Success Story Part 1: "Why MBA"

(This is the first in a series of blog posts in which Julie DeLoyd, a Veritas Prep GMAT alumna-tuned-instructor, will tell the story of her experience through the MBA admissions process. Julie will begin her MBA program at Chicago Booth this fall.)

I’d like to start at the end of my current story.

My hair’s a little shorter, I have a few more pairs of nice pants and a full-tuition fellowship to a top 5 business school. A year ago, I wouldn’t have anticipated at least two of these changes.

Veritas Prep was a big part of my journey over the last year, as a student and now as an instructor. I’ve learned a lot along the way, and this series of blogs will hopefully help give some insight to those of you about to embark upon a similar journey. But let’s get back to the beginning...

In a lot of ways, I was an unlikely MBA candidate. At 27, I’d spent most of my adult life playing a guitar for a living and sleeping in my car. 40,000 miles driven and 175 shows played was a pretty common year for me. Though I ran my own record label, I was in a community that did not applaud business savvy—in fact, making a lot of money in the independent music community was a bit of a faux pas. As of early last year, my plan was to continue doing music for as long as I could.

So, "what changed?" is likely what you're thinking. When I ask myself that question, I keep coming back to one book. There is a book many writers and musicians use to overcome writer’s block called The Artist’s Way. This twelve-step program is meant to unleash your “inner creative,” and involves a lot of writing exercises meant to get past your “inner editor” to find your true voice. (I’m a bit new agey, as you’ll come to find out if you stick with this blog series enough to hear about my test prep techniques). Somehow, the more exercises I did to use writing as a way to awaken my inspiration, the more I found myself writing about intellectual adventures I hadn’t embarked on in years. In April 2008 I found myself, once again, driving the long stretch between Austin, TX and Albuquerque. (Yes, I used to make this long uneventful drive in one day and then play a show that night.) For whatever reason, this was the moment inspiration struck. I had been harboring a hidden desire to go to business school.

As may already be apparent, I’m not someone who does anything just halfway. Once the idea of business school took hold, I knew that I didn’t want to go to just any school. If I was ultimately going to work for a great company in a position of influence, I had to add a lot of business “cred” to an otherwise pretty musician-y resume. My wife is a consultant with McKinsey, and she made the argument that I’d pretty much need to go to a Top 10 school if I really wanted to achieve my new goals quickly. To get into one of these schools, I found I needed to score in the 700s on some test called... the GMAT(?)… If I didn’t think I could do that well, I wasn’t sure business school would happen for me.

After taking my first diagnostic test from a GMAT prep book I bought the day after my epiphany, I was starting this voyage at a "630." This was my very first try, and not even a full or sanctioned practice test, so I tried to keep my hopes high. I put together a quick list of the top 10 schools and narrowed them down to University of Chicago, Kellogg, Harvard, Michigan, and then added University of Wisconsin at Madison (which I was hoping would be a safety school). My wife and I had already bought a condo in Chicago, so the Midwest was a big draw for me. This didn’t turn out to be exactly the list I ended up with--I’ll go more into my choices in a later blog… Point being, I wanted to hit this GMAT thing out of the park. I knew I couldn’t do it on my own.

I had some friends who took LSAT courses from another test prep company, but they didn’t offer GMAT courses at the time. Thankfully, this company steered me towards Veritas Prep. The fact that Veritas instructors all scored in the top 99th percentile seemed pretty impressive, and the testimonials I read online showed that the Veritas method had worked for at least a few enthusiastic students. So I signed up for the full package – 42 hours of classes, 3 hours of private tutoring and admissions consulting.

This whole business school shebang took about 11 months to come to fruition. So far we’re about two weeks into the story. I’ll be continuing this tale in 8 episodes… stay tuned!

NEXT UP: Preparing for the GMAT (Spoiler alert: I scored a 770.)