Life changing

I honestly don't know how I can sum up the experience I had with GMAT Ninja into words, but the title probably does that job okay. I owe literally everything to Harry Duthie and the guys at GMAT Ninja. 

When I embarked on the long and brutal journey that is the GMAT, I am not even slightly exaggerating when I say I couldn't remember that two negative numbers multiplied together made a positive result. I sat my first GMAT practice exam in order to get my baseline score in December 2020 without any prep beforehand, and scored a dismal 390 (Q14, V27). I knew there was a long road ahead of me and a lot of work to be done if I was to hit my target score of 600. 

I started tutoring with Harry on a weekly basis in January 2021, and we went in at the deep end. Quant was my weakest section by far, so we started there. We spent our weekly sessions with roughly 1.5 hours on quant, and then 0.5 hours on Verbal (just to keep that ticking over too). I would then work my way through ~ 20 hours of homework every week, which we would then go through in our next session, and that's really how we worked from January all the way through. At the beginning it was incredibly overwhelming, but I cannot overstate how patient and encouraging Harry was with me. His teaching style is clear and he has this amazing ability to break everything down from scary functions and horrible fractions to some truly evil inequalities and awful data sufficiency problems, all into simple processes that begin to feel (dare I say it?) easy. After about 6 or 7 weeks, it suddenly felt like the lights had been turned on, and everything started making sense to me. I was able to make connections, my mental maths got faster, and he was always encouraging me to keep at it (even through the bleakest moments when I toyed with the idea of giving up entirely). 

I sat my first GMAT at the end of April. It was online, from home, using the old exam format where you got no break at all between the sections. That, combined with a particularly difficult proctor, meant that I didn't hit my target score on that first go. No matter though, we kept the tutoring up and began to focus more on exam technique and speed now that the content had been covered. Again, Harry was such an invaluable resource for all of this - we would go through practice exams and he would take the time to watch how I'd attempted the problem, and then show me faster, more efficient ways of doing them (I had a tendency to read a Quant question and panic and just start randomly doing useless sums, so this was a very helpful lesson!). I continued to sit a practice exam every week, and by mid-June, I hit my all time high score of 680 (Q42, V41). This was genuinely something I never, ever, EVER thought I was capable of even getting close to, and it was 100% down to Harry. To put that into perspective, my quant score went from 14 to 42... a 28 point difference.

In the end, after two more attempts and my nerves getting the better of me in the exam room both times, my final real GMAT score was 550. Despite me not hitting what I *thought* I needed, I still managed to get into the school of my choice with that score, and so all was well in the end. 

Harry is honestly the biggest legend. He was always there for me, he took time out of his own busy schedule to debrief with me after post-exam tear-filled sessions, he deflected my frustrations and turned them into encouragement, but most importantly, he gave me the confidence and the skills I needed to get through the last nine months. If you are reading this and you are even mildly considering getting tutoring, I cannot implore you enough to go with Harry, or anyone from the GMAT Ninja team. There really is no alternative (and trust me when I say I did a LOT of research before choosing them). I can say with absolute certainty that I would not be doing an MBA right now if it wasn't for them. Charles Bibilos, the founder, not only deserves a nobel prize for education for all the work he's put into making the GMAT accessible for people (he is the reason I scored in the 40's for verbal, check out his sentence correction series on YouTube if you haven't already done so), but he deserves a huge shout out for being so supportive along the way. With his ever-open door policy, he was an incredible sounding board for me and was my very own cheerleader from the sidelines. 

No matter your background, no one can deny what a painstakingly tough process this exam can be, nor can you underestimate the pressures it puts on your mental and physical health. Make your life easier and get tutoring with Harry, and if you're anything like me (and I can't believe I'm even writing this) you might even begin to miss GMAT prep once it's all over (!).