Late Stage MBA Josh Moritz , Application Process Part 1

It was a long process that began in 1977. What is interesting is that after 30 years, many executive MBA programs are willing to forgive the sins of mediocre grades and crummy GMAT scores. While I am not proud of it, my GMAT scores from 30 years ago declined by one point each time I took the test, something like 456, to 455, to 454. I did no prep for the first two and the last time I did take the Kaplan course. I did it half heartedly since I was living in NYC, working overly hard and more into the City life than studying. In those days, you went to the Kaplan building in the west 50s, had a pep talk by someone who successfully took the test and then listened to some nasely sounding guy on cassette tapes who took you through the basics of math and English. I was working in advertising where it is never calm and there is always shouting and some nasely sounding bugging the crap out of you and this post work nasel voice just did not cut it. It was boring and annoying. It was more fun to go out with my girlfriend who really was a rocket scientiest -- she had done some operations research program at Yale. (A good friend of mine reminded me that he probably passed operatons research at Columbia MBA because he dropped her name to the professor, so she and I were truely in a different intellectual category). I was working at Kenyon and Eckhardt Advertising at the time and one of my bosses was a guy named Mike Weinstein who went on to create some great soda brands and campaigns. He finished HBS a few years earlier , looked at some of my failed entrepreneurial endeavors and said, go fucking start another business. Then there was another very successful boss Patricia, a true bon vivant. She was 40, a devout Kengas Kahn Republican, about the size of an IPOD shuffle and a 1970's corporate poster child for the 1980s Madonna song "Girls Just Want to Have Fun." She could fly airplanes and pickup guys on the bus from the terminal to rental car counter. Her attitude was "why bother, party. " So with the exception of my girlfriend who was concerned about those GMAT scores from a genetic perspective, my mentors weren't exactly encouraging my intellectual endeavors. And after the first few Kaplan sessions, neither was I.