Onward, Ho! More Essay Outlining

I had a lovely evening last night. Simply lovely. Despite leaving work at 6 PM, I did not make it home until 8 due to protests on the subway.


I won't go into the details of the protest or even offer an opinion on them as my blog is not political in nature. All I will say is that my subway station was closed and I wound up having to take the expensive ferry home. Though inconvenient, it was a beautiful ride on the SF Bay.

The subway shut down took a chunk of my time last night that I was going to devote to writing Wharton essays, but last night I managed to get outlines for all down on paper. After having written a set of essays for Kellogg, my ideas flowed more freely. I'm going to be able to re-use an anecdote for Wharton that I've used in my Kellogg essay. I will not be copying and pasting, however, because the Wharton question is actually different from the Kellogg question. It's just that the theme is similar.

So why Wharton?




Wharton is a program that I got excited about in the last month after learning about the small business development center and their integrated marketing and operations major. I originally hesitated because it's a larger program and after speaking to some marketing students I got the impression that their support for those entering brand management wasn't that great. Upon a more thorough reflection of my career goals, I realized that Wharton's emphasis on finance and analytics is perfect for me in that I'll be forced to develop a knowledge base in areas that I'm currently lacking and through experiential opportunities, I'll be able to connect marketing and analytics in a way that I haven't been able to before.

Kellogg First Draft Finished

After a brutal seven-hour writing session, I have completed the first draft of my Kellogg essays. I need to give my boyfriend a special thank you for his understanding. We were supposed to go to the movies and out to eat this weekend but I just haven't had the bandwith. I managed to make breakfast and lunch today but have not changed from my pajamas. I had to send him to the store to get things for dinner, and at 9 oclock we will have our Sunday snuggle time. :) Right now, I'm unwinding with a cheap glass of Sauvignon Blac.

Reminders to myself about essay writing:

Be yourself. I'm sure you've heard admissions officers and consultants advise applicants to be themselves and not try to paint a portrait of what they think the adcom wants them to be. Truer words have never been spoken. I had trouble articulating the motivation behind my long term goals on paper and I hesitated to go for broke in talking about my career plans because I was afraid the adcom wouldn't believe I had the juice to make a career switch. For weeks, my career goals essays were boring and seemed too force. They actually pained me to write. Today, I restructured my career goals essay and talked about the deal with my father that led me to this career goal. My words flowed so naturally and so much easier than they had before.

Brainstorm and outline. It is essential to have a plan before you start attacking an essay. You need to know what you want to highlight in your essay, what anecdotes you want to tell and why they're relevant before you set pen to paper. This outline is your essay's skeleton. This outline allows you to think through your essay and establish a structure. I am a big structure freak. Structure in writing fascinates me. James Joyce is painful to read but I had to respect dude's structure. In fact in undergrad, I contemplated doing a PhD in Literature studying narrative structure (yes I'm that much of a geek). Structure gives the reader sign posts. The reader needs these sign posts so that your points are not lost. It also gives you a frame work to operate in so that you don't get lost in the writing sauce yourself.

A rough draft is just that. Rough. I am an experienced writer and spent my college education writing papers upon papers, but even with that experience I had to remind myself that the first rough draft is to really get your ideas on paper. There's no way in Hades that you're going to sound like Maya Angelou or Nabokov as soon as you put your fingers on the keys. It's just not happening. If the outline gives you a skeleton, the rough draft puts the meat on that skeleton. Power through those moments where you get stumped. One of my tricks is if I get stuck on how to describe something or on a word to use I'll write a stand-in phrase and put brackets around it so I know to go back and clean it up when I do my first repass. Some people work best when they do this rough draft through stream of consciousness (a literary style that I've always hated due to my love of structure), and this may be you. So you have to let the words flow through you and write your thoughts out. Follow the map you created in your outline until you get to the end and don't worry about how crappy or how good the essay is when you've finished.

Do not be afraid to abort the mission. This is another tip I picked up writing papers. I have thrown away pages of a paper and entire essays because after I got them on paper they sparked an idea for a paper that was much better than what I had. In the past few weeks, I wrote maybe two entire essays that I abandoned. I lifted maybe one or two sentences or ideas and used them to spark the essays that I have labeled my first draft. You have to give yourself ample time to write garbage. Nabokov's first iteration of Lolita was probably rubbish, so keep in mind that the greats got that way because they practiced, practiced, practiced. We're not writing novels here, but expect to go through some iterations before you get your polished jewel ready to submit to the adcom.




It is almost time for True Blood and Breaking Bad. My first draft has been sent off to my MBA application coach and I look forward to seeing what she has to say. I should include another self-reminder -- humble yourself. You need someone to keep it real with you and tell you where and why your essay sucks. I'm expecting lots of constructive criticism. I'd be kidding if I told you that I will squeal with glee when I see all of the comments about what I need to change and what sucked, but I need and want to hear this.

Resume Revision

Essay writing is kind of fun for me. Writing has always come pretty easy for me and I've always preferred writing papers to taking exams. I feel that I have more control over the way I'm perceived in an essay, so I've already started thinking about anecdotes and stories to tell when I start my applications. As productive as essay brainstorming has been, I've been putting the cart before the horse because I should really try to refine and improve my resume so that I can get a better sense of what my perceived weaknesses will be. The resume in its current state needs a face lift.

Before I applied to MLT in September, my resume was essentially a list of my duties. I didn't really speak about my accomplishments whatsoever. When I prepared my resume for MLT, I tried to make my resume more achievement oriented by injecting sales figures. Lots of the bullet points still need refining, though.

When applying to jobs, I don't even include the first job I had out of college (3-month program with the United Way) or the internship I had after that. In my mind's eye, my pre-publishing experiences aren't really relevant, but I'll need to include at least a bullet point for these two positions and these bullet points need to reflect a major accomplishment. I have to reach back into the deep recesses of my mind to think of something to write about.

I also need to translate these accomplishments into general terms. It's difficult talking about my project that generated half a mil in revenue when other b-school applicants are talking about 15 million dollar accounts that they worked on. I need to think of points to contrast my accomplishments with. So I can talk about my 500 k project, but then I need to say that similar projects average 200 K or I need to talk about how I exceeded a goal. The resume will probably be the most painstaking aspect for me. Had I done my due diligence and kept my brag book up back 5 years ago, I'd have a record of my older achievements. Now, I'll have to make the best with what I have. Perhaps I can get in touch with my former supervisors and get some hard figures from them.

What's my story?

If you're applying to B-school, you've surely heard talk about honing "your story." When we applied to college, we didn't have to speak much about our future goals. Sure we talked a bit about who we were and the experiences we had in high school, but our professional goals weren't really at play. We weren't expected to have a concrete plan of what we wanted to do post graduation. Applying to b-school is a different beast. Business school is a professional school and you need to give admissions committees a clear idea of what you want to do after you obtain your MBA.

I'm reminded of an epsiode of Living Single. Sinclair (Kadijah's cousin and secretary) asks for more responsibility. When Kadijah asks her what exactly she wants to do, Sinclair whines and says she doesn't know. I'm kind of feeling like Sinclair -- but just kind of. After all, I embarked on this journey after taking some personal inventory. So I have a hazy vision of leaving my current industry and perhaps my current function. When I was brainstorming , I thought about which aspects of my job that I liked and enjoyed the most. In certain ways I work as an internal consultant. I'm not married to just one product team. I conduct market research and pre-launch market seeding campaigns to unearth information about the market for any given editor or to help an editor solve problems with their book list or individual books. It'd be cool, I thought, to do something similar outside of publishing. Then I thought, and thought, and said you know what, that using an external, fresh perspective and approach to solving a problems is what consultants do. I did an informational interview with one of my good friends from college (I believe I've posted about it here) and confirmed that my idea of what she really did was correct. I was fearful, however, of how well I'd be able to convince an admissions committee that I'd be successful in making a transition from publishing to consulting.

That fear led me to other avenues that seemed more predictable for someone with my background. What if I stayed in publishing and wrote about my goal to revolutionize the industry in my essays? This is quite a lofty and original goal. Thinking about your career goals in terms of how good your essays will be is kind of backwards, though, and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to convince an admissions committee that I was passionate about that goal. While my end goal is to leave the industry, I won't pretend that there aren't any aspects about it that I like. I also won't pretend that if I stayed in publishing I couldn't find a niche for myself that would be fulfilling. That said I'm giving some more thought to using my MBA to come back to publishing, but there are other industries and functions that have caught my eye.

One day I was waiting for a friend to pick me up and I wandered into a GAP, and I found another career inspiration there. I love marketing. I really do. I started my publishing career in marketing, and I took my current job because it was a hybrid between marketing and editorial. When I did a stint at Starbucks fresh out of undergrad while looking for a full time job, I used to study the marketing materials that were sent to the store. Starbucks' marketing and branding is totally integrated from the core. There's no element in a Starbucks store that does not serve to communicate Starbucks' benefits to its customers. This is also what I saw at the GAP that day (though they have been suffering in sales as of late). A light bulb went off. Perhaps retail marketing is really where I need to be. I had had a few drinks at happy hour no more than ten minutes prior, so the $5 wine could have been at work.


Then out of no where a few weeks ago, without the aid of $5 wine, my editorial mind resurfaced. While I don't necessarily want to work with books anymore, I do like the idea of cultivating a list of books or products. And that is very similar to what a brand manager would do with a particular brand's products. I went to Wet Fish to research. According to wetfish, here are a Brand Manager's basic duties:

1. Monitoring the competitive landscape of the category in which your brand resides.
2. Developing strategies to exploit market opportunities.
3. Executing those strategies with the help of a cross-functional team.
4. Delivering the sales volume, market share, and profit projections for the business.

Currently, I participate in a process that is responsible for all four of the above.

Now I have four career paths in mind and four career paths I need to explore in more depth. I would like to develop a clear picture of my goals before B-school not only for the sake of my applications, but also for the sake of attaining these goals. I understand that most b-school students wind up veering in a different direction than the one they charted in their applications. I might also fall under that umbrella, but doing personal inventory so I know what I really like to do, what I'm good at doing, and what makes me happy will still be helpful to me no matter which career path I ultimately choose.

Needless to say, pensive cat has some thinking to do....

Chance Indication Link

I might be tardy to the party on this, but I found this Chances Indication link on Vocaz.com. The site is geared towards engineers looking to obtain an MBA, but I still found it interesting. It's like one of those quizzes you see in the back of cosmo.

My competitiveness rating wound up totaling to 70.1 (don't forget that .1). I could increase it by scoring at least 20 points higher on the GMAT, but we've already done that dance before.

Back to Life. Back to Reality.

My holiday season was joyous. I took a week off from work, had a tree trimming party, went home to Los Angeles, and roasted my first turkey by myself. I also finished my statistics course and earned an A.

However, all good things come to an end, and it's back to work on Monday. The first two weeks of January is always a busy time for me at work, and I'm going to enroll in a Calculus course that starts on January 13th. 2011 is going to be busy so I'm happy that I was able to get some R&R before the storm. I do, however, have my birthday to look forward to this month.

Now comes the time where most MBA aspirants start weighing the pros and cons of applying round 3 in March in hopes of matriculating in the fall and the pros and cons of waiting till Round 1 in October and matriculating in fall of 2012.

I like to think of myself as a person who has a good balance between logic & reason and emotion & impulse so I'm really torn right now. Logic and reason is telling me to wait. My heart and impulse is telling me to pull the trigger in March.

Why apply now? I'm really excited about the prospect of going back to school! And I really am ready to move on from my current line of work.

Why wait? I've just been elected as an officer at toastmasters and I just started serving as a mentor in a local program for at risk youth. Both of these will look good on an application, but more importantly, I am obligated to the mentorship program for one year. This obligation will limit the schools I can apply to should I need to matriculate in Fall -- I'd have to stay local. Additionally my plan to bolster my gpa was to take 3-4 quant courses. If I apply in Round 3, I'll only have 2 under my belt. Should I apply in Round 3 and get dinged, I'll have made my boss aware of the fact that I plan on leaving which could jeopardize promotions (not that I'm up for any at the moment). Lastly, but most definitely not least, I really don't feel like writing any essays right now. Whenever I think about that long "What matters to you most and why" Stanford essay I wind up turning on re-runs of the Golden Girls to avoid having to write it.




So for today, logic and reason prevails.

Management Leadership Tommorrow

I got in!

Shortly after I had my epiphany, I met a woman at a Harvard Club event for aspiring MBAs. We talked for a bit and she mentioned that she was in the MLT program. I had heard about it on CNN, but hadn't given it much thought. She offered to give me an informational interview, so I took her up on her offer. I liked what I heard, and I applied back in September

Applicants were not meant to be notified until the first weeks of December, but they sent notification the day before Thanksgiving. I was happy to be able to share some good news with my family. So far, I've only told four of them about my MBA plans (my mom, dad, sister, and uncle). The others will find out in due time, but I didn't want to tell everyone until I was sure. I had tentative plans to apply to law school a few years back and once folks caught wind of that, they started nagging me. I decided that law school wasn't for me, and I still have aunts and uncles asking me why I no longer want a JD.

I'm very excited about the program. It's intensive, but I'm looking forward to the network I'll build and the partnerships I'll make.

Free admissions consultation this morning

Right off the heels of a great weekend of wine tasting and Vietnamese pho, I had a call with an MBA admissions consultant that got me thinking about some things.

1) Should I retake the GMAT? So I'm quite pleased with my 730 and would avoid taking it again at all costs. I'm thinking, though, that perhaps taking it again if I can score 760+ might do even more to help me offset my lower than average 3.0. But taking that test is an energy drain. I don't even want to think about the amount of commitment it would take for me to ensure at least a 30 point increase. There's also a chance that I could score lower than a 730 on my second attempt. I know most will tell you that the difference between a 760 and a 730 is negligible when it comes to admissions, but it might not be the same in my case.

2) Should I look at some more safety schools? There's no doubt about it at this point. I'm going to B-school whether I go to an M7 or not. There's a good chance that I'll get rejected from the top schools due to age and gpa. I had already decided that I was perfectly content with going to USC Marshall and have done a lot of research on it, but perhaps there are other schools that are good fits for me that I have overlooked. To that end, the consultant recommended that I look at Ross.

3) Should I take more additional courses and where should I take them? I'd already planned to take four courses before applying (one is currently in progress), but the consultant says that 3 is actually more than enough and taking them at a community college is fine. This is a relief considering how much the courses at the Cal extension school cost.

That said, I'm thinking I'll apply to 6 schools total (that seems like a lot and is subject to change). I've broken my list down into three groups: Reach, Reasonable, Safety. The lists are long now and I'm hoping to whittle them just by reading about the schools online and talking to alumni...

Here are my reach schools with comments

Kellogg -- One of my good friends from undergrad went here and she loved it. She's two years older than I am and when I grow up I want to be her. lol. But she did give it a glowing review and I would love to move to Chicago. Although they've been trying to get away from the reputation, I'd love to take classes from their marketing profs. They also place a lot of their students in Consulting so I'd have the flexibility of staying in marketing (I will blog about that in a subsequent post) and transitioning into management consulting.

Chicago -- I've got to do research on this school. The same friend who raved about Kellogg did not like Booth. She felt it wasn't enough of a a consulting school for her. The admissions consultant recommended I take a look at it, so I will. Outside of the rankings, I just don't know much about it.

Stanford -- I loved my visit to Stanford. But I have a feeling that even if I were a stellar applicant with no blemishes, applying to Stanford might be a waste of an application fee. The program is so small and they reject so many well qualified and dynamic applicants that it seems almost like a crap shoot (at least from the applicant's perspective. I am sure that the admissions committees have plenty of rhyme and reason behind their decisions).

Wharton -- After scoring a 730, I told myself that I'd take a look at Wharton. I'm liking what I see so far. It would afford me the same flexibility that I'd get from Kellogg and it'd be in a city other than Boston. From my research, it also seems as though they are more apt to take an "older" applicant (I'll be 28 when I apply), but I need to do more research to determine if it's in my top 2 or not.

Stanford Visit

I have loads of time I need to take off before the year ends so I decided to take a Personal Day and visit Stanford! I've been to Stanford more times than I can count (one of my best friends went there for Law School and I visited a few times in HS), so I already knew how gorgeous the campus was. Visiting as a prospective MBA student gave me a new perspective.

In HS, I got into Stanford and ultimately decided to go to Harvard because the students at Stanford were a little too excited to be there for me. Typing that makes me sound like a cold hearted meanie, but at the time, I didn't want a California experience. Reading this you might get the idea that Harvard was cold and impersonal but that's not quite the case. I developed lasting friendships during my years there and being apart of the Harvard culture and traditions is something that I am proud of to this day. I wanted something that was totally different on a totally different coast and I got it at Harvard and to be honest Stanford was just too close to home. I had nightmares of my parents popping by casually on the weekends. (These fears were probably unfounded. My little sister is at UCSB now -- just 2 1 /2 hours north of LA instead of 5 -- and my parents never visit her lol).

Now that I'm much much older my motivations for pursuing education and choosing a specific MBA program are much different. Ideally, I'll live in California post MBA and raise a family there. I'd even love to move back to LA sometime in the future to be even closer to them. With that in mind, Stanford is actually an attractive option, and after visiting again at the age of 27, I'm all about the California experience that Stanford offers. Some take aways...

1. The campus is still gorgeous. I didn't bother with the campus tour because I've seen everything already.
2. Students are friendly and welcoming but not overly-so. I sat in on a class and the professor asked the visitors to introduce ourselves. They all gave us a round of applause after we told them what round we'd apply in. I also ran into two people I'd gone to undergrad with and they were of course very helpful and I'm talking with them to get some more info on the GSB and how they came to choose it.
   
3. I do like the case method. I found myself wanting to participate in the discussion and partake in the various role plays.
4. I think I would prefer a small to medium sized program. This is kind of a surprise to me as I tend to prefer larger organizations when it comes to employment. I had a brief stint at an ad agency that had less than 20 people and I was miserable. During my MBA research, I've found myself instantly attracted to smaller programs (Tuck and Stanford for example). I haven't even visited Tuck and was actually prepared not to like it (too small, too cold, too much in the middle of nowhere), but the presentation and alumni testimonials instantly won me over.
   

That said, Stanford is an insanely competitive program and I can see why. I have added it to my long list of schools.

GMAT is over and done with

I tried to start blogging during GMAT preparation and just got overwhelmed, so I deleted all of my old posts. I studied really hard for a good four months and managed to pull a 730 (47 Q, 42 V, 6AWA). You can't imagine how relieved I was when I hit "report score" and 730 appeared. Barring the unforeseen, I'll never have to think about that test again, and I feel so relieved now that I've gotten it out of the way....

Now on to the good stuff. I've decided to postpone applying until Round 1 and 2 of next year. Doing so will give me adequate time to address my two weaknesses: lower than average GPA, lack of community involvement. I'm currently taking an Intro to Stats Course at an extension school and scored an A on my mid-term. My goal is to take four courses (Stats, Calc, Microeconomics, Accounting) before applying. I also have time to continue my current community service involvement and earn a Competent Communicator designation in my Toastmasters Club. As you can see, I'm gearing up for a very busy year.