Weekend in San Francisco

Now that I am caught up on sleep for the week, I will write more about my time in San Francisco with the BTG team. First, thanks to David, Eric, and Bea for the amazing hospitality!

This is my second time to the San Francisco area. I spent 1 ½ days in Berkeley last year, but didn’t get to see any of San Francisco. Considering that it is cold, snowy, and I haven’t seen the sun in Pittsburgh in quite awhile San Francisco felt like paradise to me!

Saturday morning, I was at a meeting with the BTG team and there are some awesome projects on the horizon! I won’t say more than that, but be on the lookout in the near term future for some awesome features! Saturday afternoon Eric showed me and two others around the Stanford (or as I learned for the first time Leland Stanford Junior University) campus. It was great! I don’t know that I stand a chance of getting into GSB, but I am convinced I should apply after the tour. There were tons of activities going on, the campus was beautiful, they are building a new 360,000 sq ft school of business, oh and did I mention the amazing weather.



After the tour, we went up to a scenic point to get some pictures. The landscape was phenomenal!

Sunday was a very interesting day. We decided that we were going to go on a biking trail and cross over the Golden Gate Bridge and make our way to Sausalito. We did this knowing there was a chance that it was going to rain. The bike ride was great and the views were amazing. I don’t bike that often because it isn’t a very common activity in Pittsburgh. I’m not sure how far of a bike ride it was (maybe 7 or 8 miles) but it was a lot of fun and the views on the Golden Gate Bridge were great!

Overall, the weekend was great and I will definitely be making my way back to San Francisco soon.

San Francisco - Beat The GMAT

Well, I spent the weekend with the Beat The GMAT team in San Francisco. It was an amazing weekend! It is definitely one of my favorite cities and the team is awesome! I will write a more detailed post and post some pictures when I am less sleep deprived!


Also, everyone should be on the lookout for some great new features to BTG in the future!

Get the GMAT out of the way

If there is one thing that I recommend more than any other when considering applying to business school, it's get the GMAT out of the way very early! This was best thing that I did. Seriously, the application process is stressful enough and I'm not even applying until next year. I know that this isn't relevant for those of you that are applying for MBA programs this year. However, if you know one or two years in advance that you are going to be applying to MBA programs, get the GMAT beast out of the way!

I finished my GMAT over a year ago now, but I took the GMAT twice. My first attempt was in June 2009 and I was so nervous going into the test center. I didn't know what to expect that day. All I could think about was getting close to my target score of 700, and I did get close with a 690. Unfortunately, I couldn't get that 690 out of my head and had to give the GMAT another shot. I signed up for my 2nd attempt in July 2009 and ended up with a 710. That put me in the 80% range of all of my target schools.

Overall, I put in a lot of effort studying for the GMAT. Actually, I just looked to see when I signed up for BeatTheGMAT because that is when I began studying for the GMAT. It was April 6, 2008 that my GMAT journey began. As you can tell, I took the GMAT pretty serious by studying for over a year. OK, OK, I admit my studying was off and on at first, but atleast I got started. Here I am over two years later and my GMAT is out of the way. Now, all of my time can be spent researching schools, visiting schools, talking with current students, and of course blogging about my adventure.

Beat The GMAT Scholarships

I just wanted to let everybody know about the scholarships at Beat The GMAT for 2010!

Here is some more info about the scholarships.

• This is the 5th year for these scholarships
• There are 6 scholarship packages to distribute
• Include GMAT Prep classes from Grockit, Kaplan, Knewton, Manhattan GMAT, The Princeton Review, and Veritas Prep

I encourage everyone to apply for the scholarships! You can find more information about the scholarships at the following website:

http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/scholarship

GMAT Error Logs

I have been working on a project to create excel based error logs with some other team members from BeatTheGMAT. I just want to announce that the two projects are complete and the files are available to download.

Error tracking is extremely important during your preparation and these two files should make tracking much easier for you!

The Official Guide for GMAT Review, 12th Edition - Error Tracking Tool
Description: Custom error log built for tracking your Official Guide for GMAT Review, 12th Edition practice. Track your performance across five categories of test questions: problem solving, data sufficiency, reading comprehension, critical reasoning, and sentence correction. Includes custom built reports to analyze your performance, as well as a comprehensive answer key.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Error Log for General GMAT Practice
Description: Custom error log built for tracking your Official Guide for GMAT Review, 12th Edition practice. Track your performance across five categories of test questions: problem solving, data sufficiency, reading comprehension, critical reasoning, and sentence correction. Includes custom built reports to analyze your performance, as well as a comprehensive answer key.

DOWNLOAD HERE


You can read more about the error logs here:
http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/gmat-error-log