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Brrr…. December 17, 2005

Posted by Simba in : Uncategorized , 6 comments

Its cold & freezing here at DC. The last few days have been a whizz that I can hardly remember. I winded up Term 2 with a series of exams..then immediately my travel plans out of Durham (sure wanted to get outta there asap! :-) ) .. landed in DC.. saw the snow, my first ever… & loved it! But it is so ironic, in the sense that I thought the first snow would make me throw away all my jackets & pick some fresh snow & play with it, LOL, instead I was running a temperature that made me slide further into my thick overcoat & hide behind the windows… Yeah Yeah, the exam gets over & I fall sick! What a great way to kick start a vacation! LOL!

School is closed till Jan 19th. Yipee. I want to sleep, I want to read a book.. sip that darn ‘pumpkin spice’ coffee lazily.. Ah, winters here & I want to enjoy! But theres so many things to do! I am flying into New York tomorrow.. my dream place… I want to be there for the Christmas & then fly back to DC. During that time in NY, I have to schedule a whole lot meetings with people for my internship. I have seen a lot of pals cringe at the thought of ‘networking’ I actually like it.. not the shmoozing part but just meeting people, discussing my interests in a few fields.. talk in length about what I am looking for.. what work they are doing! I am looking forward to doing that but I havent gotten off my a** to start emailing my alums! Now, thats a pain! :-) That too with the Christmas & New Year around the corner, many people have already gotten into the holiday mood, not sure whether I can meet anybody at all. The last 2-3 days, I have just been sleeping & reading ‘The Kite Runner’.

Read that book. Its so awesome. Its a story in Afghanistan that carries onto America. Its so beautifully written… Its so long since I have read fiction, that too novels but it was a great experience living with ‘Amir’… The character ‘Hassan’ is someone I can so relate to.. I have met a person like that & such people are so rare! Gosh, go & read it guys! Haha.. I am having a hard time typing on my keyboard.. Shucks, theres this concept of false nails in the US. LOL! And I have them on with snow flakes painted over them… hahaha.. they sure are beautiful but a pain! LOL! I am really hoping this trip proves a little worthwhile & I can land up a decent internship job.. I really want to! Lets see whether I even get out off this holiday mood & start working! Wish me luck…

Take it with a pinch of salt… December 1, 2005

Posted by Simba in : Uncategorized , 18 comments

Yeah, Yeah, I love Fuqua, no doubts on that one! But a couple of things have come to my notice over the last few months I have been here! Everyone out there, pro-Fuqua people, take it with a pinch of salt! Dont merit or de-merit only on the basis of this post.. but give it some reasonable thought & pen me ur comments. This is an issue that we as a brand need to take care of!

Well, obviously this whole thing started with companies coming in & calling upon some individuals who made a good impression with their resumes. Definitely, each of us out here have some strengths & weaknesses. And as many of you have seen me bitch about grades, they are not on the great side. Now, this kinda gets you thinking about this whole ‘MBA’ education.. I mean, is it only about grades, definitely not right?! I mean Indian schools, with the little knowledge that I have, are meant to be fussy with the grade structure. But you dont want to see something similar at the Top US B schools. I dont want to sound like the ’sour grapes’ nor am I trying to fight a system, just trying to reason out a couple of things that comes to my mind when I think about this.

Wharton & other Top league have Non-disclosure agreements. Which basically means that all the students out there are considered to be at par with others. So, when the recruiters come in, everybody is viewed from the same stand point. Now, the best part here is, the student has no right whatsoever (Guys, correct me if I am wrong!) to tell the recruiter their GMAT & their GPA scores no matter what the case is. So, basically, the scores of any course dies the minute you see them! Thats it! Then you go ahead & see whether you have actually understood the stuff .. if you did, Bravo! U are done! It doesnt matter if you score a A+ or a C-. See, when things are this way, the student has no undue stress about performing well & just monitoring grades (which is what I have been doing for sometime now!) In sucha environment, the student can actually concentrate on what he is learning & not just go into the mechanical phase of outdoing his peers. For me thats where the true meaning of education lies. You learn & you grow! Sure, some of the courses we have had are like that, for eg. Marketing, though Kotler is the text, I havent even seen a single page as we are always solving cases.. but thats different when the final grades come in & u see that u get a not-so-sexy grade, it will come to bite u! Grades do matter here & so does you GMAT score!

When you talk about B-School, you talk about the risk-free environments that each of us here have to work on our ideas & strech ourselves to the max. But it should not be so one-dimentional. I do not want to portray that we are not doing anything apart from studies, that is crazy. I am doing tons of things & actually enjoying it but I still feel that I am losing out on a lot of things becos of the continuous efforts I need to put on my courses.. the companies sure are looking! You might say that Wharton & others can have sucha system because they have hi-flying individuals, may be you are right to some extent but being a Wharton wait-list, I know that they do not take people only on ur past scores, they see for people who can add value, not necessarily increasing the Avg IQ of the class! As a true business student, I will try to see what we, as in ‘Fuqua’, should try to reduce the stress & actually make this environment risk-free.

We should have a rule for non-disclosure among students.. so that nobody should really say what their grades are before or during school so that we all are considered at the same pedestal by the companies. Also this will truly enable the students to do so many other stuffs.. maybe ‘gymnastics’ :-) .. anything! But we have to achieve it, maybe we might have to concentrate on the people we are recruiting, may be raise the bar here! It may not be a quick fix kinda solution & may take sometime to work around! But definitely a worthwhile thing to do so that at the end of the day, the student learns with the right attitude! Guys, do let me know what you think about this.. I would love to hear it!