Manhattan Prep GMAT w/ Stacey Koprince

A little about me: I'm an American male aerospace engineer living in the southern US. I received a decent GRE score (Q168/V158) ~710 GMAT equivalent I used for entry to my master's program at UCLA. I found GMAT material to be slightly tougher than GRE material, and needed all the help I could get in the midst of this supposed 'GMAT arms race' amongst the top schools. I have recently been accepted to one top-15 school and one top-10 school despite some crummy grades I had in undergrad because I lacked maturity (and still do!) The GMAT was doubly important and ended up proving to be a much-needed bright spot on my application.

I recently received a 730 (Q49V41) GMAT score after a 6-month journey. I owe some of this success to Stacey Koprince and the Manhattan GMAT live online course, which gave me an excellent introduction to some of the key principles that are paramount for successfully handling the GMAT.

I enjoy structure in my life and usually work harder when there's human interaction and accountability involved in some way. I used Manhattan live online for my GRE prep, and found it to be great. I thumbed through some reviews and found some very positive stuff about Stacey Koprince, and enrolled in her live online section.

Since time is finite, studying efficiently for the GMAT was important. I feel the direction MGMAT offered was essential, with weekly homework assignments on key problems in their excellent guide books. When I first started with the verbal section, I usually had no strategy and ran out of time and couldn't find any rhyme or reason to why the right answers were the right answers. Stacey changed this. Stacey is a seasoned veteran who had a talent for explaining in the simplest language possible what was happening in the verbal section with respect to sentence correction and choosing the best answer for the RC/CR. If I was hung up on some caveat with sentence correction like parallelisms, she intuitively knew how I was thinking about the problem and was able to explain it and shift my focus to the 'correct' way of approaching the problem.
On the quant side, Whitney (the co-instructor of the course) offered some good tips and timing strategies that I ended up using to get my 730. The course and the practice tests were good at exposing where I was most weak in the quant sections, so I could focus my study time to those areas.
A couple of areas that weren't as strong in the course and experience were the MGMAT practice tests, and difficulty of the questions presented during the class sessions.
The MGMAT practice tests were good for practicing timing on the quant, but the truth is nothing can mimic the elegance and inherent trickiness that real retired GMAT questions have. Thankfully the course provides the OG, which is the best place to practice for the quant. Top schools require top quant scores, so heavy exposure to algebra-intensive problems is important, and during class sessions the pace can sometimes be a little slow- so I would just dive into the OG and start doing stuff until the class moved on. In defense of the course, they've got a lot of cats to herd.

Lastly, I want to say that I enjoyed my experience and the social interaction with Stacey, Whitney, and the other students in the course. I found myself looking forward to my Monday night GMAT course. The GMAT can be a long and painful journey, but Stacey encouraged me to not take it all too seriously and that persistence is what was important. Having the expert guidance and interaction with the MGMAT crew definitely put some wind in my sails:)