Hi !
Long time I posted :), its a Sunday today but since I got stoned on 5 vodkas (courtesy my Boss!, u dont say no to ur Boss, do u :) ? ...dont look at '5' okay, me is a complete teetotaller u see :(, and these Englishmen dont "eat" while they booze, which effectively dispelled any sort of getaways for me !!!!), was feeling lazy and hence landed up at the office :).
Its abt 3 weeks to go now, and I dont wanna go back to studies one bit !!!, but still I need the degree, I guess. Well, since I am a half-MBA now, I decided to put down my impressions abt A, surprisingly there have been a few requests to that end too, hence here I go.
Lemme put a small disclaimer first : THESE VIEWS ARE ENTIRELY MY OWN AND DON'T REFLECT THE GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF THE STUDENT COMMUNITY OF IIM AHMEDABAD and HENCE SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN AS A REPRESENTATIVE OPINION of a general WIMWIAN...
**phew !! dat was tuff, but it was worth it, I guess.**
***Why did I go to A ? ****
The reason I chose to do an MBA might sound one of the most ludicrous ones u would have ever heard in ur life, but then mavericks like me have to exist (Nature's Law :))). In my final year at IIT Kgp, I had a good CGPA of 9.69 / 10 for my final year and had a scholarship from Georgia Tech. for Ph.D. in Quantum Computing (based on my summer Internship) and was sure to get another scholarship from Univ. of Maryland (The Mecca of Image Processing having had stalwarts like RosenBlatt on its faculty, who sadly passed away in 2004 :() if I gave GRE / TOEFL. I also had a couple of job offers at TI / GE , so my plate was almost full.
I had no illusions about being an I-banker, infact I had no idea abt what I wanted to do with life or my career, but one thing was certain, I was good at the CAT test. I took a 3-hour paper once just like that arnd Jan. 2004, and had scored about 60, which had further fuelled my close friends' (my IIT wingmates, I miss u folks :(() enthusiasm for goading me into taking CAT.
Another thing I was sure of, (seems not so sure now), that I wanted to stay in India, I had been to the US and hated it totally, US almost seemed too brash, too rude and too cold to me (not least was the problem of food, which is a beeg issue still, because I suck at cooking, and I am getting tired of pre-cooked food once more !!!). Hence, I decided, What the heck ! lets take CAT, and if it gets me 2 more years in India, well and good. (Infact I made up My Career Goals, when the IIM-B call letter arrived with its SOP question !!! Thanx to the PG folks especially Simba and Amithmp who helped me out real beegtime :)).
A 99.87 percentile and 6 calls later, I was into A...as nincompoopic it might sound, every word of it is true and not made up (for once :)).
**** My Impressions about A*****
I don't really know how I am going to compose this bit, but bear with me, it might be quite haphazard, but me will try my best to keep it readable.
The first thing that struck an uber-confused being like me was the gravitas of the people who really wanted to come to A because they had a certain purpose in mind. They wanted to make it beeg and they could see themselves as a marketer / I-banker / whatever :). But they had a purpose and their determination to go about it was set in stone. It really amazed me and gave me a beeg-time inferiority complex, I felt like a nobody in this crowd of super-willed-humans.
Now for the cliche part, it was only a small matter that all these supremely-confident-ppl were also highly-talented top-of-their field individuals who would have made it big anyways, but I guess IIM-A gives them a brand to base their achievements on.
I guess I am not being very coherent here, but then I have so many thoughts going through my mind, am only incapacitated by my inability to express them.
Well w/o further ado, the best thing that A gives u is the ability to perform under tremendous pressure, and perform well I mean. I sincerely believe I can pack any amount of work in a night's time and get done with it one way or the other (one of the prime reasons as to why the 2nd yr seems like Hawaii when the 1st one felt like Siberia :p). One of the things I have loved about my Internship is finally the luxury of sleeping w/o any hanging deadlines in ur dreams (and yeah the long hours too :p, all I do here is sleep :))).
And finally, the thing I hate most abt. A is its artificiality. Every person here is reduced to his / her image, which is perceived in the 1st few months u are on the Campus, and sticks to u for ur lifetime (I believe I am not on the receiving end of this phenomenon, but still my heart goes out for the ppl. who have been :((). Irrespective of how good the person really is, all u do is judge him/her by their respective images and act accordingly. I mayn't be able to properly express what I am trying to say, but for a fresher like me, it was one amazing difference from the good-old IIT days, where u could live like a bohemian and act like a hobbit, and none cared :).
But, even in A u can find genuine ppl., and am happy I have found some, who really, really care for u .. The catch is in never letting them go, which u mite, so u have to watch out real hard :).
Another lingering memory of A I would carry with me forever is the agony of seeing the greats tumble. Everyone of these awesomm ppl. who join the PGP-1 programme at A dont quite live up to their own expectations and their reputations. Faced with the best, and ill-aided with some bad luck, they fall away, and to see that happen is something. But that only reinforces the adage, "Dont step on toes when u r going up the rungs, U never know whom u would find when u r on ur way down :)".
Infact to put things in a nutshell, B4 coming to 'A', I was a fighter ready to take on the world with an unburnished, fragile rapier hoping to cut through the thickest of armors, but post-A, I am a survivor, who can manipulate even the last remnants of his broken rapier to break through the toughest of barriers :).
Well, I guess abhi ke liye itna hi, if I get any more thoughts, will put them down again :).
Btw, ran across this nice post on IIT Lingo, check out ..
http://vinodg.blogspot.com/2005/02/slisha-maajar-hajjaar-shady.html
Until next time,
adios, take care and sleep tight :)
ranjan
Long time I posted :), its a Sunday today but since I got stoned on 5 vodkas (courtesy my Boss!, u dont say no to ur Boss, do u :) ? ...dont look at '5' okay, me is a complete teetotaller u see :(, and these Englishmen dont "eat" while they booze, which effectively dispelled any sort of getaways for me !!!!), was feeling lazy and hence landed up at the office :).
Its abt 3 weeks to go now, and I dont wanna go back to studies one bit !!!, but still I need the degree, I guess. Well, since I am a half-MBA now, I decided to put down my impressions abt A, surprisingly there have been a few requests to that end too, hence here I go.
Lemme put a small disclaimer first : THESE VIEWS ARE ENTIRELY MY OWN AND DON'T REFLECT THE GENERAL IMPRESSIONS OF THE STUDENT COMMUNITY OF IIM AHMEDABAD and HENCE SHOULD NOT BE TAKEN AS A REPRESENTATIVE OPINION of a general WIMWIAN...
**phew !! dat was tuff, but it was worth it, I guess.**
***Why did I go to A ? ****
The reason I chose to do an MBA might sound one of the most ludicrous ones u would have ever heard in ur life, but then mavericks like me have to exist (Nature's Law :))). In my final year at IIT Kgp, I had a good CGPA of 9.69 / 10 for my final year and had a scholarship from Georgia Tech. for Ph.D. in Quantum Computing (based on my summer Internship) and was sure to get another scholarship from Univ. of Maryland (The Mecca of Image Processing having had stalwarts like RosenBlatt on its faculty, who sadly passed away in 2004 :() if I gave GRE / TOEFL. I also had a couple of job offers at TI / GE , so my plate was almost full.
I had no illusions about being an I-banker, infact I had no idea abt what I wanted to do with life or my career, but one thing was certain, I was good at the CAT test. I took a 3-hour paper once just like that arnd Jan. 2004, and had scored about 60, which had further fuelled my close friends' (my IIT wingmates, I miss u folks :(() enthusiasm for goading me into taking CAT.
Another thing I was sure of, (seems not so sure now), that I wanted to stay in India, I had been to the US and hated it totally, US almost seemed too brash, too rude and too cold to me (not least was the problem of food, which is a beeg issue still, because I suck at cooking, and I am getting tired of pre-cooked food once more !!!). Hence, I decided, What the heck ! lets take CAT, and if it gets me 2 more years in India, well and good. (Infact I made up My Career Goals, when the IIM-B call letter arrived with its SOP question !!! Thanx to the PG folks especially Simba and Amithmp who helped me out real beegtime :)).
A 99.87 percentile and 6 calls later, I was into A...as nincompoopic it might sound, every word of it is true and not made up (for once :)).
**** My Impressions about A*****
I don't really know how I am going to compose this bit, but bear with me, it might be quite haphazard, but me will try my best to keep it readable.
The first thing that struck an uber-confused being like me was the gravitas of the people who really wanted to come to A because they had a certain purpose in mind. They wanted to make it beeg and they could see themselves as a marketer / I-banker / whatever :). But they had a purpose and their determination to go about it was set in stone. It really amazed me and gave me a beeg-time inferiority complex, I felt like a nobody in this crowd of super-willed-humans.
Now for the cliche part, it was only a small matter that all these supremely-confident-ppl were also highly-talented top-of-their field individuals who would have made it big anyways, but I guess IIM-A gives them a brand to base their achievements on.
I guess I am not being very coherent here, but then I have so many thoughts going through my mind, am only incapacitated by my inability to express them.
Well w/o further ado, the best thing that A gives u is the ability to perform under tremendous pressure, and perform well I mean. I sincerely believe I can pack any amount of work in a night's time and get done with it one way or the other (one of the prime reasons as to why the 2nd yr seems like Hawaii when the 1st one felt like Siberia :p). One of the things I have loved about my Internship is finally the luxury of sleeping w/o any hanging deadlines in ur dreams (and yeah the long hours too :p, all I do here is sleep :))).
And finally, the thing I hate most abt. A is its artificiality. Every person here is reduced to his / her image, which is perceived in the 1st few months u are on the Campus, and sticks to u for ur lifetime (I believe I am not on the receiving end of this phenomenon, but still my heart goes out for the ppl. who have been :((). Irrespective of how good the person really is, all u do is judge him/her by their respective images and act accordingly. I mayn't be able to properly express what I am trying to say, but for a fresher like me, it was one amazing difference from the good-old IIT days, where u could live like a bohemian and act like a hobbit, and none cared :).
But, even in A u can find genuine ppl., and am happy I have found some, who really, really care for u .. The catch is in never letting them go, which u mite, so u have to watch out real hard :).
Another lingering memory of A I would carry with me forever is the agony of seeing the greats tumble. Everyone of these awesomm ppl. who join the PGP-1 programme at A dont quite live up to their own expectations and their reputations. Faced with the best, and ill-aided with some bad luck, they fall away, and to see that happen is something. But that only reinforces the adage, "Dont step on toes when u r going up the rungs, U never know whom u would find when u r on ur way down :)".
Infact to put things in a nutshell, B4 coming to 'A', I was a fighter ready to take on the world with an unburnished, fragile rapier hoping to cut through the thickest of armors, but post-A, I am a survivor, who can manipulate even the last remnants of his broken rapier to break through the toughest of barriers :).
Well, I guess abhi ke liye itna hi, if I get any more thoughts, will put them down again :).
Btw, ran across this nice post on IIT Lingo, check out ..
http://vinodg.blogspot.com/2005/02/slisha-maajar-hajjaar-shady.html
Until next time,
adios, take care and sleep tight :)
ranjan
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