POST # 002 : Main Banunga Ambani (MBA) - Semester 2 Diaries

Just when you believe and make others believe you've had the insanely crazy 4 odd months of your life taming 12 odd subjects at one go, you realize soon after a Christmas break that there's double trouble ahead. Where you once dealt with 2 subjects of Finance roughly, now you have double the number to head bang with, where one professor was enough a torture for a single subject, you now have 2 professors teaching the same subject, the same numerical in 2 different ways with an expectation of us writing the same paper twice, again in 2 different ways !

Yes, this is Semester II, undeniably, the toughest semester of an MBA course (in the great Indian MBA schools). You'd probably chill out more when you do your specialization if you compare it with your second semester. If I were to be precise, those with an University of Mumbai MMS degree course would concur with my feelings. With unnecessary Foreign languages bombarded onto you and Group discussion-Personal Interview special sessions which are at times attended by just a handful of students, one ends up thinking what on Mother Earth went wrong in the designing of the syllabus for this course.

To sum up the bitter sweet reality that is prevalent during this period, following is the bullet point list of the subject & the corresponding feeling that one has associated with it. Feelings may vary from individual to individual & are subject to be more or less extreme than what's mentioned below :D

• Marketing - Too many starters on the platter, not much of a main course

• Human Resource Management - Do HR people really practice the shit that we present or just arrange picnics and hire and fire employees ?

• Financial Management - Theory of Relativity is easier to understand

• Cost Accounting - Am I preparing myself as a Manager or an Accountant ?

• Analysis of Financial Statements - I don't even know what is the full form of EBITDA & here I am making sense out of Income statements & Cashflows !

• Taxation - Here I am all unemployed & I'm being taught to calculate my taxable income from salaries, what kind of a sorcery is this ?

• Foreign languages - Like I'm getting placed globally, ain't I !? Duh !!

• Research Methodology - So there are still those nuts who still buy 'x' bulbs or watermelons and want us  to prove that ain't true.

• Advanced Excel - The only wise thing here is the shortcuts, RANDBETWEEN being the most useful one, some Institutes use it after all to allott marks to their students as a smarter substitute for not correcting papers.

Can't rule out the fact that one has his/her fair share of entertainment too as majority of the college cultural festivals happen just at the beginning of this semester. It is here when you get to see the Madonnas, the Michael Jacksons, the I wanna be a Supermodel class public from your batch. It isn't a regular phenomenon to see as such talent sparks out only on grand occasions which in this case is the 'Cultural' festival of the college for some unfortunate institutes do not host a Management festival  :'(

With all this being done/simultaneously lived with, there's this annual drama that surrounds it - The Summer Internship. With the initial aspirations of several of us of doing it an Investment Bank or a FMCG, people eventually land up begging, borrowing, stealing opportunities from wherever possible with connections far-stretched beyond imagination to seal that coveted spot for a couple of months. To some, it comes as an insurmountable tension, to some, it's just another vacation. Eventually, it ends on a happy note after the last paper and an after exam booze session as everyone goes ahead updating their employment status on Facebook as 'Intern at XYZ'. This feeling again, is nothing short than having won an Oscar and letting the whole world know about it ! :P


DISCLAIMER : I do not intend to become the great Mr. Chetan Bhagat nor can I ever be. But if you plagiarize my content without prior permission over the internet, I'll make a fortune out of it by suing you sweet :D Apart from all of this, any resemblance to any person, character, identity, place et al is purely co-incidental. The only genuine thing above is Me, rest all is fictitious. Still if you think you can associate yourself with this and see yourself as a part of this story, feel proud. Don't crib about it. :D

POST # 001 : Main Banunga Ambani (MBA) - Semester 1 Diaries

The Main Banunga Ambani (MBA) phenomenon is something very special to me, for the fact that I had it's hype all over me even before I got admitted to a Business school. MBA or MMS or PGDM, whatever you may call it, isn't tough by itself, atleast if you go by the Tier 2 B-school ways of grading students. What is more tough is getting into a B-school (Read good B-school). Ain't so easy to NOT make it sound like an autobiography but I guess I'd still tuck in some sweet shit here and there and make it sound interesting, if not boring.

With two years and roughly tuition fee amounts varying from 200 grands to 550 grands for the next 2 years for the Hatchback/Sedan class public and of course 1 million to 2.2 million rupees plus the regular tuition fees for the coming 2 years for the Luxury class public (excluding the photocopies cost, booze costs, hangout costs, canteen food costs, transportation costs,date costs, formal clothing costs etc) it felt like a lot was at stake, atleast appeared to be. And the very thought of bagging a package of atleast more than half a million rupees annually post your MBA keeps you moving in these 2 years makes you feel there's much more at stake, as precious as a dear life.

So with the much anticipated 'Induction' that commenced with sessions on how mean and cruel the 'Corporate' world is, (almost went ahead in the semester pronouncing it as Car-pore-ate) the first grueling, cruel, taxing, tiring semester begins. You don't need a raise of hands to know the number of Engineers/Non-Commerce students that comprise your batch strength for the blank faces in the Accounts lecture tells it all. Not to forget that Statistics is the Spartan arena for the Engineer creed as they bam into their scientific calculators to arrive at the answers.

Marketing gives you the I am the Business hunk feeling as you show off all the Kotler jargons during your presentations coupled with vital stats, enough to impress any on looker and if not that, atleast your non-MBA friends ! And if you thought you missed out on Psychology, Philosophy or anything that was associated with Humanities, there is Organizational Behavior which would help you live your unfulfilled dream - of course even multiple shots of coffee do not help while preparing for it a day before the exam.

As I bitch about the different subjects that torment a student, one cannot simply avoid bitching about the 'Group members' he/she works with. You have a host of characters to face on a daily basis, from one presentation to the other. There'll be a few who're the Creme-de-la-creme performers just like Accenture : High Performance Delivered and there'll be many who love the Introduction or the Conclusion slide and basically contribute towards pumping your blood pressure high by not turning up on time for your presentation.

You fall in love with some, you swear to swipe the butt of some with a samurai sword, you feel like wanting to work with some people time and again in every presentation and then there are those guys who you'd want to bitch-slap back to where they came from. Then there is that kind of species which will pen down everything that was ever discussed in time and space during the lectures and these go ahead and become the kings and queens of the award-winning photocopies whose notes circulate in the hands of the entire batch with a hope of clearing the paper with whatever's written by them. That reminds me, the photocopy guy is the finest entrepreneur class you'd ever get to see. He'll keep some extra copies of completed notes with himself and lure you into buying them saying it's something you just can't avoid buying. (That's Direct selling for you)

With all the torment, all the insulting feedback, all the carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide produced after burning the midnight oil (okay okay sorry, too much this is), one finally steps onto writing the First semester of this globally hyped degree/diploma. It's a back to back bombarding of surprises with direct questions, neuron biting case studies, numericals that can make you weep in the middle of a paper and laws and theories that are synonymous in nature with the Milky way.

By the end of it, you make your set of similar nuts whom you prefer to hangout with, a set in which you can be yourself completely and true unlike the pretentious face that you learn to carry around right from your first presentation, first viva and first submission. You by now learn how to digest people, how to bear insults & epic fail situations with a HappyDent smile. One also understands eventually that being insulted isn't a big deal and that people just are on the lookout for such a moment and most importantly, you transform yourself into a Superhuman who can sleep for a bare 4 hours and still give an Oscar winning speech next morning in a presentation.

DISCLAIMER : I do not intend to become the great Mr. Chetan Bhagat nor can I ever be. But if you plagiarize my content without prior permission over the internet, I'll make a fortune out of it by suing you sweet :D Apart from all of this, any resemblance to any person, character, identity, place et al is purely co-incidental. The only genuine thing above is Me, rest all is fictitious. Still if you think you can associate yourself with this and see yourself as a part of this story, feel proud. Don't crib about it. :D