B-School Blahs!!

And so it begins.....
Everyone around me is on pins and needles...only they aren't showing it!
The quest for the "perfect job" begins soon as you realize the importance, pressures and freedom financial independence brings with it.
Or rather, it starts soon as you gain admission to a Business School, where you try to analyze your classmates and within a span of 6 months, silently categorize the competitive candidates and the not-so-competitive ones in your mind.
Some of us sit confident in the knowledge of posessing good marketing sklls, financial expertise, operational fluency, human resource understanding or I.T. scenarios.
Some of us bask in the glory of posessing sound communication skills, while others silently try to emulate what the soft skills teachers try to teach us.
Sit up straight. Don't cross your legs. Don't debate with the interviewers unnecessarily. Increase your domain knowledge. Keep yourself updated with the current business scenario. You must be aware of the political who's who of India. Go through commonly asked questions in interviews. Prepare the obvious questions. Be spontaneous (??!!??). .....and so it goes on.


They say it's a dog-eat-dog world.
Strange. It doesn't look that way to me. Not yet.
We're all so busy trying to outshine each other, that we forget that sometimes humility might help a bit in the interview process.
But in those 5 minutes in which each one of desires to grab the coveted job in question, we sometimes lose touch with what we REALLY want.


I never wanted a job. I wanted to start with my owm entreprenurial venture.
But there are some things that even the best business schools can not teach you.
Things like recognising the right questions.
Things like finding or recognising opportunities.
Things like bridging the disparities between you and your competing classmate, so that we may learn to respect the fact that we are all in it together!!


I'm all for competition. I'm not wound up in ethical issues to the extent of handing what I rightly deserve to somebody else, and I really don't have a choice in the matter.


But I am sure of one thing.
And that is that by the time the placement season ends, a lot of us will be still without jobs. Some of us will be without direction. While some others will be without conviction.
Whether or not the Institute is to be blamed for this is a debate that can turn ugly and I would rather not get into.
While I don't agree with a lot of things I have heard in the last year and a half, the one thing I do believe is that all of us were given equal opportunity to learn.
There were times I debated with the revered faculty members, times when I kept quiet for fear of being ridiculed for asking a silly question, times when I found it hard to believe the myopic viewpoints of some of my colleagues and times when I was apalled by the frivolous conduct of some others.
But they were all good times.
Because there were also times when I found solace in the friends I made here, times when we laughed for no apparent reason, times when we bunked classes for a cup of coffee at CCD, times when we scraped our financial resources together to share one omelette between 5 friends, times when we slipped late into class with an apologetic look on our faces and requests for attendence, times when we feared being detained for short attendance, times when we bet on the cricket matches to win or lose 50 Rs. , times when we all cursed the system together....this list goes on and on.


And so, I thank each one of you, my respected faculty and my dear colleagues, for the wonderful times we've shared here.
I may not have interacted with half of of you as much as I would have liked to.
And with some I interacted more than I wished to.


But before we get too wound up in the placement process to appreciate a part of what really matters, I felt my blog must have an entry that described my term here.
For who knows, what tomorrow might bring.
Good Luck- to us!!