Have decided to do this.
NGAC and I spent - what was it almost an hour and a half intotal - trying to ftp the files containing some study material across to me (We didn't succeed by the way). Anyway, that's the plan. Wish me luck.
PS: GMAT still going. Booked for next March.
Have realised for a person who claims to be interested in technical reviews, I own some pretty low fare stuff. Let's review:
- Motorola W375, fuchsia at that (it was a phase, I almost opted for a pink credit card)
- Verbatim 2GB pen drive (I woke up at 8 am on a Saturday to pick that up for $10 @ a one day only sale)
- Seagate standard 3.5" 80GB hard drive in a local USB casing to make it portable
- Dell 1525 - that's after 2 months of soul ravaging conflict between economy and a MacBook Pro :(
- Transcend 1GB mp3 player (bought based on experience with friend's model and lack of drive to shop around)
- DLink DIR300 wireless router, coz it was the cheapest!
No iPods, no piano black 8GB N95's.
Who cares actually, this was a fun exercise though!
My new Ubuntu CD arrived. Unfortunately haven't had the time to install/run it on the fly. Will do so next weekend.
Am planning to buy a Seagate FreeAgent Go 160GB drive as a gift for friend who's going abroad soon except there is no reliable looking online retailer that will ship to India. Seagate website has a weird bug that changes the website to the US version despite repeated efforts to keep it on India. Am thinking of simply going in for 250GB WD Passport instead. Same price, 100 gigs more. I wonder. But the Seagate's so pretty with the whole orange sidebar softly blinking when in use! Plus it's on-the-go security promises to never leave a trace on any public computer where you will use it. And since the bloke I'm buying it for will be using it while @ university, that is a definite plus. Anyway, here the 2 are, will let you know how it turns out.
Seagate 
WD
Have ordered 3 books @ Amazon. My first Amazon purchase.
1. Princeton Review with DVD (unfortunately was brainless enough to not realise 2009 version would be available in June, so have ordered 2008 one!)
2. Official Guide to GMAT Review
3. Official Guide to Verbal Reasoning
4. Official Guide to Quantitative Analysis
Cost me AUD103, including a $25 delivery. Not bad I say, compared to the $200-odd I would've shelled out buying it straight off www.mba.com (the official GMAT site) or at Borders (not that they would've had it, the fiction loving idiots!). Downside - Expected delivery date is late June!
As for the Manhattan Guide to Sentence Correction so widely renowned in the GMAT blogosphere, I simply printed out the 77-pager from the free pdf download at manhattanguide.com, punched it and put it into a ring binder! Also printed and bound Spidey's and Sahil's SC notes while I was at it (Confession : used office printer).
Intend to do same for rest of mg's stuff. Brilliant, I say.
Also made an account with www.mba.com and downloaded their free GMAT software.
Have placed GMAT in large red letters on a spirax and written pattern on inside cover. Intend to practise in this notebook as well, as practicing on sheets of paper leads to trouble later as one tries to remember past approaches to questions.
Plan till books arrive - GMAT Prep software/mg SC/all mg stuff.
Once books arrive, will start with PR and then move on to OG's. Expect to finish all this by end of year giving 5-7 hours every weekend. Then will buy Kaplan in 2009 and take a week's leave and book GMAT exam. That's the plan, amigos, that's the plan.
PS: Am using Windows Live writer to write this. Its a free blogging software downloadable off the Microsoft website. For once, Microsoft has done something right - they kept it free. Brilliant for blokes (blokies?) like me who need to quickly and painlessly post to multiple blogs.
So I'm joining the ranks of the many who do the Engineering and MBA thing. Deciding that CAT (the entrance exam for Indian Institutes of Technology) is not in my destiny, seeing as I either misjudge my result (by almost 20 percentile) or the CAT misjudges me (by about 8%ile), its moving on time.
Why I'm blogging about this
I am a procrastrinator by nature. I hate keeping schedules because I don't stick to them. There are 2 reasons to get out of this habit - (A) I'm not going to get into a good business school with this attitude and (B) Personal improvement and all that 7 secrets of highly successful people blahahaha. This blog documents my promises to myself. Hence this blog is a journal about all the stuff I find out on my way to a B-School.
Plan of Action
Here's what you need to get into a top 100 business school (I'm aiming for top 30 in Fall 2011):
1. GMAT score (valid for 5 years)
2. Solidly good work ex, preferably with a bit of volunteer/out of office work thrown in - its quality, not quantity
3. Fairly good acads (weightage depends on quality of work ex)
4. Recommendation letters from people who have worked with you closely - these can be professors or
5. Statement of Purpose - a 1000 word essay on why you should be let into THAT particular school
6. Some schools have additional requirements - for instance, Columbia School of Business needs you to develop a 10 slide presentation. They expect it to tell them something about you that is not covered in the application. Power Point being one of my fav softwares, I'm definitely applying to Columbia!
7. Financial Budgeting (more on this later) - depending on the school, you have to shell out around $50,000 purely for tuition fees. Add to that living expenses and the odd $10,000 you need to jet set and be part of exchange programs and network - all integral to the great B-School experience. Let the scrounging begin.
8. Paperwork, paperwork, paperwork, esp if you apply for scholarships (which I will)
Hopefully this list will convert itself to links to other posts by - ok, here starts the deadline setting - end of July.
My background
Born and brought up in India.
Good scores from a fairly good engineering college in India in July 2007. Currently working in Shell Scripting and J2EE in an Indian IT service company in Australia. Having Australian Permanent Residency, I am definitely looking at getting an admit from AGSM and MBS, the only 2 Australian B-Schools in the top 100 world ranking.
As of now, my schedule is packed with working from 9 to 5 (sometimes 9 to 7), household chores and my kid sister who lives with me (and is a full time student). Of course add in a generous dose of time spent watching DVDs and reading books and you have my life about covered. Thankfully, not too committed in terms of a social life, although I spend about 30 minutes a day in personal correspondence to friends back home.
STEP 1 - GMAT
Planned GMAT date - mid 2009.
Planned GMAT score - 720 +
Reason - Valid for 5 years, lets get it out of the way while my studying habits are still fresh
Which means I have almost a year to perfect my prep.
Right, late for work. More on GMAT prep plan later.
This is the new Vista Home Basic default wallpaper.
This is the old Ubuntu default wallpaper.
You do the math. And frankly, the brown looks classier.
Mac Air obsession rears its unhealthy head once more. I will never buy one, so why not dream of the best while I'm at it. For a tidy lil sum of $3000, you can have yours go metallic on you - from gold to chromiuim to nickel. The Apple logo itself is inlaid either with diamonds for a more *cough cough* subtle look or with semi-precious stones, in full over-the-top technicolor glory.
For mere mortals, we may still have a chance at designer glory. The company is offering to do the same for iPod Classics. Similar services for other products are in the pipeline.
29 April 2008
Have recently been doing some good old google research on Duet, a la Project Mendocino. Will be posting my results soon. Watch this space.
1 May 2008
Right, so here is what's happening. Microsoft decided it has no new stuff to offer, so why not make its most popular suite - Microsoft Office - more popular. Thankfully, they have come to terms with the fact that while Sharepoint and Exchange Server have survived thanks to early legacy monopoly in the IT industry (Vista might finally break that rule with most Network Administrators choosing to wait for Windows 7 than installing the AeroCrap that is Vista), there is little chance that a new Microsoft product would be accepted with as much gusto as the MacBookAir (just realised how easy Apple would have made it for reviewers if the Air was a terrible product - new Mac just a load of Hot Air, Flies away into oblivion, Air Headed Apple...you get the point...I deviate from it. Let's return). So we have one team desperate to make a comeback into the hardcore IT industry. Enter SAP. The world of warehousing at its feet, and Microsoft suddenly gets a chance to shift from business productivity market to the mega lucrative Enterprise market.
And this part, even I will admit, is pretty damn good. They've combined Outlook with MySAP, MyCRM et al so that you can do Business As Usual activities all from the new Duet enabled Outlook environment. Going for a meeting ? Do it in outlook. An unobtrusive little Duet sidebar quickly grabs info from SAP via Exchange Server (min 2003) and grabs the project codes for your account. It displays em on the side just like a To-Do bar. You pick the project for which this meeting is billable and hit 'Bill this appointment'. If Duet is configured to seek approval from your manager, it automatically sends off an email to him to approve this billing, he hits the approve/reject button (much like an Accept/Decline button for a meeting invitation) and there you go! Its all billed. No crosschecking, no end of month oh-no-did-we-bill-this scenarios.
3 May, 2008 (yes I'm a bit busy ok!)
This can be extended and configured for 10 areas as of now -
Time Management,
Budget Monitoring,
Organization Management,
Leave Management,
Travel Management,
Reports and Analytics,
Sales Management,
Purchasing Management,
Demand Planning,
Recruitment Management and
Contract Lifecycle Management.
All seems great till now. Till you decide let's get Dueted. And then...you can't. Cause your SAP is customized. Or cause it isn't the ECC version. Or your entire enterprise isn't on the same version of Outlook. Or...some inconceivable string of words only warehousing people can make head or tail of.
While Duet is expected to come up with 2.0 in Q4 of 2008, their media releases suggest that it is a mere code fixing release.The real showgun features aren't unleashed till 3.0, which isn't expected anytime soon. Till then, they'll continue testing this on clients who use off the shelf products, of which they claimed to have procured 250. Trouble is, the RoI on this kind of product is directly proportional to the size of the enterprise. And they specifically released it as a "non small and medium business" product. Very few large scale enterprises havn't got highly customized backends. Even fewer have upgraded to ECC, given the costs in migration or indeed, decommissioning such a large legacy system. Most still use the good old black and red mainframe environs. SAP, of all stakeholders, must've known this.
This product claims to further Microsoft's People Ready business tagline. Not quite. My disappointment isn't there. The proof of concept is brilliant - it would shoot down hours of specialized learning (since everyone knows Outlook), web server issues, redundancy, integrity, tracking, approval routing and what have you. Their promise of delivering the world at your inbox isn't all that exaggurated. They didn't follow through on the market readiness. I expected SAP to lift Microsoft up. Seems Microsoft's dragged SAP down. A pity. Still, if they can pull it off by 3.0, they'll be back in my fab four books (which, for the curious, is comprised of Apple, SAP, GNU and good ol Sun).
For more info go to www.duet.com.
I particularly like the demo at http://www.duet.com/AboutDuet/Demo/tabid/155/Default.aspx.
Looking at the strong feelings I seem to have unsuspectingly developed for the PC vs Mac issue as a proofread of this article proved to me 2 min ago, I might add myself to the millions of geeks who have done this debate to death by blogging about this Gate way to Job lessness. Actually its Jobs to Gatelessness if you get my drift, er Air. Oh God, I am so bad at puns right now.