So the news is: I’ve just finished my first draft of the first essay of the season.. (Discounting the Reliance essay)  I had been procrastinating this for quite some time now.. ( More than three months actually!! ) So to at least make things start, I decided to go ahead with the non-goals essay. (Goals essay requires more effort ) I decided to start with Tuck’s “constructive criticism” essay because I’ve a decent work-related story from my early career days. The question asked:

Discuss the most difficult constructive criticism or feedback you have received. How did you address it? What have you learned from it?

 As the rules say, while writing the first draft, I did not care about the writing style or word-limits. I just let the thoughts flow and dumped those on the word-doc. The result is a non-impressive, 900-word long story and I’m  actually expected to answer it in 500 words.. So need to filter out a lot of junk from the essay.

 Still I’m happy that when I ran the essay under the answering-the-question test, it came out good. I read out the essay to my friend and asked him to guess the question; he framed the Q as: “Tell us about a time when you were criticised for your performance and you were able to improve because of that.” I’d count that pretty close to the original question.

Will spend some time on this to bring it in a slightly better shape before I move on to the next draft. Most probably, next one would be a non-goals essay too to gain some more momentum; but then I’ll need to attend to the goals-essay..

Fellow-bloggers, wish me luck!! And do keep us all updated on your submissions and procrastinations.
The silence on Hella’s list is frightening at times!!

Isn’t in weird?? I had quit blogging just after the last post on my blog, which said “Don’t quit!!” Well, I was too much tied up with deadlines at office.. Everything related to B-school journey had almost come to a stand-still: so no b-school research and therefore no blogging as well. :’(

Actually, an “almost” can be added to the “No” in B-school research mentioned above.. I did manage to sneak into Pagalguy at times or to check what’s going on with some blogger-pals.. So what else I have done in past few months: (This also includes the non-blogged stuff when I was active in the research.)

• Attended B-school events:: I can confidently say now: never miss an admission event of a B-school that you’re even remotely considering. Marketing is a subject on every B-school curriculum and it seems the adcom people have mastered it to full.. More about this in my next post.
• Helped fall’09 applicant friends: I had a vicarious experience of apping to B-schools by helping some of my good college friends and a few net-pals with their essays. I believe now I do have at least a rough idea about what is liked by adcom and what not. Hope this experience will help me when I start penning down my own essays later this year.
• Some reading: As I said in my “Not ready for MBA” post, I feel thatthat not many of us have a good idea about B-school life and different B-school specializations. Moreover, I feel that reading about some Business barons can also instill some business sense in me. So have ordered lots of books. (I’m an obsessive book-buyer, though can’t call myself an obsessive reader. ) So far, I’ve completed “Snapshots from hell” It’s a book about a student’s first year at Stanford GSB: a must-read for every B-school aspirant. Right now, reading Ten-day MBA. Next in queue are: Montauk and Lou Gerstner’s autobiography.
• Blog-hopping: Though I did not write much on my own blog, but I keep my B-school instincts alive by visiting blogs of some fall’09 applicants. A lot of them have got good admits this year and this may prove handy when I apply.
  

Will try to be more regular here now..