Before I continue on with the application process and school information, I’d like to give you a brief look at my profile. In my last post I stated some of my reasons to continue on with higher education and not go in the workforce right away, and now I’ll explain how things don’t often go as planned.
When I returned to Carleton University in Ottawa after my year abroad for my final year of my undergrad, I was adamant that I would do everything in my power to get accepted. This included being involved in almost every student association known to mankind at the Sprott School of Business. I’m not completely exaggerating this point because I was in the executive committee for four associations: Sprott International Business Association (SIBA), Sprott Student’s Management Association (SSMA), Carleton DECA, and Carleton University Exchange Society (CUEx). On top of that I was a Sprott Student Ambassador and frequently volunteered for fairs, shows, student/parent visits and class talks about the International Business program.
My spare time was nonexistent.
Now on top of that I was taking four courses a semester and they all demanded a great deal of my attention since they were senior level lectures. I thought I had a good enough grasp of everything so I started doing my research about the GMAT. All of the universities and programs I was interested in required a GMAT or GRE score for their admission processes therefore I had to complete this test before I could take the next step. I had never done a standardized test of this nature before and was surprised when I found out how long it took and what kind of trickery they used in their questions. I had tried a few free questions myself and they are unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. The GMAT specifically uses simple or logical math and verbal skills and then provides you with a question that is worded in such a unique way that many choices can be correct. Your goal is to find the most correct choice. To be perfectly honest it all looked alien to me and I’ve studied many of the underlying concepts before, I just was not a fan of their question and testing methods.
However I persevered and decided to self-study a few hours a day for a few weeks before my intended test day. This plan did not pan out the way I anticipated and there were a few reasons why. The first is that I needed to use either a software or teacher to completely understand the new methods of questioning on this test because I was not getting it. The second was that I just didn’t have enough time for the amount of studying that had to be done. So it came as no surprise that I didn’t fare very well when I took my test. I believe I scored under 510 and I was aiming for the 700's.
I clearly needed to take a few months during the summer and just study for the test. Little did I know that this was a blessing in disguise.
