Since last week I am becoming more busy at work. Mostly is because the training sessions I’m giving to some colleagues are becoming more frequent and longer. They are taking more than 75% of my day. The rest of the time I’m just reading and replying emails. I’ve managed to write some short posts the other week, but now it’s getting harder.

So going back to where I left in the last post of this series…

The admission day was getting closer, and I booked my flight and the hotel for a few days. It was on a Friday, but I decided to fly to Brussels on Tuesday, and stay in Leuven until Saturday morning. That way I would have 2 days to get to know Leuven, relax from work for a while, and also study a bit more. I was happy in the end because I managed to do a fair balance during those 2 days. I’ve walked around Leuven a lot, becoming more familiar with the city, and also managed to study for around 4 hours each day. I’ve also meet on Wednesday morning someone from the church I contacted, and we got to talk for a while. I was given a small but useful tour around the city, and was also given some good advice… and something pretty useful… a map!

That Wednesday was a very rainy day, but on Thursday I was lucky, and we had some sunshine, and the city actually looked to me a different place. Didn’t looked so gloomy as it did in my first impressions. It was a quiet and small city. I could walk around anywhere pretty easily. I was slowly getting comfortable with the possibility of having to live there.

On Thursday evening I went to a prayer meeting in that church. I was invited to go there, in order to meet other people from the church. It was something really useful to me. I heard some more good advice, support and prayers about my next “admission” day and the decision I would have to make, in case I got in. It was good to meet new people, was good to stop thinking about what I had been studying the previous days, relax and refocus my perspective about all this… and just leave everything in God’s hands. I was good to see how “international” the church was. I remember people from Belgium, UK, Ukraine and China.

The day came! The admission day would start at 8am. All candidates for the MBA were gathered in an auditorium, and after introduction and explanation of our schedule for the day. We would start right away with the “Analytical Test” which would take 30 minutes, followed by the “Written Test”, around 1 hour long. The first focuses on basic math concepts and data sufficiency, and the second on language skills. In the “Written Test” they would read us a news article, and we had to write a summary and a comment to it, in 60 minutes. We were forbidden to take notes while the article was being read aloud. Nobody knew about this detail. We thought we would be given a copy of the article, for us to read. This raised the difficulty of this part.

Another post will be needed to finish the “Admission day” story…