About the GMAT

From the beginning I knew GMAT would be one of the hardest steps in my way to a top-MBA, specially if Harvard and Wharton are in my list. So I decided to take a preparation course here in my city.

Finding an institute was not difficult, the problem was how to select the best one. I had heard that many colleagues took their preparation course at CIUP (http://idiomas.up.edu.pe/idiomas/hojas.php?sc=03) so I went to the informational session to get more highlights about the course. Surprisingly, I saw lots of 40+ year-old ladies and children; at first, I thought I had missed the right classroom, but later on I noticed that CIUP used to give information about all their courses (not only GMAT) in only one session. No wonder. Anyway, I realized the course was theory/practice and verbal/quantitative well-balanced, so I decided to get in.

The course was really good. I've read some applicants think GMAT courses are not necessary. In my opinion, it depends on your kind of learning method; in my case I learn better when there's other people to whom I can ask and discuss about the topics I don't get easily; besides, in this type of race against time I need a structured program. I think I have some ability to learn languages but that's not enough for me. By the way, I scored 240 last year in TOEFL (CBT), I needed to take it before going to Holland, so I was a little bit confident about my English ability. However, that's quite far from top-tier B-Schools minimums.

The course structure was pretty good. It was something like this: we had 2-hour classes from Monday to Friday, from 7.30 to 9.30 pm, perfect for people like me who are currently working at a company with no end-of-the-day hour. The quant days were Tuesday and Thursday while the verbal days were the remaining. In every class we had a section called "the mini-class" in which our teacher taught us some important tips and tricks about the test in addition to some review of grammar and math topics. Besides, in the even weeks we had a trial GMAT test (on Wednesdays) - no AWA part - and, in the odd weeks we had an AWA trial (on Fridays). I think the program was really focused on get the most of the students, I think that's why some people left the course before finishing it, almost 50%.

Before I stop talking about the course I must say that we had in-class exercises and homework every day, so we were forced to think GMAT almost every day during those three months (from January to March). We did lots of exercises from Kaplan, OG11, OG10, Manhattan, etc. I knew it was a lot of time investment but I think it was undoubtedly worthwhile. On the top of that, I made some friends at the course.

From the beginning, our teacher, Pedro, encouraged us to exploit some free web resources specially Testmagic (http://www.testmagic.com/gmat/). Regarding this, I think the best thing in Testmagic are its forums (http://www.urch.com/forums/). I highly recommend that forum for all prospective GMAT takers, it helped me a lot when I was close to my test date; I asked many questions to the forum and there was a lot of helping and supportive people. There were also some inspiring stories about 700+ scored test takers in which they explain thoroughly how they did to outperform the 700.

Anyway, I always knew I had to take advantage of this demanding course to do my best in the GMAT. So I scheduled my test the Monday right after the last class (the course ended on a Friday). In retrospective, I cansee it was really a good decision, because I didn't have time to make my mind think anything else than GMAT.

Finally I scored low 700+. Not bad. Anyway, although my GMAT score wasn't very high (I almost reached high 700+ at trials), I was not that disappointed. I hope it's good for my purposes anyway.