Super Soccer Night

Spirits were high tonight at new campus. With the long awaited holidays just round the corner and a significantly low probability of a test tomorrow afternoon, people really let their hair down. With my newly acquired crew cut, I could not do much, but joined the party nevertheless.

After about a week free of tests, the last class of the afternoon was one filled with anxiety. Probability of having a test was so high that the bookie's counter was flooded with queries about which subject to put a bet on. I had mine put on Data Analysis. Notwithstanding the marvelous class of Operations Management, at 1 o' clock I was frantically refreshing my mail account in anticipation of the dreaded test announcement email. But destiny had other plans. Man proposes, God disposes. I lost my bet and boy, was I happy!

Lunch was unusually tasty. The Management Communication email that I had to send to my Western India Business division thereafter, seemed like a breeze. I got so carried away that I sent in an impromptu email to the gang inviting for a full blooded late night soccer match. The response was terrific.

Not only did we have a record crowd, we even had some of the spouses and the little ones adding color to the festivities. The whistle was blown and the mad rush for the ball began. Competitive spirit saw a few rough tackles and some had to be substituted owing to early injuries. Powerful shots and long passes followed. The game ended with the score reading 3-2.

A rare fun filled day came to an end and it was good to see everyone relaxed. Tomorrow a good number of us leave for our homes for a three day break. Like everyone, I am eager to visit home, but I surely will miss the gang even if it is only for three days. With the long list of pending tests and the term nearing completion, the week after will be another time another story to tell.

A shot at entrepreneurship

Right from day one, a sizeable population of PGPX students have been very actively pursuing entrepreneurship. A few very active special interest groups have already been formed and these groups are taking a serious shot at starting something on their own. Entrepreneurship is the hallmark of most successful MBA programs and IIMA PGPX has left no stone unturned to facilitate the same.

We have a very successful multi millionaire entrepreneur who has himself been a gold medallist at IIMA in the late seventies, taking personal interest in each and every one of us. Not only does he hold so called "brain washing" sessions to persuade students into taking up new ventures, he has personally been driving students with clear directives on entrepreneurship. Right from the day PGPX commenced, he has set base on campus. Even spouses of participants have not been spared. They are equally being involved in various activities such as training to set up schools and starting small ventures.

Students themselves are not far behind. We have among the students a few already successful entrepreneurs. One of them has already set up a successful chain of book stores, made successful commercial movies and so on. These students are doing their bit in motivating and helping others work in similar lines. With barely any breathing space between assignments and quizzes, we still had a bus load of students travelling as far as Baroda just to see how a real factory works. At the end of the course, I am sure we will have among us many who will make the others proud by setting their own trail.

Term 1 Part 2

The first term is almost divided into two logical halves with some of the subjects getting over halfway through and new ones getting added. The new subjects that were added naturally had new professors. In the last few weeks, we have had two such subjects and the reason I am writing this blog is the professors that are teaching them. Even after one month of enjoying the great pedagogy, the professors still are managing to amaze us with their very special way of teaching.

The first one is strategic cost management and the professor impressed us so much that we are actually looking forward to the classes even with sleep deprivation and all that. To give an idea, he has worked in almost all the continents of the world in senior managerial roles, had been a gold medalist in his CFA and had left as a senior manager at Rolls Royce before quitting and joining IIMA. The examples and summaries that he gives in the class are so relevant and to the point that one of a fellow student was referring to them as a revelation.

The next is a new class on operations management. The professor has the capacity to wake up Rim Van Winkle from his slumber. He started a seemingly insipid subject saying that by the end of the fifteen sessions we are going to attain the nirvana that Buddha achieved. He also explained the various uses of the textbook such as a pillow, an exercising equipment and lastly as a tool for learning things that lesser mortals wanted to know. In short, he said that the case method to teach operations was being used in IIMA and this is probably the only instance in the entire country. As a result, no textbook could give us the knowledge and wherewithal to handle operations anytime in the future.

Well, even after all the rigor and torture that we have been subjected to, I would still give my good night's sleep to attend these enriching lectures - even from my orbit of Pluto.

Thank God It Is Friday?

Zombied! Yes, that is what has happened to most of us here at IIMA at the end of the first month. The frequency of my posts must have conveyed a clear message to those who have happened to notice the timestamps on the posts that something is amiss. Amiss is an understatement, I say.

The barrage of assignments and quizzes have started to take a real toll now. Capacity to focus on fast moving distant objects is swiftly diminishing. From the orbit of Pluto that we at the back benches have positioned ourselves in, the happenings of the class have become akin to some fast moving distant object on which our hold is getting real slack.

Last weekend seemed a welcome relief. We were anticipating a quiz on management decisions and we got one on financial analysis. And guess how we performed in the quiz! The very next day had another surprise in the form of strategic cost management quiz. But, whatever happened, we were left with two quizzes less and that prompted us to venture into the outside world Friday evening. Yes, we actually managed to find time to enter civilization and watch a real movie in a real theater. Most of the time I was pinching myself in the theater. Dinner followed and we came back a happy bunch. We reached campus in the midnight hoping for a decent game of football and guess what we encountered. The syndicate room welcomed us with the rest of the classmates struggling with an assignment that had to submitted the very next day! We ended up sleeping at 4 AM in the morning barely finishing the assignment. Fridays, we soon understood, were meant for another world, another people.