Back to School: Getting Started with GMAT

I am two months away from hitting the big 3-ohs and just like anyone else, I have been evaluating the "What ifs" and "What could have beens" of my life. And just like anyone else, I see myself staring down a growing list of dreams and things to do, of which very few, if not none have been accomplished. One such dream, right at the top of the list is to empower myself, my career and life by getting an MBA education. As a fresh, dewy faced Engineer, at the beginning of my career, I foresaw myself scratching off every item in my bucket list by the time I hit thirty. But then Life happened. Deadlines, product releases, appraisals, promotions, love, heart break, successes and failures have made me stash this list out of sight. I have been waiting for the right time to start working on these goals. The right time was 3 years ago. As always, I am late. Probably, the only thing that I did on time, strike that, before my time, was being born. I was born full 2 months before time. Well, thats a post for some other time.

Thats enough of blah, lets talk about MBA and GMAT. The first step towards an MBA is GMAT. I have done my research and have trolled the gmat club and beatthegmat.com for the past few weeks. I am yet to set a date. I will do so by the end of this week. I kick started my journey to a 750 GMAT by attempting a GMAT prep test today. To begin with, I downloaded the latest installment of the GMAT prep from mba.com. For those who are not aware, GMAC has recently released the latest version of GMAT prep software labelled GMATPrep 2.0® along with an additional set of 404 questions called GMATPrep Question Pack 1 that can be purchased for additional practice.

I decided to skip the AWA section. I started the test with the new Integrated Reasoning section. A few IR questions were dead easy while others required a lot of reading as the question stem itself was two pages long!! My first impression of IR section is that the questions are not all that difficult, except for the questions with long question prompt. Next is the Quant section. I found the Quant section to be tough. I didnt remember most of the formulae and concepts and struggled with this section. Same was the case with Verbal section.

The final verdict: 530 : Q 37 V 26, Integrated Reasoning : 1 on 8
I am pretty dissapointed with the score. I was hoping to do better than that. I have my doubts on the IR score though. I had 3 wrong answers out of 12 questions and still scored 1. I read that the GMAT prep software has some bugs in the IR section. I am hoping the low score in the IR section can be attributed to that. Either way I have a long way to go. I need to put in a lot of effort in all sections to push my score upwards of 750.

Watch me go from 530 to 750. Let the games begin..