Crazy Rush to the End of Term 1

It's completely insane how Term 1 is already over. We have 3 exams to do over this weekend and then that's it. This week has been a crazy whirl of final classes, exam tutorials, final assignments (strategy assignments are pretty killer), more recruiting events, study, study....study.

It has been an exhilarating, stressful, fun, frustrating, exciting, tiring and 1000% intense term. I confess to being just a little bit sad (but also very relieved) that it's over. Apparently from here on it geets easier and easier. Though next term is summer recruiting term which is a totally different kind of stress. There is already a sense of pressure and urgency as Career Centre sends out email after email announcing summer internship postings, Corporate Partner Week event signups, reminders to go see them, interview and application advice. Though really January 8th is not that far away.

On a happier note the famous LBS annual Snow Trek is right after the exams - this coming Monday! 120 of us heading to France - it'll be a real riot. Fun events include an ugly sweater competition (though I haven't had time to acquire one), and er...animal onesies? I'm fully expecting drama, scandal, and loads of partying (and skiing)!

Now to get over these pesky exams...

And so Term 1 Begins

Term 1 has begun. If you're confused, wondering what my post on the last 2 official weeks was, that was pre-term. What that means is that the school is now more crowded with not just MBAs and MiFs, but also the MiMs, MFAs and EMBAs.

It also means that more of the "real" classes are starting. While my schedule doesn't look as full as it was say 2 weeks ago, it's deceptive. There's now more time needed to allocate to doing pre-class preparations, assignments etc. In between that, there are tons of events from Careers. Most of these are currently exploratory events so you can find out more about the various industries. If you're not sure what you want to do post-MBA, I definitely recommend signing up for all these Working In... workshops.

Then there're all the club kick-offs happening. These are where you find out about the various clubs, their activities and what leadership positions are opened. Here your prioritisation skills are definitely put to the test because you'll have several clubs kicking off concurently. Since you can't be at two places at once, you need to decide which one you would actually be interested in playing an active role in.

Elections for various leadership positions have also begun. Stream rep voting ended last week and elections and applications have opened for the Student Association and several clubs. If you think about it, it was only about 4 weeks ago that we began the program so it's really early. I'm finding that things happen very fast here - life as an LBS MBA student might even be faster than working in FMCG ;)

Some Reflections: The First Official 2 Weeks

Ok, remember how I said in my previous post prior to starting the MBA that it was two weeks of crazy? Scratch that - the last two official weeks have been so intense that it's felt like I've been at LBS for 2 months. My fellow classmates can attest to that.

On FOMO (fear of missing out)...
While all MBA alumni and current students tell you to try and avoid FOMO, I'm discovering that trying to do so is seriously hard! There's just so much going on in the social sphere. For instance, last weekend there was the option to either go for a group hike of the Seven Sisters Cliffs or go for the Notting Hill Carnival (both are highly recommended by the way, just very different sort of activities). Or last week there was the last Flat Hunters Pub Crawl (awesome way to meet people) and 2 parties happening concurrently.

I'm not going to advise any future MBA students to not FOMO because you won't get it until you're in it. What I'm going do is to quote some really really good advice given to us on Day 1 from Alex Edmans, one of the most popular profs at LBS - "It's either HELL YEAH or no". If you aren't 110% in, then pick something else.

On careers...
The cliche "what you put in is what you get out" really applies here. Even though we've barely begun, there's loads to do for careers - if you make the time. Most of this though is lots of introspection. I've found that the more I've spoken to my fellow classmates about what they do and what they want to do, the more unclear my own future goals are - because there's just so much out there that's possible!

So dedicate time to reflect on what really suits you and where you want to go. Additionally, the LBS careers centre offers lots of different workshops and information sessions. Plan early and sign up for those that you really would like to attend, otherwise you might find yourself on the waitlist.

On classes...
Let's just say it takes time getting used to being a student again. Most of us are used to lots of distractions and many different things going on at once during the work day. We're used to multi-tasking, working on several different things at once, answering phones, so focusing for a 3 hour lecture is hard. My focusing stamina was definitely tested when we had a full week of 8.15am - 6.30pm classes with 15min breaks in between!

On time management...
It's worth mentioning again that there's so much going on all the time, especially in the first weeks. You really need to make sure you're keeping on top of things - classes, readings, assignments. Good calendar habits will ensure you don't miss classes and key information sessions/networking events. There's plenty of optional stuff, so pick and choose where your priorities lie.

On study groups...
These are randomly assigned groups of 5 or 6 and LBS really analyses who they put together. Count on different backgrounds and nationalities - for instance in my study group we're only missing someone from the continent of Africa! Personality-wise, it's a bit of luck really. You actually end up learning a lot about your team dynamics when LBS puts you through GLAM in the first 2 weeks.

I'd say probably the most important thing really is to keep an open mind and be willing to improve your behaviour to adapt to the rest of your study group. Participation in all the team activities/assignments is also key to getting the most out of the leadership courses.

On partying...
There are plenty of opportunities for being social! In London, I'm finding people drink a lot (like everyday in some cases), so it's a good idea to make sure you're disciplined enough to monitor your own intake. Bear in mind as well that drinks aren't cheap either, so it could be an added incentive for not going too hard at it :)

And with that, I'm off to Amsterdam as our stream has a long weekend!

Two Weeks of Crazy

Where have the last two weeks gone? Technically, although the MBA programme doesn't officially begin till tomorrow, life has already become a whirlwind of studying, socialising and travelling....oh and settling into London.

Studying

Since July, we've had quite a few things to do as pre-course work for the Leadership module at LBS. Mainly these have been surveys - lots and lots of surveys. I've lost count of the number of surveys I've completed from LBS. Our pre-course reading list also got released not that long ago, with a case and several articles that we need to prepare before our first class next week. There's also an official assignment to submit before the end of next week - and yes, that's a graded assignment.

Amongst all this official pre-work, some of us are trying to finish up the online pre-courses in finance, accounting and quantitative methods (some of us have given up); some of us are studying to try and pass the waiver exam for Managerial Accounting and Finance; some of us are brushing up on our language skills to get ahead in/pass the language diagnostic test (of which level 2 is scarily difficult for a second language).

Socialising

As people settle in and arrive in London, there's always some social event somewhere. The official Flat Hunters' Pub Crawls began on 4th August and so far there have been five events at different pubs around London. Don't let the name fool you though, because most people at these events have already found flats and are just there to party :). There's also been a tennis social and a couple of pedibus tours organised. Plus lots of lunches, dinners, drinks - there's really no lack of company!

Travelling

Our class is apparently the first to have organised a pre-MBA trek. About 50 of us and partners were over in Barcelona recently. Aside from this, we're already had the opportunity to participate in any treks organised by the various clubs at LBS. During this time, it appears that the sailing club has been the most active, it being summer. Signups to the sailing club treks have been on a first-come-first-serve basis, including putting payment down for the trek up front. Aside from this, those who have arrived in London earlier and are more settled, have organised thheir own trips in small groups as well.

Oh and as for recruiting, the consulting firms - Mckinsley, Bain and BCG in particular, have already organised pre-MBA events too where attendees were introduced to the world of consulting. And of course, the opportunity to network with existing consultants.

Does it sound like b-school has already begun? It certainly does to me. Timetables were released a few days ago and our calendars are now chocker. Bring on the mayhem tomorrow!

Dipping a Foot Into Finance & Accounting

For those of us who don't come from finance or accounting backgrounds, the general consensus from alumni and current students is that some pre-MBA prep would be highly beneficial. I can appreciate that, being an over-achiever. After all, I know I would really hate to be the "last" in class when it comes to the finance and accounting core courses.

MOOCs are perfect for this, being free, taught by renowed educational institutions, and entirely flexible. So I've embarked on Introduction to Corporate Finance and Introduction to Financial Accounting on Coursera, taught by Wharton professors. Definitely highly recommended as I now know about the time value of money, annuities, NPV and some of the financial jargon that you would definitely come across in core courses.

In fact, INSEAD recommends doing such courses on Coursera pre-MBA and looking at the content of their 1 week pre-MBA Business Foundations course (€1,800 extra), they cover pretty much the same material for the Finance and Accounting sections. I've also heard that London Business School offers pre-MBA prep quant courses sometime in March, much like INSEAD's Business Foundations course, except that it's online and self-study. So I've figured I might as well get a head start and later when LBS does offer their course, it'll serve as a refresher.

On a side note, Coursera, I'm finding, is a little bit like falling down the rabbit hole. For avid learners it's a gold mine of pretty well-delivered business knowledge and I keep finding more courses I'd like to take. Alas there are only 24 hours in a day and I do still have to work for a living :) That said, I'm going to attempt to try and absorb as much knowledge as I can by July when I move over to London!

Studying for the GMAT Part 3: A Note on Free Diagnostic Tests

I have probably taken all the free GMAT diagnostic tests (a.k.a CAT) there are out there while I was preparing. I did almost one every week. The important thing to note about CATs is that they're designed to allow you to practice under "real" test conditions so don't get too caught up in your final score and focus more on the thought processes for solving questions and your test-taking strategy.

The best diagnostic test is of course the one from GMAT itself since nothing can beat the real thing after all. Problem is that you only have 2 free ones so you want to save at least 1 for closer to your actual test date. Manhattan Prep and Veritas both offer 1 free test which are probably the closest to the actual GMAT.

That being said, I found it useful to train on harder CATs too, though I took the scores with a grain of salt. The Kaplan free CAT and Economist Tutor CAT are good for verbal training. The options presented are quite close so you shouldn't be disheartened if you don't score well.

GMAT Pill also offers 5 free tests that are quite challenging. Again, don't be surprised if you don't score well. You however need a paid membership to access more than 10 free solutions. However if you are able to figure out why you went wrong and how you should get the right answer, the 10 free solutions should cover the ones where you're really stuck.

I also found the GMAT Club tests really useful and they had explanations too. They simulate the GMAT environment the best but the questions are tougher than the actual GMAT.
You can find a list of diagnostic tests here on the GMAT Club forum.

And that's all I'm going to say on GMAT as there's lots of material about the GMAT out there already.

Studying for the GMAT Part 2: 6 Tips for Tackling the GMAT

There's a ton of information out there on how to study for the GMAT, just check out the GMAT Club forums. I'm not going into details, but thought I'd offer a few tips for what worked for me.

Let me just start by saying that the Official GMAT Guide (a.k.a. OG) is essential so make sure you borrow/buy a copy. I worked off the 2013 version (OG 2013). I started by doing the diagnostic problems in the guide to get a feel for what GMAT questions were like. I noticed straight off that they were very different from the kinds of tests I'd taken previously. The questions are more about strategic problem solving (especially for quant) that doing Math problems. I call it "doing Math without really doing Math". Basically unless you're a human calculator, if you solved the quant problems like you would do at high school, you're stuffed.

Tip #1: There's more than one way to skin the cat when it comes to quant. Focus on learning these different methods.
How I did it was to do a problem in the OG, then look up how other people solved the same problem. My go-tos were GMAT Quantum, GMAT Pill and the GMAT Club Forums. For critical reasoning, I found the Powerscore CR Bible immensely helpful.

This way I found out other ways and alternative strategies for solving the problem and if one of those ways resulted in reduced time spent on the problem, I adopted that strategy for any similar problems going forward. Spend the most amount of time reviewing your answers and always ask yourself: "Was there a better/faster way to get the answer?"

Tip #2: Time Management is key. You can skip questions and still get a high score.
The GMAT does actually penalise you quite a bit for not finishing all the questions so make sure you do, even if you have to skip one or two in the middle or towards the end. For perfectionists like me, this was a tough obstacle to overcome. I'm persistent when it comes to problems and this meant I had a hard time letting go and would end up spending far too much time on a particular problem. Initially I would do poorly on the quant part of GMAT because I'd run out of time and miss answering 1 or 2 questions. I had to learn to be strict with myself - any problem that I was still somewhat far from solving after 2mins 15 secs I skipped. In business you need to know when to cut your losses and move on after all. The GMAT forum has some other great tips on timing here.

Tip #3: Time yourself when doing practice questions.
Once you have a decent level of accuracy, make sure you do this every time, even if you're doing short "runs" which gives you practice problem-solving under pressure. I'd do say 10 questions at a time and give myself 20 mins to do all 10. I focused on doing the questions in the OG from back to front. The best tool I came across was the GMAT timer created by GMAT Club's walker. I would run through a set of questions and mark my answers on the timer. Then at the end of the practice run, the timer lets you copy and paste your answers along with the time of how long you took to finish the question. I then marked my practice and noted down which questions I had taken longer than ideal for and also the ones that I potentially could've cut down time on. Then apply Tip #1 :)

Tip #4: Practice practice practice.
GMAT thinking is not natural. So it needs to become a habit. For any questions that you've gotten wrong answers for, guessed or aren't too sure of, after analysing the best way to solve them, do them again on the spot (timed!) and once more the next day before you do new questions. It's about practicing the same methods over and over and making them a habit. You should then find that when you tackle a new problem, you can automatically think of more ways of solving it and can pick the quickest one.

Tip #5: Use a process of elimination to work out answers for the verbal section.
Often there should be 1 or 2 options that are obvious "outs". Especially for sentence correction, it helps to eliminate the obvious incorrects first so that you can then focus on the answers that are quite close. Then work out the differences between the two and what they're actually saying. Tip #1 and Tip #4 are definitely key for verbal - after all exposure to lots of questions and strategies will train your eye to spot the incorrects,

Tip #6: For Reading Comprehensive, skim read when you first get the passage.
Don't bother spending time reading in detail because when you read the question you usually have to go back and read in detail anyway. What you want to do initially is to work out what the passage is about and get the gist of what each paragraph is covering so that you can quickly navigate to the right part to answer the question. Practice speed reading a lot and with everything you read.

What I've written above might be slightly skewed towards improving quant rather than verbal since this was the section I found a bit more challenging with my background. However, Tip #1 and Tip #4 are definitely key for all sections.

Studying for the GMAT Part 1: When to Start

If you've read my previous post, then you've probably seen that to get a good score i.e. 700+ out of 800, you'll want to put in at least 100 hours of study time. Of course this is if you're the average person and not a super genius. I started out with a 720 GMAT score in mind since that was within the 80% range of the schools I was looking at applying to.

I initially started studying in March, with the view to take the GMAT sometime in early July so I would have time to do a re-take or two in case I needed to (at the time the wait between re-takes was 31 days, but GMAC changed the rules in July, reducing this to 16 - read about it here). For me personally, I started too enthusiastic and too early, which led to a GMAT study burnout some 2 months down the road after doing silly study hours on top of very long hours at work with no down-time. This led to me doing zero study the whole of May and a slow start in June when I picked up the books again. Plus, I ended up pushing out my planned first take by a week (luckily I hadn't booked it in yet due to not being sure when I would be able to take 4 hours off work).

So on hindsight, if I had started a bit later and paced myself, it would have been more efficient. I also had to re-review the material I had studied previously since I had that 1 month break in between. In any case, when I was looking up study resources for the GMAT, I came across this 2-3 month study plan by GMAT Pill which was very helpful as a base for my own study plan.

If you're looking for study plans for the GMAT, there are tons out there - the GMATClub forum offers several variations depending on what your objectives are. My advice? Don't waste too much time hunting for "the perfect" study plan. Pick one and adapt it to suit you.