Yes I am about to complete one year of my two year course at IIT SOM. It has been phenomenal, I don't have any other word for the year but phenomenal. At the end of one year I think I have mixed emotions when I look back at the year that is gone. Few things that this one year taught me:

Formal occasions do not come with prior notice, you are supposed to be ready with your suit and tie any time that you are summoned to do so.... and that might as well be too frequently in which case you should either have a set of lots of formal clothes or you should be meticulously clean while putting the same set back to wardrobe.

There is a formal channel to achieve any task and it Must be carried only through that. As with a B-school education formality comes for free, actually it comes at a price. The fees that you pay to become an MBA, is in fact a fee to learn to be formal! So the formal channels become extremely important and indispensable!

PPTs, I mean PowerPoint presentations. If you haven't yet learnt to present you must learn to then pretend that you know how to and nod vigorously while someone else presents on your behalf from your team.

The keywords: it’s important to know the right keyword not just while doing an efficient search on Google but also while doing an MBA. Example of usage of keywords.. as Strategy, Innovation, entrepreneurship... make sure the key words are also today's buzzwords so you are with the times and with your classmates and you are still "in"

Jargon : half the talk is jargon for someone or the other, most of the time yourself (while you speak) It is important to use jargon effectively unless someone might mistake you for knowing too less. It is important to showcase that you know more than you actually know and it is extremely crucial to know that your audience doesn't know which part you don't know.

Team spirit: of course when almost all your subjects require you to work in teams you have to learn to work in teams. Did you forget you mentioned in your CV that you are a team player. Now is the time to see how exactly do you play in teams. There are meetings after meetings with several combinations of people forming your teams for several subjects. And mind you this part of the MBA is the most important. It calls for not just compatibility but tolerance and organising....

Motivation: of course you need motivation and very high when your first love is maths and all maths oriented subjects (read finance) don’t even let  you get close to an average score in those. And when there are 90pc of people taking n number of certifications and you feel obliged even to take those 5 tests at the end of the term, it requires extreme motivation to assume you are still in the race... and believe me you are!

Permutation and combinations:  we talked about that briefly when talking of team play... it also happens when socialising. An MBA suffers from this extreme urge of wanting to socialise (network) like we call them cos' you are taught that knowledge comes from most unexpected resources and so do opportunities. As an MBA you learn to value the importance of "contacts" and learn to socialise fervently and you become quite efficient at "hitting a chord" with almost everyone. Even better if you were the one with an entrepreneurial bent! :P

Time value of money : People who have worked and quit to continue their education know what I am talking about. Everything is in terms of future value and present values. Usually money. The amount of fees that you pay gets converted into 20pc more than the median salary for your senior batches placements. And similar equations follow.

Value of time: If there was anything scarce in a B-school it was time. There is always something to do. More often than not, there are multiple things to do. And you will have to choose or prioritise between the same and at the end of it all you would still feel there is not enough time to sleep. By the time you wind up your day, it is way past 2/3 am and again the morning lecture MUST be attended.

Resources and constraints: The term comes from operations. You learn to tell yourself, after studying here for a year, or I’m not sure it’s the studies which taught me this, that there are only resources not constraints. Constraints are fewer resources which call for your managerial skills even more. So these are opportunities again, not difficulties for you to showcase your skills in managing situations around.

Value add: Get this one by heart. The amount of value added to yourself is directly proportional to the amount of value YOU add. This ‘value add’ is a generic term for all the inputs vs. all the outputs at stake… grades etc. You hear a lot of people saying this a lot of time, “what’s the value add” in simpler terms they mean to say, what’s the point!! I am not getting to mention it on my CV!

Some better things that you learn:

As an MBA student you have seen CEOs, heads of corporate giants coming and delivering lectures to you with utmost priority given to your interests and a keen ear to your queries. They want to gauge the pulse of your batch in order to understand the depth of your knowledge. 

You have seen people who you only knew through newspapers, corporate magazines. People whose CVs don’t really end if you want to cover the DETAILS, are speaking in front of you, interacting with you on almost every other occasion that you hold at your school. You take back amazing inspirations back to your room, when coming from these lectures. You take back a lot of vigour and enthusiasm. And some of us take back a dream of making it big. 

You learn that people have started from being no one to someone, from someone to The XYZ. People have been places and come back to India, to do things insane by all practical means and still extracted some sense out of it. You realise that the giants were once headquartered in a room with two people. You realise that these people didn’t even undergo a formal education, they still did it.

As an MBA the most important thing that you learn is that it isn’t impossible: Nothing is.

Comments

Add comment

Name
Comment
Image Verification:
	Enter the six character code in the image.