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I was thinking recently that it was only about a year or so ago that I finally decided to apply for business school. Registering (and paying!) for the GMAT was a first big step into making it real.

For those people that are reading this and have yet to take the GMAT, I have just a couple of simple tips for hacking the GMAT.

However, before all that, are you aiming to get into a top-tier school? Get a 700+ and you’ll be setting yourself up for success. You can certainly still get into top schools with significantly poorer scores. In fact, I’ve heard of a student who got into a top school with a GMAT score in the 400’s. (What happened in that case was the GMAT wasn’t at all consistent with the person’s CV/resume and work history. The interview clearly showed that the GMAT was an outlier; the person turned out to be a superstar.)

That said, the higher score you get the easier it is for schools to accept you.

Tip 1 — Challenge yourself

My first and most important tip is to really challenge yourself. If you really want to kick ass on the GMAT, forget 90% of the study books out there. Those are written for people who want to do above average on the GMAT, not kick ass. If you want to get that 700+, only go for the books that are trying to get you the mythical 800. Kaplan GMAT 800

is the book that I used.

Why do this? Well, instead of picking a representative sample of test questions, it only focuses on the really difficult questions. This is what you need to get comfortable with and master if you’re going to hack the GMAT. Forget your other study books; focus on the ones that challenge you.

Tip 2 — Prepare your body and mind

The second and final tip is to be very careful in the days before your exam. Get good sleep, and not just the night before the exam. Make sure your head is in the right place by getting good sleep consistently for a few days before the exam. Whatever you do, don’t be stupid and try cramming so much that you lose sleep the night beforehand.

So that’s it… my tips on how to Hack the GMAT. A good score won’t guarantee you entry, but neither will a bad score necessarily prevent it. But the better you can do, the easier it is for your chosen schools to accept you.

I want to say a public congratulations to Doug Rowe, a fellow Cambridge MBA student. Just yesterday he was named as the scrum-half for the Cambridge University Rugby Union Football Club 1st XV in their Varsity Match against Oxford at Twickenham Stadium next Thursday (the 11th). He will be a bit of a rare commodity; an MBA student that achieves a sporting “Blue”.

It’s hard to express how big a deal this is in the sporting world of the University. A sporting blue is the highest level of sports achievement, and comes with a distinctive blue blazer. While the Rugby Union Varsity Match isn’t quite as high-profile as the Boat Race (in rowing), it’s been played since 1872 and now takes place in the UK’s second biggest stadium, seating 80,000! Doug did used to play on the US Rugby Team, so top-level competition certainly won’t be foreign to him.

So a hearty congrats to Doug… well done! (Match photos of questionable quality taken by yours truly at a very cold home match a few weeks ago.)

On a completely different note, it’s already the last week of classes in Michaelmas Term! I really have no idea where all the time has gone.

Just this last weekend we finished a lengthy take-home exam for our Business Modelling class (lots and lots of Excel… thus the need for a take-home exam). In the next two weeks we’ll complete our term’s consulting project, a final essay for Management Practice, and the essay portion of Organizational Behaviour. Then it’s a month of holiday and revision for exams in the first week of January.

Finally, I just found what is quite possibly the best-written internship cover letter I’ve ever read. Check it out here.

Earlier this week the Guardian newspaper broke rowing news that I’m very happy about; Leander Club has been informed by the Henley Stewards that they cannot enter Club-level events at Henley Royal Regatta.

To explain a bit, Leander Club is a bit of a gorilla in British rowing. Their boathouse/clubhouse is at the very end of the Henley Royal Regatta course, which means they are able to make a significant sum of money from hiring out facilities during the regatta. Additionally, they are able to raise a significant amount of money from ~2000 members that keep their affiliation (and thus get tickets for the facilities during Henley). This means that for the other 51 weeks of the year they are able to pay for highly trained coaches and heavily subsidize their athlete’s training.

For club rowers at Leander, rowing is essentially their job. They are expected to train for around six hours a day. There’s really no way to have any sort of reasonable full-time job after that. Club rowers elsewhere around the country train in their spare-time. Really serious athletes either sacrifice and work part-time to train more, or sacrifice everything else in their life to train. Where Leander athletes pay virtually nothing for membership and get kit and camps largely paid for, any other club’s athletes pay a lot of money (hundreds of pounds) on membership, kit and everything else.

My rowing club, Thames Rowing Club, does it’s best and has had some really good success recently. We do pay some fairly significant membership fees, but we have very impressive facilities, a top-level paid coach and an incredible boat fleet.

With such a dramatic difference between one “club” and the rest of the clubs around the country, I completely support what the Henley Stewards chose to do in this case. It’s simply not fair to consider their athletes in the “club” category when they are able to and expected to train so much more than any of their competition.

Last week we had the pleasure of hearing Bill Janeway speak to our MBA class. Bill was formerly vice-chairman of Warburg Pincus (the Private Equity fund) and is still a Senior Advisor to the company. He sits on a number of boards, and is incredibly active at Cambridge. In fact, you may recognize him from my post on Tim O’Reilly; he hosted Tim in Cambridge that day. Of course, Bill also sits on the Board of O’Reilly Media! (I put a more complete bio at the bottom of the post.)

But Bill came and spoke to our class on Finance. Specifically he reviewed the recent failings of the financial markets and traced it back to modern finance principles trying to treat economics too much like physics. (Where models can be relied upon.)

This was quite an intensive talk; over 50 slides crammed with quotes, references, citations, and more. (In his defense, he told us that it was going to go pretty quickly and that slides would be available afterward.) I tried to take notes and largely failed; this was information by immersion. In the course of an hour he managed to touch on virtually all key aspects of what caused the credit crunch, and the principles of finance that led to the crisis.

While I have the slides, I don’t have specific permission to share them. He recently did an interview which covered a lot of the same material as this talk, which can be found here.

He ended the talk with a few notes that I did manage to catch. First, the bad news is that we’re essentially in the “1931” scenario right now. But he believes that the good news is that “1933” will not follow “1931.” (He is very encouraged by Obama’s election.) Perhaps more importantly for some people in our class, banking will not be like it was ($-wise) for at least a generation or two. For regulators and finance thinkers, Bill said that we to establish Financial Economics as a social science in order to frame future regulation of the industry.

Overall, it was a fantastic talk. Since I don’t have a deep finance background, there was quite a bit I didn’t managed to catch as it flew by. But it’s clear Bill Janeway is clearly a very deep thinker and actor in the modern financial marketplace, and it great to get his perspectives on how we got to where we are, and what we as a society need to do going forward.

If there is one single takeaway from his talk, it’s this: Finance is NOT a branch of Physics!

[Addendum:] If you want to read another really interesting perspective of the credit crisis (from the perspective of sub-prime loans, CDO’s, etc) that is actually readable and entertaining for a wider audience, check out “The End” by Michael Lewis in Portfolio. Very interesting, as well…

As promised, Bill Janeway’s full bio:

Bill’s experience encompasses over thirty years of practical finance in investment banking and venture capital in the US and Europe. On joining Warburg Pincus in 1988, he initiated and managed implementation of the investment strategy for Information Technology that established the firm as a global leader in the domain, including funding from start-up such prominent providers of infrastructure software as BEA Systems and VERITAS Software. Bill is a member of the Board of Directors of Fortent, O’Reilly Media Inc., Nuance, Inc., NYFIX, Inc., and Wall Street Systems, Inc.
 
Bill was a Marshall Scholar in 1965 through 1968, and in 1965 was valedictorian of Princeton University. He holds a BA from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and a PhD in Economics from Cambridge University.
 
He is chairman of the board of trustees of Cambridge in America, University of Cambridge; founding manager of the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance, University of Cambridge; Honorary Fellow, Pembroke College, University of Cambridge; and director of the Social Science Research Council. Bill is co-Chair of the 800th Anniversary Campaign for Cambridge University and a Visitor at the University’s Centre for Financial Analysis and Policy.