The bad news is that I have still not yet gotten into that panic state of "oh my god! ... I need to get this all done and dusted". I still feel like I'm leisurely strolling through doing the essays. I've been working on the MIT essays this week. I am near to completing the first drafts of these. These particular essays make me want to revisit my previous essays. MIT's questions are written with very particular instructions:

Interesting, no? The felt, said and did really make you think.

In other news, my leisurely stroll through the MBA essays is such that a few weeks ago I volunteered to give a humorous speech this Thursday 4th September. The only problem is that I still have not written it. So I fear my week will be sucked up doing that. Anyone have any funny stories they'd like to share? Every iota of inspiration is appreciated.


We're now into September. I'm hoping this will give me the adrenaline kick I need with my MBA applications. Surely I should be submitting something this month... at least that Kellogg Part 1 thing. :-/

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As a red blooded male, I must say that I'd love for more women to attend business school! But, it seems like everyone from that hyperactive admission consultant to BusinessWeek and WalletPop are all saying one thing: perhaps girls should not be admitted. Sure, they don't say it that blatantly, but look at headlines such as this one:


Surely this headline is only insinuating one thing, i.e. what good are they doing with their valuable MBAs while being at home?

WalletPop has some theory about woman heeding their biological call, and BusinessWeek says the business work environment is not structured to be as family-friendly as the fields of medicine and law. Perhaps these MBA Moms are the cleverest of them all, heeding to this cracker of a paragraph from the same BusinessWeek article:


I wish I could marry a rich girl!

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• As I was filling in the employment history section of the application form, the session timed out! When I logged in, the details were wiped clean. It was frustrating and demotivating. I almost cried, 'I no longer want to apply to Wharton'. I've learnt one thing at least: click 'save' often!
• Your employment history is asked for, as well as your CV. This makes me wonder whether the same information should be covered in both, or whether each should be tailored. If so, in what way?
• Has no one else started filling these in yet? There were a few minor bugs in the website. When I put non numerical characters in the 'size of organisation' field, it said that I had put them in the salary fields. Not a major thing, but I can see it confusing people.

On the whole, I've been surprised by the amount of information collected on these forms. For example, they seem to ask the details of everyone who is close to you (parents, partner) as well as anyone from your family that might have been to the school. I do wonder how they will use this information.

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Four years ago I was working in a Customer Support department. We had a TV screen that ought to be showing stats of customer queries. Instead, it was showing the Olympic women’s beach volleyball. When I changed companies, I thought those hey days were gone. I should have known different. I now work in an open plan office and all yesterday, just from where I was sitting, I could see three screens showing the women’s beach volleyball. One of these was a large projector beaming against the wall of the Director’s open plan office area. Just what is it about this sport that has captured so many hearts? I just don’t see the attraction...

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I have my application materials in so many places, it is unreal. I have copies of stuff on my home laptop, on my work laptop, on Google docs and even copies on a backup storage drive. I thought it would all be oh so easy to just use Google docs for everything. The only problem is...Google docs does not support some features on Word. So then it just becomes easier to have some things in Word format. They suddenly there are copies of the things everywhere.

Today I started writing a new essay for the Kellogg application. As I started to write it... I suddenly felt a deja-vu. This all seems so familiar! I did a search here and there... nothing. Then I had a look at my Google docs account. Ah ha! I have written this essay before! Has all this been going on so long that I've forgotten what I have and haven't done :-/ ...

I need some program to sync my documents in various places. Windows of ten years ago (i.e. Windows 98) used to come with a 'briefcase' feature to do this. I wonder what happened to that.

In other news, yes - I too noticed the Silence of the Applicants. But it seems like it was more to do with holidays than anything else. It's good to start seeing some of their posts again.

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As HappyBunny notes, athletes of varying type gathered in Beijing on 08/08/08 for the start of one type of games. In the meanwhile, Wharton and Kellogg opened their applications over the weekend to let another set of games ramp up to full speed.

I feel like the application process has now really got into full swing. Applications are now open for all my target schools. At the moment I seem to be spending more time talking to my recommenders and discussing ideas than anything else. This is both a little frustrating, because I am not working much on my essays, but I also want them to get going on writing their part of the application. With five schools, I really feel they have a lot of work ahead of them.

In the meanwhile, the Dollar has strengthened over the last two weeks, slightly increasing the cost of any US MBA education to foreigners. Interesting times lie ahead!

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If you've done the GMAT, you might know that many of the sentences used in the Sentence Correction part of the exam are taken from the New York Times and are then modified by GMAC for the purposes of the exam. One such example of this can be found here.

Though this will not really be useful for anyone yet to take the exam, an article has now been published by the New York Times highlighting the common errors they themselves print in the newspaper. Here is the link to the article and the header...

The Error That Won’t Die

Even in the rush to publish, writers and editors at The Times strive for polish and precision in our prose. Sometimes we succeed.
But sometimes, after the dust settles, we are dismayed to see painful grammatical errors or embarrassing faults in usage. A quick fix might be possible online; otherwise, the lapses become lessons for next time.

These comments are adapted from After Deadline, a weekly newsroom critique overseen by Philip B. Corbett, the deputy news editor who is also in charge of The Times’s style manual. The goal is not to chastise, but to point out recurring problems and suggest solutions.

Since most writers encounter similar troubles, we think these observations might interest general readers, too.

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