??

This term has whizzed by like anything. It seemed much more shorter than the previous term although both the terms were of six weeks each. Classes end next Thursday and exams start Friday. For me, this term was not very fruitful. There were some important courses in this term, but somehow I was not able to keep pace with the result that I need to work really hard to be prepare myself for the exams. The only course which I really liked in this term was Macroeconomics. The prof has done an excellent work in introducing the basic concepts of Macro. No financial mumbo jumbo, no text book stuff, just plain common sense understanding of Macroeconomics. He has covered National Income Accounting, Theory of Income Distribution and Monetary and Fiscal policies. The great part was that the prof related the contents to the current economic scenarios and helped us understand the various forces at play during the time of recession. Infact, the prof said that he enjoyed teaching the subject more during low economy phases because during these times the students are more receptive to understanding what is really going on. We have had some excellent discussions on the global economic situation and it has been an overall great experience. Kudos to the man!!!

Cost Accounting is another subject which has evoked some interest in me. Although complex, the prof has managed to capture students interest through his teaching style.

Marketing is a course which I find very boring and I typically switch off mid way during the sessions. There have been numerous case discussions during the session but I never really got interested. There is a marketing project which my group has to present and submit next week, but we are not even half way through. Guess it would be a last moment exercise.

OR is another interesting course but it faced the typical problem that quant courses in business schools face. These papers are taught by mathematicians and they have the habit of going into miles and miles of details and proofs and theorems and auxiliaries and formulas and what not. Little do they realize that as managers we would not be proving formulas but solving business situations. There is an excellent tool by Microsoft which is called Excel which can help us in solving various business problems. Instead of solving LP using Excel we banged our heads against Simplex and Big M and Two Phase which are thoroughly useless for us as managers. Excel is the way to go.

Tune back in later for my analysis on the other courses.

And I am back…

Finally I am back to blogging. Was away for a month now. First the exams kept me busy, then I had a week off for vacation and then I got preoccupied with some personal affairs which kept me away from this blog, but hopefully I should now be more regular.

Exams went off well which means that I should not flunk in any paper. At least that has been the history of previous batches. None of them has ever flunked a paper in this course. And I certainly dont have any intention to break that record. Results will come by the end of this month, and by that time the current term’s exam would be upon us.

Three weeks of the current term are now over. The papers in the current term are Macroeconomics, Managerial Communication, Operation Research, Cost Accounting, Organization Theory, Marketing , and MIS. I must say I am not very enthusiastic about most of this courses except perhaps Macro. I am not too happy with how these courses are designed. The course content for most of them are relevant for the typical two year MBA courses and have not been suitably modified for fast paced one year MBA programmes such as ours. Each paper is covered in 10 sessions totalling 15 hours, so fast means  really fast. I would have liked the courses to be more application oriented, with stress on relating the content to our work experiences. However it is a tough challenge, to cover the basic concepts of any topic and simultaneously to relate each topic to real life scenario. There is a definite trade off that needs to be made. Some students are vociferouslydemanding for project work in a few papers but it is tough to get enough knowledge about a course in 15 hours to be able to put together a meaningful project. Some of the courses do have projects though such as Marketing, MIS and Cost Accounting.

Two months into the course and people have started getting serious regarding the placement prospects. Various study cum job groups have started taking shape. Consulting, Finance, Telecom are few of the kinds of groups that have been created. I suspect that within a month or two these study cum job group will reduce to job groups. With the current placement scenario still looking bleak, the groups will need to put in concerted efforts. (There’s even an Event Management Group, but the focus of that group is more to manage parties and beer binges for the group.)

End of Term 1

Classes for term 1 ended on 15th. Exams start on 18th, followed by one week of break. The last few days have been truly hectic as we have been running around trying to finish chapters, case studies, assignments, a slew of presentations. It has been a great challenge to keep track of what all tasks need to be done and importantly which needs to be done. Suddenly prioritising has taken a whole new dimension.

With exams now looming over, people have gone into their shells. There is an eerie silence through out the hostel rooms with people only meeting each other in the hostel canteen. There too there’s too little talk going on. Everyone is so preoccupied. Its as if the studied material will escape as soon as mouth is opened

I guess I will not be able to write for another few days. Hope to be back after exams.

Return of the evil dead…

Last week we had a couple of quizzes. One on Accounting and one on Microeconomics. Accounting was the first one. Giving a written academic exam after almost ten years was a challange in itself. For the first few moments, I had completely freezed out, with hands sweating and palpitations rising. It may sound silly but yes it happened. After having encountered so many difficult situations in work life, I was still unable to handle the exam anxiety !!! The fact that it was an accounting exam made matters worse. Anyways I managed to calm myself down and focus on the paper. At first reading, all questions went flying above me. Things started improving second reading onwards. On hindsight, the questions were fairly simple -no Balance Sheet to make, no Income Statement to generate. Most were simple questions based on the basic accounting equation. However, I did not perform as well as I would have expected to. Dont ask me how much I scored, although it was not too bad.

The second exam was on Microeconomics. I didnt freeze up this time. As of now I have the feeling that I did fine with the Demand Supply curves, but only my score will tell me if the feeling is shared by my prof too.

End term exams start from 18th May. There are a couple of presentations and assignments lined up before that and classes are running at full steam. It is difficult to keep pace with the course work and needs tremendous dedication and planning. However you will always be playing catch up, thats for sure.

This weekend I also managed to squeeze in a flight to visit my family, and it was a welcome break from the daily rigors.

Some quotes from my class before I sign up….Good to chew on.

“Smoking and drinking are the best networking tools.”

“Those who do..do, those who can’t ….teach”

“In the long run we all are dead”

“In the long run every new product is a toaster”

“Mathematics is the most concise language known to mankind.”

“If you are not for yourself, then who is for you?…… If you are only for yourself then who are you?”

 

P.S. For those who are still trying to find out the significance of this blog’s title….I was talking about examination”

Getting Busy…

The fact that I did not write a post last week does suggest that I am getting busier now with my course work. Over the past five six days there has been a sudden spurt in assignments, presentations, case studies and other activities. A simple subject such as Management Communication has taken up demonic proportions with the amount of study materials and presentations. We completed and submitted one set of IT assignment today and the prof was quick to hand over the second assignment for IT. To top it, a couple of quizzes are to be held in the next few days. Not to say that one of the courses (Managerial Statistics) is yet to begin. The old timers (…aka..alumni) boosted our confidence by pointing out that the game has just begun. Now that the tip of the iceberg is visible, we should be enthusiastically awaiting the entire iceberg. So its a life of under six hours sleep from here on. Lets see how and when this quantity reduces further.

Things are warming up on the placement front with the placement office asking for a brief profile and expected job profiles/companies that we would like to target for ourselves. Its going to be a long hard battle for placements and planning early is essential.

Thats all for now. Hope to be back soon.

Admissions 2010-2011 Starts

The notification for PGPEX 2010-2011 has come out now. Find further details at www.iimcal.ac.in/pgpex

Its getting warm in here….

End of week 1. And it seemed to fly past in a jiffy. There was an off day on Tuesday but the rest of the week was filled up with classes. We had classes for Microeconomics, OB, IT and Financial Reporting and Analysis (FRA). We also had a few sessions on basic mathematics as part of the non-credit induction programme. Its only the first week of the schedule and I am already starting to fall behind in terms of the course material covered. It is just barely under control as of now, but I am sure the coming weeks are going to heat things up. Classes for two courses Managerial Communication and Managerial Statistics are still to take off. A slew of case studies and assignments have been promised to us in the next couple of weeks.
The FRA class came packed with a punch. For a class with 50% engineers and very few with a finance background , 3  straight hours of accounting left most of us dazed and thoroughly out of our senses. To her credit, the prof tried her very best to keep the lecture simple and not make it complex. She outrightly refused to answer questions which were beyond the scope of the introductory class and asked us to focus on the ABC ’s first. The course started with an introduction to accounting but at the end of three hours (2 classes) we had our first balance sheet and Income statement ready. An accounting case was given for practise and everyone has been racking up their brains for the last 24 hours trying to balance the accounts to the last $.

The IT course seems to be going nowhere now, with an overly enthusiastic class managing to divert the lectures way off track . I had heard of CP(Class Participation). Now I also know of DP(Desperate Participation)

BTW another term to which I was introduced…”Constructively Discontented”  which, in English, means “frustrated”.

Its Showtime folks !!!

Our classes formally got off today. No specific courses were taught. There was an initial session by the Programme chairman who explained to us about the academic requirements of the programme as well as the format of the international immersion scheduled in a later term. Another prof introduced us to the case discussion methodology by taking us through our very first case and effectively demonstrating to us how cases help in explaining concepts and ensuring adequate class participation.

The last week was relatively free. Registration ended on 31st (Tue). There was a formal welcome session where the director of the institute and some other relevant people aired their views on the PGPEX course. The last week also had the convocation for our previous batch and we were able to meet up with some of our seniors. They were able to pass on to us some interesting tid-bits about how to manage the course. They also guided us elaborately on how to go about the entire placement process. I had a chance to interact personally with a few seniors and must say it was quite an informative discussion.

We had a few interaction with our placement incharge who stressed on the fact that given the curent scenario, it was imperative that we plan the placement process very well. He hoped the next placement season would be better, but added the caveat that he had hoped the same for the previous batch also !!!

The last batch’s placement statistics were also officially disclosed this week. There has been a 10% drop in the average salary and an almost 25% drop in the highest domestic salary. There have been no international placements. Luckily the entire batch has been placed which is a great achievement given the fact that other b-schools in India are still struggling to achieve a 100% placement.

PGPEX placement details

Other b-school’s placement scene

PGPEX placement news on CNBC Awaaz

Lesson no. 1…I belong !

We had day 1 of registration today. Almost 75% of the students got themselves registered on day 1, as per my estimate. Officially, now I am a student of PGPEX at IIMC. A student after exactly 8 years and five months of passing out from my previous college. Am I now eligible for student’s pass on Indian Railways or Indian Airlines? Hmm…that would be nice incentive…given that I am planning to become a frequent flyer between my college and home.

We got our first case study today. We need to prepare it for our first class on 7th April. There’s still time and I am sure no one is willing to dive into studies at least for the next couple of days. Probably 6th evening is when we will fish out the case study from our bags. We also got the schedule for the first term, along with the courses.

Another huge development was that I finally managed to get hold of the bank draft for my education loan. Unfortunately, the draft for which I struggled for almost three months did not stay in my hands for even three hours and I had to deposit it at the time of registration. A long and tiring struggle for education loan at SBI finally came to an end. IIMC really needs to develop better tie-ups with banks for student’s loan.

Tomorrow is a off day as I am already through with registration. Looking forward to exploring the campus as there is still a section with which I am not familiar. Need to get some minor issues related to the room fixed before classes start off in earnest.

The first myth that has broken here is that those who are selected for MBA at such high profile institutes have super fantastic profiles and are super smart. Before admission, I somehow felt that I did not belong to that league. The profile of people here is excellent, but on interacting with them, I do feel that I am an equal part of this group; and this thought has boosted my confidence to be able to find my footings in this b-school. Thats my learning no. 1. I belong!

Reached IIMC

I finally reached IIMC yesterday (27th). The campus reminds me a lot of my previous alma mater BIT Mesra, with the same forest-like surroundings. After ages would I have heard the sounds of birds chirping.  The campus seems to be very laid back, silent and lethargic, quite unlike the academic rigour that it is known for. A perfect example of “Dont judge a book by its covers” !!!

Yesterday went by in hostel accommodation, bank account opening and education loan formalities. Met a lot of new people who till now were only e-mail id’s with whom I used to interact. People are slowly trooping in to the rooms allotted to them, some with family, some without. Next week will be spent in registration and other induction formalities. Classes start from 7th April. So I still have a week to prepare myself up for the hectic academic schedule.