When I left Gili Air for Ubud I was crushed. I had become emotionally attached to that little island and wasn't sure how to mend my broken heart. What I didn't know was that there was more bad news waiting for me in my inbox.
London Business School had emailed me telling me they wouldn't consider my application before I had completed my GMAT, and the deadline was 30 April. At the time I read the message it was mid-March. I had submitted my LBS application only a week earlier, and had my LSE one still pending waiting for my last reference. I had been under the impression that they would process my application despite not having taken the GMAT and if successful through the first stage offer me a place under the condition that I'd score a certain result on the GMAT... I had not been expecting this. I thought I had easily at least until the end of April to carry on travelling, and wasn't even expecting to hear from them at this stage - so you can imagine the shock I got when I went online for the first time in ages to get in touch with reality. And what a reality check it was! I didn't know what to do with myself. It all came out of the blue and slapped me on the face - I didn't know which order to process my thoughts in. With every thought came a new overwhelming feeling - I went through anger, confusion, sadness, anxiety, panic and fear all at the same time all the while asking myself how I was going to handle this, how I was going to make it, was I going to make it, should I fly back on the first flight, should I abandon ship, would I have enough time to study, and was this actually what I wanted in the end?
The biggest shock was realising that I'd have to come to terms with the fact that my wonderful journey through Southeast Asia was going to come to an end. If I thought I was going through the "five stages of grief" before reading this email, well it just multiplied a tenfold.
And yes, I do see it from "the other" point of view too - the one where a girl was blessed with having the opportunity to go on a five month amazing holiday that most people can only dream about and cried because she had to cut it short by a few weeks and threw a tantrum about it. Yeah I hear ya.
I figured since I was a bit paralysed and didn't quite know what to do the best thing would be to stick to the original plan and do my best to get into school. So the deadline for taking the GMAT exam was on the 30 April - that meant I had to start studying ASAP. With no good GMAT courses being offered out of Singapore I signed up for one in London starting in the beginning of April. Unfortunately the London GMAT centre was booked up for exams in April so I signed up for one in Reading...! Now all I had to do was to get flights to make it back on time for the start of the GMAT course and that wasn't going to be a problem - flights never a in this part of the world. All that was left was to just study like I've never studied before and cram three months worth of studying into three weeks, and to get a score good enough for two of the top universities on planet earth to offer me a place. Piece of cake!
That's it, two weeks left and then it would be home time.
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