SOM
6. ISB

Attending information sessions from Chicago, Columbia and Duke did help me to a good extent in finalizing the univs. My selection was limited because of my criterion of a graduate loan without a collateral and without a cosigner. After the global meltdown, many of the univs have taken off the International no-cosigner graduate loan, and hence I was stuck up with limited options. And considering that Indian Male IT is a dominant group in the application pool, I stand at a huge disadvantage as far as getting into my dream univ is considered.

Wish me luck. Deadlines for all the 6 univs are nearing in and so is my nervousness and anxiety.

My GMAT Experience - 730

Was a little held up with gmat preps and then with the apps, so couldn't post on the forum.
Sharing my gmat experience

Gave my GMAT on 16th July '09 and scored 730.

Background info abt me: I am an IT engineer from India. I started preparing for the exam around February, but was unable to seriously prepare and gain any pace for 2-3 months mainly because of work pressure and lack of seroiusness. To add to the work pressure IPL and T20 world cup were the major distractions.

Materials used during the prep:
OG 11
OG 12
OG Verbal Review
Cracking the GMAT- Princeton (didn't find it much useful)
Princeton Verbal Workbook
Manhattan GMAT SC
Kaplan 800

Apart from these materials, I used to browse through beatthegmat and manhattangmat. manahattangmat's forum has detailed explanation for lot of problems by Stacey and Ron.

Tests I gave
GMAT prep1(right at the start without any prep) - 690
3 Manhattan tests: ranged between 630-680 don't remember the exact scores
Powerprep1 - 710
Powerprep2 - 700
GMAT prep2 - 730
GMAT prep1 (retake) - 660 (screwed up verbal big time..got a couple of phone calls in the middle of the test)
On an average, I ranged 48-51 on quants in the practice tests and 28-40 on the verbal

Exam experience:
Quant was pretty straight forward. Didn't face any difficulty at all and ended up the section 15 mins before time. I found the difficulty level to be a little more than the GMAT prep tests, but definitely less than the Manhattan ones. I used to end up Quant around 20-30 mins before time in GMAT prep and power prep tests.

I was really surprised at the verbal score as, I was not expecting a good score there. After a few decent SC and CR questions, I got two tough RCs and couldn't even make a work out out of the 2nd one. That scared the hell out of me. And then the level of questions went down and I didn't face much trouble. CRs were all straight forward, and SCs were of medium difficulty level.