Some pictures from the bootcamp

Some pictures from the class on 8th Oct (psst....thats me teaching ;)

Bootcamp DAY 1

Day 1 got over yesterday. I was very pleased overall with the way it went. Spending 11hours inside a room with 10 other people helped in forging a personal bond. It is exciting to actually see people who I had spoken to earlier on the phone. Nice to put a picture on a name.

Harsha hotel (Tiger Trails) seems to be a very nice place - everything was arranged when I came in the morning including bottles of water and a jar of mints on each seat. It had a nice U-shaped arrangement around the whiteboard. Nice huge white-boards and markers of different colors. Something the consultant in me loved. I am known for impressive white-boarding skills ;)

There was some shuffle in the plan. We started off with CR - a marathon 4-hour session taken by yours truely. We spent almost 2 hours focussing on the basics - looking just at stimulus and figuring out the conclusion, premise and assumption AND diagramming. The next 2 hours we did close to 2 dozen questions practising the concepts on actual application - "real" GMAT questions on Find assumption/conclusion, strengthen/weaken arguments.

We broke for lunch at 2pm, a good 1-hour off schedule. Lunch was served in the same board room. Not bad but not sure it's 3-star quality.

Post-lunch session was SC. An unconventional way to approach it - we never discussed the rules of grammar. That is for day 2. Rohit Dhingra (GMAT - 740) took the session focussing more on stuff like style (clarity, concision), idioms and also conventional things like subject-verb agreement and pronouns.

Finally, at 6pm I started off with RC. A challenge which required me to draw on my decade-long teaching experience to engage the students into another long session on RC - focussing purely on how to attack the passage and types of question - individual approach to each question type. Next class, I promise, would be a lot more interesting with special emphasis on "What to do if you have 3mins to finish a RC passage ?" :)

Closed a long day (11-hours) with a feedback session. Its very important me to get a "feel" of how things went so I can use that to alter the next sessions. The response has been positive and I hope my excitement and passion for GMAT rubs into the students :)

Thanks to everyone who has been supportive of this venture. It has been tough at times to pull it off all by myself. Right from content & delivery to marketing & logistics. But now that the first step has been taken, I am sure things would be a lot smoother.

Another piece of good news was I have a new partner joining in. He is as passionate and and as dedicated to teaching as I am. A verbal raw score of 48 to boot ;)

Arun