GMAT and Olins Business School

I had first given a thought about doing an MBA during my engineering study days. Like everyone around me, I took CAT, worked very hard and two weeks before the actual exam caught Malaria. The 2005 CAT paper, like most other CATs, was intimidating. Moreover, the format had completely changed. Long story cut short, it was a disaster for me. Returning from the exam center, I knew that CAT was not my game. I never went on to retake this exam again. Before that, I had screwed up JEE exam and the GATE exam. Clearly my track record for competitive multiple choice exams was bad.

It was august 2007 when a close friend Shikha went for a two week leave, back to her home town of Delhi. Don't know what conspired but out of the blue she decided to take the GMAT exam and scored 710 out of 800 in two weeks of study. Amazing.. She went on to study at Asian Institute of Management.

Few months later, I relocated to Saint Louis. Now I always knew that probably I want to do an MBA but was not sure of when and where. On relocating to Saint Louis, a friend told me about Olin's business school in downtown Saint Louis. It was a high rated school and had a part-time MBA program. This got me interested. But then still, the first step was taking the GMAT.

I started studying for GMAT and found Saint Louis's relative silence and solitude helpful. I eventually took the test. Of course I was nervous considering my previous track record in competitive exams. I scored a 680 with a highly unbalanced breakdown. I scored a paltry 34 in Verbal, which accounts to a mere 69 percentile. On the other hand, while I scored better in Quant, it was still not enough. I scored a 49 in quant with 88 percentile. Probably an advantage of years of blogging, I found essay writing relatively simpler. I scored a 6.0 in the AWA section, which is 87 percentile.

Study Resources:
1. OG 11th Edition
2. OG Math Review 1st Edition
3. OG Verbal Review 1st Edition

Meanwhile, I visited Olins to sit through a marketing class and feel the study environment first hand. I found out that 40% of the students here were working at Boeing. Boeing is located in Saint Louis and finances the whole MBA tuition for its employees. Most of this crowd there seemed to there for the degree rather than studying. The non-Boeing crowd at the class confirmed the same.

Moreover the cost of the program was a whopping $65,000.  Plus the same year, due to the financial crisis, Amdocs stopped giving out tuition assistance to employees who were studying. Not to mention, my consulting profile work at Amdocs Saint Louis was very hectic and demanded long hours. All in all, it was a bad deal to study part-time at Olins. That's where it ends... my MBA saga.