Erika here with prep scholar GMAT we are here today with Laura Leszcynski
she is a Wharton MBA and she's the director of GMAT here at prepscholar
she'll be answering our questions today about applying to business school about
taking the GMAT and she'll also be giving us some advice for aspiring
Wharton applicants Laura thank you for being here today thanks for having me so
we're just gonna jump right on in first question is to tell us a bit about your
background certainly so I graduated from Princeton
with my undergrad in psychology and a minor in Spanish and after college went
on to consulting for four years in Washington DC I really wasn't sure what
I wanted to do with my degree and so I thought consulting would give me a broad
array of experiences with different industries and different clients which
it definitely did after about four years of consulting I realized I really wanted
to go into brand management and in order to do so with most companies you need an
MBA and so I applied to business school got into Wharton went for two years of
course for their two years their full-time two-year program and then
worked at General Mills for six and a half years in their rotational program
with the brand management team and now I'm here at prepscholar leading the
GMAT course awesome so you ended up going to Wharton why did you decide on a
Wharton you know I decided I'm working for a couple of reasons the first
obviously is just the strength of the overall program getting experiences with
with other students from all over the world was something that I really wanted
another reason was the strength of their brand management or their marketing
program believe it or not a lot of people think of Wharton as a finance
program but their marketing program is just as if not better than the finance
program at least based on my experiences I have a lot of friends from Business
School who went on to CPG brand management companies from there and then
the third reason for me was I wanted to live in a city and so Philadelphia
obviously the school being in Philadelphia was a great opportunity
for me to see an experience and live in a new city which was a lot of fun
awesome so when you are applying to Wharton how
important was the GMAT and your GMAT score as part of your application how
much emphasis did you put on studying for the GMAT I put a lot of emphasis into
the GMAT particularly because my GPA and undergrad wasn't the best and a low 3
GPA and there were different reasons for that of course you know I was an athlete
I was doing other things while in college as well as obviously the
academics but I wanted to really prove to the admissions committee that my GPA
wasn't a reflection necessarily of my high standard my academic
standard and so for me I ended up getting a 710 which when I applied to
Wharton was the average I think the average now is more like a 730 but my
goal was to at least get the average so that nothing would stand out to the
admissions committee as like a red flag or as something that I needed to
overcome in other parts of the application
awesome so when you were studying how did you study for the GMAT so I
studied for about four probably six months at four to six months I'd say and
it was a combination of a couple of things it was self-study so I was lucky
in that my roommate at the time was also taking the GMAT and so on weekends we
would go to my company's office which was a couple blocks away and just lock
ourselves in a conference room it was funny so we kind of forced ourselves we
became our own accountability partners if you will that was enough for her she
didn't need to take any courses or anything but I still felt like I wanted
some sort of structured course or prep so I signed up for two in-person courses
one was like a weekend boot camp course and then another was maybe over a month
or two you know once a week twice a week kind of thing and they were both in the
classroom structured courses and I think they both definitely helped if I were to
do it today I would probably do it a little bit differently but at the time
it worked for me and so I went with it so would you say that there's anything
you did in your GMAT prep process that you would not recommend to someone who's
studying for the GMAT today yeah like I said there were a couple things I did I
would probably do a little differently it's not that they were terrible
for example I took two structured classes I don't know how much value or
benefit having the additional class really added for me it was more a peace
of mind kind of thing to know I was doing everything I can but I also spent
a lot of money on these courses and then the other thing was I assumed that what
worked for my roommate or what worked for my colleague or whatever was also
gonna work for me as in self-study on Saturdays or
taking this course or whatever if I were to go back and do it again I would
probably want to do my research a little bit better just to kind of a little bit
more self-reflection of like how I learned what I needed to learn and
really direct my studying towards towards what I needed as opposed to what
I heard others needed or what worked for other right that totally makes sense
yeah so based on your experience um you studied for four to six months would
you recommend that same timeline for other students or would you recommend
that they start earlier or not quite similarly it's hard to make a statement
for all students because everyone's so different it's gonna be the amount of
time you need to study is really going to be based on your starting point when
when the actual test is what else you have going on in your life what your
goal score is if your goal score if your goal score is a 600 versus a 750
you know you're gonna need a lot more time to get to the 750 than you are to
the 600 so it's it really very student to student but I would say on average
students should probably set aside say three to four months to study and then
either add or subtract from that based on their individual circumstances make
sense and then you went the route of after undergrad taking a few years to
work before applying for a business school do you recommend
a similar time line for students or do you recommend they take the GMAT earlier in
the process I think both work anything both have their pros and cons I think as
a college student you feel so busy and you have so much on your mind thinking
about what you're going to do next and where your life is going to take you
that adding one more thing on to your plate feels really overwhelming
however in a lot of ways it makes sense and I do actually have started
recommending to college students that they take it while they're in college
for a couple of reasons your GMAT score is good for five years
um and so as long as you're planning to apply to business school within five
years of graduating or within five years of taking the GMAT in college your score
will be good and most students do I think the average working experience is
three to five years so most students do apply within that time period and then
the other reason is while you're in college you're already in kind of this
study like formal academic mode that you quickly slip out of as soon as you enter
the working world and so as much of a pain as studying for the GMAT now feels
like who's gonna be even more of a pain and headed in a year or two from now
when you're in the working world and you're trying to build your applications
and you're trying to do a million other things as opposed to just doing it now
and getting it by the way now that's said I know a lot of the viewers are not
in college and are probably thinking well is it too late no absolutely not
most people take the GMAT after school so it's definitely doable
but if you are still in school I definitely recommend consider take
considering taking it now right and you're definitely evidence that you can
take it several years after college and still be fine still get into Wharton so
yeah that's right awesome okay and then the last question that we've got is what
is your biggest piece of advice for students who are planning to apply
Wharton or to another business school I think my biggest piece of advice is to
structure the application process in a way that isn't overwhelming and so for
example I took the GMAT in December but it was the December of the year before I
was applying because I really wanted to get the GMAT out of the way
so that I could focus on other things like community service building out my
story for applications visiting schools talking to alumni etc etc too many
students wait until say August or September of the year they want to apply
and then all of a sudden they have to study and take the GMAT to write their
stories to build their applications to get the recommendations it's a lot into
two or so months two or three months and so if you can be planful and plan ahead
that would be my number one recommendation is take the GMAT first do
your reset once you have your score and you know kind of what schools are in
your reality do your research decide what schools you want to apply to
and then start building out the application awesome so kind of like GMAT
as the first step and then the rest of that later runs right yeah that's good
advice yeah all right I think that's about all we have time for thank you so
much for answering our question it was no problem if you liked this video
please leave us a comment below if you have suggestions for future videos we
definitely want to hear those and if you have any questions for either me or
Laura we would be happy to answer those as well
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