MBA from rearview mirror [Part 2]

In this post, I’ll focus on the non-academic aspect of MBA.

B-schools are a very different place than engineering colleges. There are a lot of festivities, DJ parties and lots of other recreational activities. There are numerous interest committees which most of the people take, not because of interest but because of C.V value. There will be a committee for every damn little thing from finance to cleaning bathroom!! In every committee or in every group assignment, Pareto principle can be seen in practice.20% of the members would be doing 80% of the work.

You would find three classes of people in a B-school.

Class 1: Over enthusiastic guys, may be, haven’t participated in any extracurricular activities in their undergraduate college and want to make up for it or have been the same over-enthusiastic in UG days and want to carry the same form in B-school.

Class 2: Do everything for the C.V value. Even if they give “bakshish” to the mess worker or bathroom cleaners, they would do so for the intention of C.V value. Even if they help a blind person cross a road, they will immediately come back to their room and update their resume with this.

Class 3: “Care a damn type”. These classes of people are usually the intelligent and studious ones and think such activities as sheer waste of time. They would have talked to some close friends in their senior batch who dispels the myth that involvement in committees has no C.V value and quote examples of numerous seniors who walked away with the most coveted jobs on campus without getting involved in any extracurricular.

The truth is that one should be involved in an interest committee only if one has interest in that else it would be a recipe for disaster!

The culture at a B-school is very open, much different from an engineering college. Students as well as some of the faculty members use slangs with a lot of freedom. Ironically, for some slang is a litmus test to know if someone is cool or not.

B-school is a place where everyone preaches honesty and ethics but almost none practices it. I seriously feel the pedagogy for subjects like ethics should go for a complete transformation. Such subjects are indeed extremely crucial in today’s world of greed but I feel it’s difficult to teach such thing to grown up people. Such value system should be instilled in school else we land up with the current scenario where everyone talks about in public in fancy conferences and lectures but none put to practice. Such state of affairs is indeed pathetic!

Although B-schools is a place of intense academic rigor, they are a great fun place too! It’s an amazing finishing school!!

With this I'll put an end to the series of posts on Business schools,guess I had too much of it :)

MBA from rear view mirror[Part 1]

During my two years of MBA,I always felt that one needs some considerable amount of time for self-introspection and to be in total control of the situation but MBA doesn't gives you that privilege. Now time has taken a complete U turn.MBA is over and you are grappling to find something worthwhile to do at home. I do realize that it’s going to be the last "long" vacation of my life. One has plenty of time to look back in time and understand what MBA was all about!

In this post I would only look at the academic part.

Before joining a Business school, the three most important parameters for any aspirant for judging a B-school is

• Placements
• Industry Interface
• Faculty

Almost all B-school rankings are a mere mockery and are in some way "paid listings" just like the paid ads that you see in the Google search page.

Every aspirant craves for loads of industry interface but when on campus, he’s bogged down by the sheer quantum of alumni talks and other CEO talks held in campus.

Before joining a B-school, every guy who thinks he has some grey cells aspires to be an i-banker and makes up his mind of majoring in finance. In the very first term with much fanfare people register for CFA exams. Registration for CFA exams is a sure shot way to be christened as a "fin stud". The fear of failure for some make them go underground and register for it secretly, fearing that they might lose their reputation if they fail, as if they have lot of it!

But only a couple of terms are enough to hook people back to the ground. Floundering grades and diffidence gets people on dusty ground. CQPI maximization becomes the only goal in life. People take up subjects to maximize grades even if they have no interest in those and learning is almost zero!

As a rule of thumb, be it engineering or MBA, always the sub-standard faculty bestow lavish grades for hiding their incompetence and winning the confidence of the students. Students give them good feedback in return for generous grades and the incompetent faculty survives at the institute with ease. This is a huge lacuna in our education system.

Whether grades are important or not in B-schools is a million dollar question. Seniors drum it into your heads that running after grades is a waste of time and extracurricular is what matters. Summer placements are like a trailer of final placements. After summer placements and having more information of final placements, somewhere in term -3, most of the students are stupefied to know that grades does matter in short listing. They start to panic, curse their seniors and take up papers which are of no value other to maximize grades! In final placements, apart from a couple of firms, none of the others shortlists only on the basis of grades. Your class-10, 12 and engg. Academics matter much more! Situation in top 5-6 campuses might be different where management consulting and i-banks come for recruitment, which categorically looks for the toppers.

Some of the firms even go for random short listing. Even a guy in bottom 5-6 percentile of his batch and no great pre-MBA academic record or pedigree finds his resume shortlisted and a guy from a top notch engineering college with an enviable pre-MBA academic record and work-ex is shunted from further evaluation. This might be boon for many but definitely not a scientific way of selection!

In placements anything can happen. Toppers' dreams might be put to dust while the underdogs might walk away with the most coveted jobs on campus. I believe placements are not completely in your hands but what you learn in 2 years is something on which you have control. So, the focus should be on learning. After all we are in a knowledge industry and we are paid commensurate to the skill set that we have!

Getting placed in a big brand with differential profile and pay is worse than getting into a not so exclusive brand company which treats you in league 1.It's the nature of work that you do that matters and not the company for which you work for.

If you track the career of any of your former classmates or any other acquaintance from a premier institute, you would find most of them end up fighting their way to the top. Campus placements are just a launch platform. One has got the maximum bang for his bucks only he has maximized his learning.