Today, I’d like to offer four quick tips to help you get ahead in your GMAT preparation.

The first tip is study with a friend. Studying with a friend is great for three reasons. The first one: it’s just a really great extra piece of motivation. If you’re anything like me you’ve probably already put a lot of time and effort into your GMAT prep and occasionally you probably feel overwhelmed. Having a good friend in the room is going to give you that extra little boost of energy to help push you through to the next level. The second reason to have a friend in the room when you’re studying is by virtue of them being there, you’re going to be exposed to be different approaches to problem solving. That’s going to be incredibly valuable come crunch time when you need a different approach to solving a really hard math problem. The third reason is when your friend asks you how to solve a problem, it’s going to force you also to crack that problem and understand it really innately. I know that for me I have five great friends through an organization called Management Leaders for Tomorrow that were incredibly, incredibly valuable to my success on the GMAT.

The second tip I have for you is to practice recognizing patterns outside of the GMAT. Success on GMAT, just like success in business school, is about using patterns that you recognize in previous problems and applying them to problems you haven’t seen before. So, I know that at least for me, I would read articles such as The New York Times or The Economist and look how they structured their paragraphs and see what else I could glean from that to use on the GMAT.

The third tip I have for you is, if at all possible, try to get a tutor, preferably early on. Classes are great. But, I know that for me at least, it was not going to be the best opportunity for me to target my specific weaknesses. And again, I understand that tutors aren’t going to be possible for everybody, so going back to my first point pull aside a good friend who did particularly well in a GMAT and ask them if they can help you come up with a personalized study plan.

My last tip of the day is to use memory devices or mnemonic tricks to help you remember all the information you need on the GMAT. There are so many rules on the GMAT and so many exceptions to each rule that it’s really difficult to remember those when the clock is ticking. One tip that I use to remember all these tricks was I would actually turn some of these rules into songs, so if I got stuck I would just sing one of my favorite songs, having changed the lyrics to a specific rule and automatically it would come back to my mind.

Another quick tip is: take each process for each mathematical formula and turn it actually into an acronym, so then you can actually repeat like “ABCD” that stands for something else. Hope those tips were helpful and hopefully looking forward to seeing you guys soon. Take care.