Life @ MAC 1

Well for the lesser mortals like me who need to do a Google search on what does this word MAC means, I am telling you that MAC does not always mean a unit to measure speed of sound. For B Schoolers like us, and who are unlucky enough to make the transition from a career in engineering to a post graduation in business administration I must tell you that “MAC 1” means a first course in Management Accounting. When half the population of the class is from commerce background (one CFA also), you know it from the very beginning that you are out of the top 50% (too much to worry when you have relative grading system in place). So, what’s the solution then?

I was recently complaining to one of my class mates (I recently discovered that he has scored 100% in his undergrad paper of accounts) that this MAC thing is taking the hell out of me. Most of the time I am finding myself lost among the various accounting jargons. He replied that the course is the superset of all that they learnt during three years of undergraduate and the advanced management accounts. And guess what? We are supposed to do all that in three months. This is not enough, the instructor just recently made an announcement that he intends to finish the whole course before august end and that effectively means, two months only. Now, the pedagogy is something like we have to follow a book and then we have slides for revision and then loads of assignments and case studies to follow. And that is just one subject. We have five others too. And it has one of the craziest evaluation systems in place. You don’t get any marks for completing your assignments but you will get a -10 (minus 10) for not completing them in time.

Hey, it just occurred to me that we have a quiz coming up on Monday and well, my life has to really start moving @ MAC 1.

In comfort Zone.

Here I am, sitting on the sofa near the hostel reception desk and watching news on TV. I am really delighted with this surprise news break that we have no classes for the second half of the day. Though I am still dressed in my formals and reluctant to walk three flight of stairs to my room, I know that I am in my comfort zone.

I remember that back in undergrad days, the very thought of a presentation or a seminar was well enough to give us sleepless nights. But here, if I go on behaving like the same, it'd be more like I won't be able to sleep for months. Last night was just one of those nights which was completely wasted on presentation. But, slowly my body and mind is becoming accustomed to it, I no more wish to sleep for 10 hrs a day. Just yesterdy after a nap in the evening I felt like mild fever running down my body.

After the crazy first and second week of the course, I am feeling that the third week is kinda easy but no, the thing is that third week is more hectic and as per the experience of the seniors, all the subsequent weeks will be more and more hectic. But once you accept this fact that life is really crazy here, it all becomes simple and you enter into a phase of learning. In a sense, you reinvent yourself, start getting accustomed to the new situations and then one fine day.. stop complaining.

Well, so the complaing part for me is over now. I am into third week here and I have realized that the only way to survive here is by actually surviving it. The only way to put my misery to an end is by actually cutting down on my sleep schedule and start enjoying my studies. I can summarise my learning from the first two week as MBA is all about attitude and emphasizing the fact that there are no right and wrong answers for a question. It's not about how much you learn? Rather, its all about whether you can learn or not? And yeah, the most important part of it is the definition of your comfort zone. Well as long as you are in a B School, your comfort zone will be your cozy little comfortable bed. Guess what? I am already half asleep. after all, no classes in the afternoon.

In the middle of a crazy week..

Its only the second week here and it feels like I have rushed through an year of my engineering life. Honestly speaking, I never pulled an all nighter for the purpose of completing assignments or making presentations in the entire of my engineering life. Being more honest I can accept that I haven't studied for like 50 hours total in the entire of my last semester of engineering course. But yeah, B schools teaches you a lot. It teaches you how to become innovative (Just make one sure of one thing that no body knows about what you are doing into your room), it teaches you how to be competitive (just hold the important information with you and you will be there at the top). You learn your first few lessons of your professional life here.

I am unable to understand that where my time is flying by? I have no idea how much productive work I am doing and how much I needed to do in the recent future. But, I guess I am fitting in well here. Was really feeling a bit depressed about the banning of blogspot and blog sites in India, so thought to check this all out.

Have to hurry, or I might miss my lunch (and I cant afford it as I have already skipped my breakfast courtesy an Organizational Behaviour Presentation. Well, that is a different story. But I am all set to make this blogspace of mine as my B School's diary. My only worry? Do I have time? Huh.. all B schoolers might want to answer this..

Wanna Do MBA? Think, Think.

I am lucky that I have survived the first week of my MBA program but the rigours of the course is making me ponder over the reasons why I chose to go for a M of Business Administration. I remember that I was always good in economics and if I could have resisted my father's insistance on me to chose engineering as a career option, then perhaps, I might have completed my masters in economics by this time. The whole idea is that, my like for economics grew into a desire and the engineering way of thinking that I developed during my engineering course added a twist to it and I started thinking that, a career in Business Administration will be the safest (*Jargaon is Value Addition) and the best option for me. So, my perception about MBA was that if I can relate myself well with the jargaons in economics then perhaps it's all going to be easy for me. But, well, "It Depends".

The beauty of the phrase "It depends": On the very first day of the program, we learned just one thing and that is about being diplomatic. One plus One is obviously two, after all, we have cleared CAT, got good percentiles and posesses good mathematical skills. We must know this thing. One plus one must be two or the fundamentals of counting won't exist. But well, we have learned to say that 1+1 can be 2 or cannot be 2. It depends. A plain question asked, Are you good with maths? The answers could be either Yes (egoistic will be the HR officer's perception about this person) or a No (Humble but a person who is low on confidence). We all know our potentials. But well ask this question to a MBA student and you will get the answer "It Depends". Price is rising, clearly the demand should fall, now a question is asked, should the demands for a good go down? well, the same good answer, "It Depends"

Ubiuqitously you will find this phrase "It depends" in the dictionaries of all the MBAs. Well, are they really trying to be diplomatic or behaving like a smart ass who believes he knows all the other aspects of the question? Well, again my answer will be "It Depends". Yeah, it really depends on the origin and orientation of the question. Like 1+1 could be somewhat like adding the efficiencies of two persons together as a team. Now, this could be exactly twice their individual efficiency but again it depends on how they go along together. The chances are that if they really click together, they might add up to 2+anything. But then, a conflict in interests/ambitions might depletes their combined theoretical strength. So the safest answer is "It depends".

For the mathematic question, again it depends on what kind of mathematics skills you posess. A ninth grader will also say that yeah I am good in Mathematics but then he is good only with mathematics till grade 9. So again it depends.

I picked up this jargaon really fast because I know I am going to use it all the time. It's really a beautiful word. Anyways, I really thought that MBA is all about economics, accounting and philosophy. But then I realised that again it depends. Management accounting is condensed into MAC and believe me, it really zooms past you like a fighter plane flying on the same speed (MAC is like the speed of sound, if I am correct, which is used to represent the speed of fighter airplanes). Organizational behaviour alone is a combination of more than 5 mainstream subjects of education. Even computer engineers (I am not talking about computer engineers like me who obviously find everything difficult and are constantly complaining about the deadlines and all) find it difficult to cope up with the nuissances of Management Information System. And if this is not enough, a first course in statistics will blow the hell out of your mind. Wait, these are only four subjects, two more in a trimester. Surprise quizzes which are announced only half an hour earlier, assignments (forgot those good old engineering days of mass copying) and yeah you won't get any marks for completing them in time but you will loose marks if you miss the deadline, Presentations (that's really a scary word for the MBA students) can very well make you go crazy.

Well, this is just a picture of how things can change from graudation to post graduation. But well, again the same golden rule applies here. "It depends, It always depends".

What’s the first day in B school like?

To start with, it could be like anything. It could be like a two hour interactive session with one of the senior faculty members where you were explained about the do’s and don’ts of the institute followed by the lunch break and then continued with some ice-breaker sessions so that you could easily intermingle with your course mates. It could also be like an intimidating experience where in a span of two hours, all your misconceptions (read your dreams about the life in B-Schools) will be washed out by the free flowing language of an expert in his own field, who puts it down in very simple words that even chartered accountants can fail in their first term course of accounting. It’s scary to know that the attendance requirement is almost 100% (I am wondering I have no any plan 'B' to cope up with that because for all my life I have faced this attendance problem. Yeah, for all my life, right from grade 1) well, this is not all, you have to clear all your papers in one attempt. You come to know that there is a strict grading system and the moment you cross the lifeline of two D’s, it can very well shatter your MBA dream. You slowly realize that as the course will progress, it will unveil many more surprises for you (though they will be termed as “Challenges”) and if there is something to learn from the experience of the seniors, it’s like you would soon start wishing that why there are only 24 hours in a Day?

Lastly, there is one more side to this first day in B-school. It’s the time to continue from where you left your preparatory days. We all must have worked hard during our preparatory days (remember those days when we were like writing one examination every other week) and it’s the time to take charge of our lives. All those passage which we have read for the sake of clearing cutoffs now increases in length and become case studies. You have to read them in record time. All the vocabulary you have learnt by heart will now be used to impress your instructor. Quant questions will be replaced by quantitative methods in the first term and DI with statistical reasoning thing. Night outs will take a new dimension and you might wish to carry your laptop with you also (I have heard that some B-Schoolers even take it to Disocs also).

But yeah, things change for good. You can see happy faces around, some anxious ones and even some calm ones (We just discovered that we had only one calm person among us). People are happy as they see this thing as a partial fulfillment of their cherished dreams, people are anxious as they are still to come to terms with the nuisances of a B-school life and people are calm because perhaps that’s the only way they live. I represented those who were having mixed feelings as I am still to feel the rigours of the course. The seniors have helped us calm down a bit by showing their indifference towards interfering in our lives during the early days (that’s really good thing about this place that you have some really cool seniors).

Anyways, have to attend a 9’o clock class and me and my roomie are still to use the bathroom, have to iron my clothes (well, have to iron clothes of one of my friends’ too, that’s the price I have to pay for living in hostels). I guess, I’ll be late for breakfast, or for the lecture, man! Crazy times ahead. Well who cares? I am a B-Schooler now.

Back to Work again.

It has been a long time and it seems that I am almost dying to hit the keyboard. Well, it really was a long layoff time for me mainly because of two reasons. Partly because of my final semester examinations and excitement about starting with my PGDBM course, and partly because of the cumbersome documentation procedure required by the banks for processing of loan applications. I was made to run from pillar to post to get my loan application sanctioned and thanks to the the typical Indian business framework where having contacts in the right places always helps.

I am in the campus of my B- school now but I guess that this feeling will take time to sink in that I have started with my MBA. well, I really have a lot to write about. About education loans (well my experience will really help all those people who wish to obtain a loan sooner or later), about my Soccer fever (I guess I am not the only one suffering). And ofcourse about my life in B-school (after spending the first couple of days here, I am really getting positive vibes about this life). Well, right now I am feeling like starved though I ate three omlettes in the morning and which made the contractor to put a placard saying, Two per person only. Going to find out, what's there in today's menu.