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October 2006. I was in a Lufthansa flight heading towards Frankfurt. In a little more than 16 hours, I would be landing in the USA. The land of dreams and opportunities. I would be working with clients directly. Discussing technology, proposing process improvements, winning new projects. It's gonna be a great boost for my career, this assignment at the client location, I thought.

Fast forward to May 2009. I was in a Lufthansa flight, this time heading towards Chennai. I looked out the window and I saw nothing but clouds spanning over as far as I could see. That's how my career looks now, I thought. Nothing in sight. I had reached a plateau. I had to do something. I had to save myself from the sea of mediocrity I was drowning into, but I didn't know how to swim.

Thus started my process of introspection on what I really want from my life and where all this frustration stemmed from. I was reading the newspaper one day and the answer was right in front of me - "CAT is going online this year". An MBA. That's the swimming coaching I need. But I was already a 5-year experienced "IT professional", and writing CAT didn't seem to make much sense (unless I get into IIM A, B or C or XLRI). GMAT, on the other hand, seemed to be a more sensible option. I started researching about GMAT and discussed with friends who had already taken the exam to get an idea of how to prepare for the exam. Most of them told me that the verbal section is nothing short of gruelling, and I would do well to enroll myself into a coaching centre.

That's when I came across 4GMAT. I got many suggestions from my friends to join other institutes whose names were more associated with CAT than GMAT. I had written CAT during college and had enrolled in one of those institutes. The batch size was juz too big there and I could not get individual attention. I didn't want to go through that again. I called up the Mylapore 4GMAT centre to inquire about a lot of things - timings, batch size, materials, etc. I also browsed through the website to get additional insights. Read the testimonials. Thought it would be nice to write one someday after getting a decent score.

Enrolled myself for weekend classes at the Mylapore centre the following weekend. My first class was Critical Reasoning - by none other than Subashri ma'am. What's so unique about her approach is that she'll never tell you what's already in the books. Instead, she'll give you the inside scoop - stuff you'll never be able to come across on any website or any ebook you download on esnips. Every one of her classes was memorable and insightful. Please make sure you take notes during her classes, maintain them and revise them a day before the exam. One critical piece of advice - do not yawn blatantly or you'll be reminded of her every time you do so later (Juz kidding).

I was pretty strong at math and found the problem solving classes pretty easy. Then came a class on data sufficiency. I had been very confident of scoring a Q50 or 51 in GMAT till that day, going by my performance in the problem solving classes. Shreyas' classes on data sufficiency totally shattered every bit of that confidence. For the first time in my life, I felt handicapped at math! I gave special attention to DS problems and used to pester Shreyas with problems that I found interesting or hard (I still do, actually). I was also a bit apprehensive about permutation - combination and probability questions since I was very bad at that. Baskar alleviated all my fears in his class. He taught us a very simple approach for such questions. Following that approach, I was able to solve almost all the questions I faced during my preparation on this topic.

The last 3 weeks of my preparation were the most crucial, and the most intensive. For verbal, I referred to the OG (in the words of Subashri, "you cannot not do the OG!!!") in addition to the questions from the 4GMAT material. For quant, I worked out all problems from 4GMAT, especially the DS workbook. Believe me, working out all these problems is more than enough. You can refer to the online forums if you need more.

Subashri always stressed upon the importance of the depth of the preparation and not the breadth. Do not commit the mistake of collecting too much material for your preparation - you'll almost always end up not being able to complete going through every bit of it. Simply because there's just too much of it available. 4GMAT provides you with ample amount of prep material. If you feel that's not enough, you can refer to some of the prominent online forums like GMATClub, beatthegmat, pagalguy, etc. DO NOT go on a frenzy of downloading each and every bit of PDF you can find online.

For verbal, in addition to looking at why the right option is right, one needs to see why the wrong answers are wrong. This helped me to a great extent in using the elimination technique to arrive at the right answer. I would like to quote Subashri here again - "Be incisive in your reasoning, and think from the testmaker's perspective". This is very true for CR and RC sections.

If you're not very good at math, practice is the key to success. If you're good at math, do not be confident that you can crack the GMAT easily. I realized during my GMAT preparation that GMAT may not be as easy as I had assumed it to be. Now that I have written the GMAT, it just seems all the more true.

I am not sure if self-preparation would have helped me attain this score in GMAT. For the simple reason that you don't just need motivation for success, you also need support and advice from knowledgeable and informed individuals. And that's what I think made all the difference.

Narendran Santhanam (5+ years work-ex)
December 2009