Important Note: This story is mine, and it’s honest. No dreams,
no fantasies, nothing borrowed. It’s not inspired from famous personalities in
the business world, no business objective to meet and above all, this is
something that I ‘want’ to do, not ‘have’ to do.
“Expect
the unexpected”, a phrase that I heard several times in a popular youth show
Roadies, aired on MTV. MBA to me is a perfect example of this phrase in action.
No wonder, we call it a lifetime experience which changes the way you look at
life, and in some cases, it changes life!
My
story started in 2010 when I first thought about appearing for an MBA entrance
exam. Little did I know that I have an entire gamut of exams to test my
eligibility to be a manager of the future. CAT, XAT, SNAP, MAT, NMAT, GMAT. I
know all these ‘people’ (in reference to their ability to judge people) now,
but it wasn’t easy to start with. Which exam will take me where, and how will
it make any difference to what I want to do, were some questions on my mind? To
get into MBA, I had to crack one of these exams with a superb score. The fact
that I didn’t know how does my ability (or lack of it) to calculate the speed
of a boat upstream, downstream, no stream and figuring out a seating arrangement
for some random people on a round table (without even knowing them) makes me
eligible to study any sort of management, and for emphasis, Infrastructure
Management (new kid on the block) made it more difficult. But I knew MBA as a course which gives a higher credibility
to your thoughts, even though you might be proposing the same ideas as you
could/would earlier (or worse than that), and on top of that, MBAs get paid a
lot more than others for doing the same job (or worse than that).
A
pertinent question is, why do people still choose MBA, and in particular, why
did I choose to this? I can attribute this to my willingness to go for a
master’s degree and lack of opportunities other than MBA. I humbly accept that
it could be entirely due to my lack of awareness of the options that are
available. A computer science engineer (not by choice), with three and half
years of experience in the domain of HR, ‘wanting’ to study HR further, I found
limited alternatives, and the fact that I still don’t know any other option,
MBA is the only option. I don’t know how many people join MBA for the same or
similar reason, but I guess there are many. So, MBA is not a degree of choice,
but it does add a perceived value to your acumen and credibility. This is what
I knew about MBA.
Now
that I have got into MBA and spent a little over two months in one of the
premier institutes of the country. I think about these last 64 days (5,529,600…
seconds, remember, every second counts) and look at my learnings. I see how the
living hours of my life have suddenly jumped up from an average of 480 hours a
quarter to a forecasted 600 hours a quarter. An increase of 25% QoQ. I have also
learnt that everything sells, including you, in all the interviews starting
from college committees to MNCs. Accomplishment of as many tasks as possible
(read classes, assignments, presentations, B-school competitions and committee
inductions) is your Operational Efficiency index (OEI). There are other major
motivations than bonuses and incentives, let’s call that ‘survival’. There is
more to making good friends in life, which is ‘networking’ and finally, there
is way of group counselling for stress, we know that as a dance party!
I
also learnt a few other things, the most important of those is to ‘be who you
are’, while you have enough opportunities to throw it away. I also realized
that the challenge is to come out of it ‘knowing’ what happened to you, rather
than just wondering what it was. I am trying to make sense of how all this will
eventually tie up in my life and whenever I fail, I tell myself the most
inspiring words that I know. The words as said by Baba Steve Jobs, “you’ll be
able to connect the dots only when you look back at your life, it will all make
sense eventually”. This is what I believe in, and this is the source of my
inspiration and happiness. Signing Off.
