Crapshoot!

Fellow  business school applicants. The road has almost come to an end. My results for the 2010 application season are known to you (summarized below) for you if you’ve just landed here.

R1: Kellogg (Interviewed/Dinged) / Booth(Dinged) / MIT (Interviewed/Deferred)
R2: Fuqua (Interviewed/Dinged) / HBS (No Interview) / Stanford (No Interview)

It has been a long, arduous journey; one that I hoped would end in at least one business school admitting this now forgotten soul. Alas! They have not.

Some will win, some will lose, some will live on to sing the blues. In my case, I will be spending the next few weeks giving serious thought to whether it still makes sense for me to apply again this fall. You’ll know, as soon as I do.

To all me hearties, I wish ye good luck. And if you get bruised on the b-school trail this year, maybe we’ll celebrate victories together next year.

Au revoir!

MIT Interview Invite and Windows 7 Woes

MIT sent out it’s first round of invites today. But you’re probably wondering why I’m complaining about Windows 7 suddenly?

Well. It’s a long story. And you’ll enjoy it. I just got a new laptop from work. A ThinkPad T500 with Windows 7. Raj, our resident tech guru, and my go to guy for all questions relating to technology assured me that its the best thing that our hardware budget would allow. I wanted a Macbook Air, but even a company like mine that makes a killing by selling financial products to gullible investors cant afford such luxuries.

Anyways, I am in Los Angeles for work this week. I fired up my computer at a investor conference that I am attending. The speaker wasn’t really keeping my attention, so I logged on to Gmail and hit up my girlfriend on IM.

GF: When are you scheduling your interview?
LB: What are you talking about?
GF: MIT just sent out invites. Check GMATClub
LB (sh*tting melons): lemme check, don’t see it on my iphone
LB: i got nothing… F#$K!
GF: i gotta run. conf call in 5. im sure you’ll get an invite. :*

As you can understand, this was a double whammy. Not only did I not get an invite, but I had to swallow my masculine pride that too while I was IMing my woman. Sexting would have been nice (to soften the blow), but she went cold the moment she realized that I didn’t make the cut.

So what does Windows 7 have to do with this? Aren’t PCs the root of every problem known to humanity. I am a centrist kind of guy, but after today I do agree that Microsoft – no good.

I hadn’t setup my outlook email on the machine and the web client I used all day to check my email was slow. So I called Raj and asked him to walk me through the process. Why so sad? he asked me. I told him about the tragic events that had transpired earlier.

Well, check your junk filter. Your Kellogg invite was sitting there too, he reminded me. What genius I thought… Between the boring seminars, the work that my boss was making me do (despite sending me to a conference) and the melancholy mood I was in, I had overlooked that fact.

I have all my b-schools on the safe list in Outlook – you moved those over to this one didn't you? I asked Raj. He confirmed that he had migrated all my data and settings. Check anyway, he asked.

I looked. And indeed there it was. My golden and shiny interview invite.

So the takeaway for the day is – Windows 7 causes pain, suffering and agony. Any lawyers want to jump in and help me sue them for emotional distress?

Direct Your Destiny. Really?

Check out the latest GMAT ad campaign. They’re telling us that if you’re not an MBA, the only jobs you qualify for are those of a server or a poop scooper.

Wow! If this doesn’t scare me to register for the GMAT, I don’t know what will. Perhaps they need to hire an MBA with some advertising and marketing experience.

Really distasteful.