Mid-terms [Term 1]

My 2nd post in a single day – that’s a record of sorts. But this is about the mid-terms, so it’s kinda important. All I will share are a couple of tips. As for the actual exams and how I fared – the less said the better.

1) Take good notes in class – an accounting problem on the mid-term was a replica of a problem solved in class, and I didn’t find it in any text book. A corollary to this theorem is to stay awake in class and pay attention. This also implies that you need to manage your time accordingly to get enough sleep the previous night.

2) Have a habit of jotting down key points/formulae (preferably on your laptop) which summarize the text and lecture notes on a daily basis. This helps in a couple of ways. On some exams (like stats), you’re only allowed to take one ‘handwritten’ cheatsheet. Preparing that cheatsheet at the last minute was nuts for me because I had to summarize key points (which I did on my laptop) and then had to transfer the critical points over to paper all in a span of a few hours. A good technique is to work on the former throughout the course and only focus on the handwriting aspect on the day before the exam. It’s tough to work on the handwritten cheatsheet during the term because you’re limited to only 1 A4 size paper and you won’t know how much space you’ll need, so a two-step process is recommended. This also helps on other exams (like eco which is also open book, open notes) where flipping through a stack of books and papers during the exam is very distracting and you only wish you had one summary sheet to refer to – of course you can keep the others for comfort, if you want

3) Pay attention to what your alums say. One of them apparently talked about a good online resource for eco, which not many paid attention to (yours truly didn’t even attend the alum session, so my case is diff). Things would have turned out differently if only…

And this is probably my most important tip

4) Study hard, without a doubt. But keep things in perspective if you don’t fare well. One mid-term is a drop in the ocean of tests you’ll have to take. So there’s no use freaking out if you haven’t done well. Pick up the pieces and try again. And if you find after a while that these tests aren’t your cuppa tea – spend more time on your co and extra currics. That way you can at least justify your drop in grades No, I’m serious

There’ll likely be more tips after I get through some more of these. Apparently in subsequent terms, we get so swamped with assignments and cases that we don’t even know when the exams hit us. At least term 1 has been gentle in that regard. Wish me luck!

Change of guard

Early this week, we had our last classes with our first set of profs. It was a little sad to see some of them leave.

I had expected Financial Accounting to be boring, but the enthusiasm that Dr. Mohan generated in his classes was to be seen to be believed. He used humour but mostly by way of body language and change in speech patterns. A smart comment with a raised eyebrow was guaranteed to make you laugh. A very good buddy of mine is headed to Duke (where Dr. M is resident faculty). I’m sure he’ll have fun there.

I will also miss Dr. Stine’s excellent stats classes. This is a good place to talk a little bit about Dr. Stine and his sense of humour. I’d heard a lot about funny Dr. Stine, but after sitting in a couple of classes, I noticed

he did not “crack jokes” or use funny stories or body language. His sense of humour is quite subtle. As an

example, he drew a map of the US to illustrate a point and the western coast was drawn with a little bulge. His matter-of-fact remark was “This is a map of the US. California got a little pregnant there”. He’d just smile and go on, but the rest of the class would be in splits. On another occasion we were talking about the fact that loyalty card programs were just clever data collection mechanisms. To open the discussion, Dr. Stine said (with a very straight face, might I add) – “I am a whore. I sell my data for loyalty points and I have no problems with it.” BTW, here’s a pic of our last session with him. And if you’re wondering why a few of us are dressed up weirdly, our theme for the day was ‘tapori clothing’ which extended to tapori-ishtyle emails later in the day as well. Was good fun when A explained to Dr. Stine that we were dressed up as ‘gangstas’ and he then started eyeing every new student who entered the room with newfound curiosity. One of my study group members has a crush on Dr. Stine. He will be sorely missed (at least by her).

Dr. Bell didn’t have to be funny to be popular. An accent from down-under and apparently good looks (hey don’t ask me, I’m a guy) was a sure-fire way to have all the gals of our class under his spell. I’m sure they’d swoon if he looked at them but they had to stay professional and alert for the sake of CP. After his last class there was a catfight to pick who would give Dr. Bell his farewell gift (ok, that’s a little bit of an exag but you get the point). Dr. Bell’s classes were fun – but I found them to be more conversational than structured. So you had to make sure you kept pace and structured what he was saying. In one of his classes, he showed us a funny video about market sizing. I love the guy’s Venn diagram. Absolutely hilarious!

And last, but not the least, our very own boyish looking Dr. Amit Bubna. He teaches a LOT of material in a very short span of time, but is pretty darned good at what he does. You just need to be able to keep pace with him and learn to read the various resources on the subject. What did I like best about him? He calmed me down in lecture 1 by saying ‘it’s not the math, it’s the thought process that counts’ and true to his word, most of his lectures have been about understanding why something happens and not how to represent it using differential equations (although truth be told, you can’t escape the math fully).

Next week, I’ll jot down my thoughts on the new set of profs who’ve come into our lives.

Time Pass

There’s a bunch of stuff happening on campus today – club meetings, tutorial sessions by TAs, parties, etc. I’m sick of seeing supply/demand curves or accrued revenues. So I decided to spend my evening on something fun and the most appealing thing was Dumb C organized by the theatre club. Was loads of fun. My team did pretty well to get into the finals and then tripped up on a couple of crazy ones. One was to figure out a book with 9 words in its title (something about an artist as a young man) – something I’d never heard of before. Another was Lassie. This one was supposed to be pictionary style so it was even trickier, coz all I could do was draw a dog. My attempts to draw a Sardar with a glass of lassi didn’t quite work (I was accused of violating the ’similar sounding’ rule). Anyways we did get the odd one in our favour when we shouldn’t have. The round was dumb dumbc (A mimes to B, B confirms using mimes, C comes out of a corner he was tucked into, B then mimes to C, C speculates on answers). So anyways, my team-mate mimed ‘Venice’ to me which I mimed to my 3rd team mate, who mentioned ‘Vatican’ and we found out he was right. Clearly the wrong message was passed to me which I passed on as well, and we somehow got an answer right by fluke. So after guessing stuff like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ‘Einstein’, and ‘Aqua’s I’m a Barbie Girl’, we ended up 4th (out of about 13 teams that participated). Aaah, who cares about the result - the 2.5 hrs was time well spent. Kudos to the theatre club for organizing the event. Here’s to hoping there are many more to come…

You just can’t win

Economics is probably my favourite subject this term (although the assignments still strike fear in my heart). But the thought process and applicability to real-life situations makes it really interesting. Plus after reading more about it, I can now understand what the heck is written in the Economic Times.

Anyways, as part of my prep for the mid-term, I am reading about price discrimination. Aha, I now realize that publishing low cost Indian editions of books is not a philanthropic measure to foster education in a country with low purchasing power, but in fact is a very smart way of profiteering (google third degree price discrimination if you’re interested). The topic lead me to Priceline and an interesting article on Slate (http://www.slate.com/id/82827/) and subsequently lead me to a topic called the Winner’s curse. To learn more, wikipedia the term and then hop on over to http://www.gametheory.net/Mike/applets/WinnerCurse/ to play a neat game on the topic. You’ll then realize the meaning of this post…

Steamrolled

We have classes four days a week. Eco and Stats on Mon/Wed and Accounting/Marketing on Tue/Thu. Each session lasts 2 hours. Section F (that’s mine) starts at 8:15/8:45 am (depending on the day) and ends at 1:15pm daily. And then it’s time to get back, understand what the heck just happened that day in the lectures and also make a sorry attempt at pre-reading for the next day so you can at least vaguely remember having read something when the prof talks about it in class. But to confound matters, you need to factor in 1) pop quizzes, 2) assignments, 3) club meetings, 5) keeping up with the outside world, 6) keeping up with inbox management (spam is elevated to a new level at ISB) and 7) other random stuff (read family time). 24 hours in a day is grossly insufficient.

Things were hunky dory for the first couple days of the term and come Thursday, the party mood just crashlanded. We had to work on an economics assignment (due Monday), an accounting quiz (due Sunday), prep for the stats class discussion (which is graded) on Monday, work on a big-ass marketing case on Gillette (due Tuesday), prepare a growth plan for our leadership development program (due Sunday). Right after the marketing case was submitted (deadline was 11pm and we sent it in at 10pm), we had to prep for a stats quiz on Wed. And to top it, we had a pop quiz on Eco both on Monday and Wednesday. Now, I’ve worked on pressure assignments in the past, but this one was weird for a couple reasons – a) none of the material was familiar ground (at least at work, I’m good at a couple things), b) I’d never worked with my team (in this case, my study group) in the past, and c) it’s difficult to t know how much time to devote to each (so our estimation skills were useless). Of course, we’ve learned a lot from this past week, so things should be somewhat better going forward. But for now, I’m completely wiped from the efforts of the past week.

So why does ISB make us suffer?

In our marketing class today, the prof spoke about the labor market and the conversation veered towards people marketing themselves. The prof drew a graph with hours worked on the x-axis and pain on the y-axis. He drew two curves (representing two people, say A and B) and asked us which person was more lazy. We correctly pointed out the dude (A) and said for the same number of hours worked he experiences more pain than B does. Now for the question: if a recruiter just looks at both resumes, she will find it difficult to identify that B has a higher threshold for pain. So how does B market himself? One way is for B to take on an exceedingly painful project which a recruiter can recognize. An example of this is to get into ISB and just survive the year. The learning doesn’t matter, but what distinguishes you is that you’ve gone through suffering which the majority of the population doesn’t go through and this demonstrates your higher threshold for pain. And amidst loud chuckles, the prof concluded by saying “it’s not our job to make you learn, all we’re here to do is make sure you suffer”. Applause/laughter galore! Classes are fun indeed…and yes, the rationale makes me feel better, even though I’ve been steamrolled.

First impressions of Term 1 courses

So after two days, I’ve sampled one course each of the four on offer for Term 1 and I must say I’m enjoying them a lot.

Managerial Economics: Youngish looking prof by the name of Amit Bubna. Straight off the bat, he put every quantophobe at ease by demonstrating the ‘minimal’ amount of math involved in the course. I fervently hope he’s right. He then asked some social questions and asked us to think about the economics reasoning behind them (a la Freakonomics). Stuff like ‘why are popcorn prices higher in the theatre’. When someone answered ‘captive audience’ his immediate retort was that theatre owners should charge really high prices to use their restroom as well. Fun stuff. At the end, we played an auction game in class yesterday and though you kinda know the theory, it’s amazing how it plays out in front of your eyes when students are trading with each other. After the game ended, the prof pulled up a slide with a flourish that predicted exactly how the game would end. Wow! Whoever called this the dismal science was wrong…

Statistics: Fun prof from Wharton (Bob Stine) who’s also written the text we’re using. A lot of material he covered was from the pre-term, which I’d taken. So thankfully, the pace was just right. Now what remains to be seen is how the learning curve will shape up going forward. His presentation was slick with funky slide transitions, but sadly, he used Keynote and none of that can be transferred to Powerpoint (unless I shell out big bucks for a 3rd party prog). So I’ll have to stick with the dull slide layouts that MS provides

Accounting: Tam guy from Duke who earlier taught at Stanford, Mohan Venkatachalam, is our man. In his words, he’s the opening batsman facing the seamers from us until the middle order dude, Mark Finn, arrives after the midterms and can tackle the older ball. I somehow took a liking to Accounting during my pre-term, though I had an expectation that I’d find it really boring. And I opened up an annual report and it’s really nice to see stuff that you can actually understand. Hmm, my money’s being put to good use after all.

Marketing: Fantastic prof from Wharton, David Bell is teaching us how to connect better with the customer. He’s a New Zealander and this is his first time in India. I loved the content he was throwing at us. He didn’t follow the slides to a large extent, and it was a free-flowing conversation throughout most of the lecture with examples of companies marketing efforts thrown in for good measure. Arbit CP from others, thankfully, wasn’t so bad. But CP is a BIG problem for me in this course. Couple different angles to this:

a) There are times when I feel I need to formulate a response and I’m doing thinking rather than listening to the prof. Not good from a learning angle.

b) Sometimes I had good responses and the prof didn’t pick me. So it seems there’s a little bit of luck factor going on as well.

c) The very fact that you can earn a portion of your grade just by making a point in class is very unsettling for me. It’s like the most aggressive person wins. Hmm, maybe that’s what they’re looking for in ace marketers…

Anyways, I ended up with zero participation today. Need to boost this going forward. I might have another post just on my thoughts on CP. (Apparently suggesting that CP should be eliminated is blasphemy, so I’m not going to say it).

OK, back to studying for my stats quiz tomorrow…

2008’s first blog

Well, after an extraordinarily long hiatus, I’m back. Not only is this my first blog this year, but it’s also my first blog from the ISB campus. Yes, for those who don’t know, I did join the famed Indian School of Business, a school whose reputation is growing rapidly thanks to FT’s ranking as well as the skyrocketing salaries that catch the eyes of the Indian public.

Orientation week has begun in earnest and by jove, what a batch we have.

The guys and gals all around seem absolutely brilliant. Now it all boils down to who can withstand the so-called b-school stress. The alums have been doing a bang-up job of keeping us focused on partying and fun stuff though…we’ll see after a couple weeks how the mood changes.

The racket in Khemka when we shouted our section cheers today was to be heard to be believed. I’m surprised the entire structure didn’t come down. Apart from the fun presentations, the specialty-du-jour was the Treasure Hunt – a maniacal marathon criss-crossing all ends of the campus. No, my team with a 1 hr 57 min time didn’t win but boy, what fun it was (esp. since my favourite character Tintin was part of one of the clues)! I wish it were intellectually more challenging. But I guess for now, the focus is on building physical stamina, which I sorely lack.

Right now, I’m just eagerly awaiting the arrival of my wife and kid. I have 3 pre-terms and have done zero prep for them. Oh well, all in good time.

Messy Infrastructure

My flight from Bangalore to Delhi was supposed to leave at 7:10 pm. I was at the airport at 5:15pm after an hour on the congested Airport Road (I have no idea how Bangaloreans manage to survive the nightmare that traffic is). Anyways, after an hour in the Jet Airways lounge, I figured I’d give myself enough time for security check and was horrified to see lines longer than the ‘dharma-darsanam’ queue at Tirupati – now if only someone were around to keep the folks moving…but sadly no ‘jaragandi-s’ were to be heard. I stepped into the aircraft at 7:10 pm and heard the pilot say that we were still waiting for 10 more folks. We eventually got airborne at 7:50 pm and got into Delhi at 11:20 pm. That’s more than 4 hours on the aircraft (which is the longest for me in India). Thankfully the aircraft was one of the few that had the newer inflight entertainment system. Whiled away time by watching ‘Live Free or Die Hard’ (what a piece of crap it is), Friends (evergreen favourite), and to my surprise a couple of old-time DD star serials – Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi and Fauji. I felt a combination of nostalgia and a strange sense of ‘man, these serials aren’t really that well made, even though I used to enjoy them quite a bit when I was young’. Anyways, our good old pilot came back on the air and said ATC at Delhi was only using one runway (apparently a few near-missed caused the DGCA to get jittery and shut down the use of both runways – which I must say makes sense given that both of them aren’t parallel). We finally touched down at 11:10 and I got out of the airport at 11:40. Thankfully NH8 from the airport back to my home in Gurgaon is nicely done - I got home at midnight. It maddens me to no end that I end up paying Rs. 2K in extra congestion charges and surcharges which don’t do anything whatsoever to improve the flying situation. The whole experience (Bangalore roads, airport terminal congestion, air traffic congestion) definitely shows that we have a long way to go.

Dec 18

Yesterday was eventful. My MBA admission saga came to an end with INSEAD’s decision. If that was disappointing, what was more painful was the fact that I was away from my daughter on her first birthday. I was in Bangalore for work and to help get my sister settled in her new house, while my wife and kid were back home in Gurgaon. I had to settle for pix of my baby in a cute pattu-paavaadai. Have to figure out a way to make up for this.

So near, yet so far

Aargh! Waitlisted at INSEAD. I don’t know whether to feel happy for the fact that I am close to getting into a top school or to feel disappointed by the fact that I don’t have closure. Anyways, I’ll now take up ISB’s offer and hope for something to open up at INSEAD by March. If that doesn’t come through, Hyderabad – here I come.

 One thing’s for sure – I’m glad to be finally getting away from the rigmarole of work. I enjoyed it for close to 8 years, but it’s definitely time to try something else.