The MBA hunt - Part 1

As mentioned in my previous post, about 4 lac Indians try to get into B Schools every year. I, untill recently, fell in the same category. And I led a life of the-typical-MBA-aspirant for about a year. Here's a quick flashback.

The beginning:

As is the case with thousands of engineering students I too was persuing engineering not for the love of it but for the tag. Engineering (and that too Computer Science and Engineering in my case) is considered cool - I was just being cool. Despite being a merit scholarship holder for all semesters my main interest lay in the Student Activity Council, the apex student body of the institute - I loved living the manager's life through it. The outcome was evident - I decided to jump into the MBA band-wagon and to start preparing for the MBA entrance examinations. Since I evaluated myself as a cut-for-MBA material ( conceit?! :) ) I made a list of about 15 institutes which were my targets. I was just not interested in anything of lesser value.
I started with grabbing a big load of old Career Forum MBA study material. The stuff looked comprehensive and I thought that I'll cream it within a stipulated period of say 2 months. Ofcourse, needless to say, the plan crashed and failed. When there's so much fun to have around you, why would you bother to waste time on these two dozen booklets! And thus I could not qualify to be an early starter. This was January 2007.

The beginning again:
May 2007-
My strong extra-curricular background landed me with a super cool internship opportunity in an international students camp at (hold your breath) Kazakhstan. No, that's not some market in Kashmir. It is a former Soviet Union country with a per capita income more than that of India. So now I had to choose between one of the following two options:

1) Go to Kazakhstan and enjoy life and also earn $1000 and later brag about my experience to all my mates.

2) Go to Lucknow and live a hot summer and struggle with B-School entrance preparations.
After some speculation and repetitive coin tossing I decided to not take up the super cool former option; instead took up the hot latter option.

A lot of people spend a lot of time in camparing a lot of MBA prep institutes - I didn't do that. I, under the influence of mob-behavior, just went and joined TIME. Till date I'm not sure how good a decision was that :).
Classes started - I took an overload of them. Did that for one month or so. Then just left it.

Mock Tests started - Started with decent 90+ scores.

Sooner than I thought, it was time to get back to college - to Hyderabad. I continued to stay out of touch with prep classes there too - had lost the money, why lose precious time now? ;).

As you can see, the momentum was not too great. This was August 2007.