why do an mba (a sequel to the rg-giri wounded)

why do people come to do an mba... this is a question that i answered for myself before quitting my job as a software engineer in a prestigious mnc...

it was high paying so money making was not the only criterion... considering the job insecurity that most places were facing we didn't have that worry...

it was a well settled business model and our jobs were very secure, unless of course you had some great inborn talent of getting into trouble and fired... so no worry about layoffs or stuff like that which put you under constant necessity to upgrade yourself and be better equipped with new technologies…

life was chill out there – regular weekend parties, movies, music, biking trips, games, sleep and whatever money and mastercard could buy… didn’t have a care in the world spent lavishly ate the choicest foods at the swankiest places… the restaurant manager even became good friends of ours. So why leave this heaven and do u know what…

considering the fact that I am “lazy” by nature I could not bring myself to put in that regular schedule per day of studying for CAT… I did try to force myself to attend the coaching classes and paid a hefty sum for it too… but then classes are meant to be bunked and this was no exception…

so after all this why the hell did I and probably many more like me land up here to get a mirage called MBA… for the benefit of the uninitiated, it is called PGDBM (post graduate diploma in business management). Yes sadly it is a diploma and not called a degree… though people do recognize it as on par with the other PG degrees.

Are we here for the grades which we could not make in our engineering and that we are going to compensate for the 4 years of romping around in an unshaven countenance and dirty shorts… is that what we “executives” from top notch companies are here for… the answer is a big no…

Let us assume for a second that our grades are the most important take aways from a b-school education… then wouldn’t it be like companies would just come look at our cgpas and recruit us just like that… why the hell do they go through the elaborate process f scanning our resumes and interviewing scores of people before settling on a handful… I can quote numerous examples from my past experience where the bottom of the class gets placed at a company and profile higher than that of the topper… and it is normally the batch topper who takes the longest time to get placed (sorry guys this is just an observation based on many samples and I pray to god that it does not happen).

So now that we have hopefully agreed that the quantitative evaluation is not the single most evaluation criterion let us try to understand why anybody like me or those in the batch who are better than me come to this situation.

An mba is not a destination it is a journey that begins with the decision to do it. Then there is the first step in grooming a manager – the CAT… striking where it is easy and matters most. Attempt the easy questions and leave the hard ones – basically survive. Just achieve the basic objective so that you may enter the next level which is the interview call. Once you get into the interview room they really test your smart thinking and ability to communicate your thoughts and I would like to believe that they are at least 90% accurate.

Now that you are inside, you think you were a lone profile, but when we look around we find that everybody here is a unique person – just like you. The batch is so diverse in terms of background and work-ex that is just amazes you to see such high diversity packed into a small batch of 150 students. And since each one has gone through the same rigorous process of sifting the pebbles to find the diamonds, you can rest assured that each one is stud in his own way…

Now what do you do in a mba class – you share experiences from everybody’s lives… a quick journey in learning from others mistakes and achievements… as an mba you don’t have time to go through all the same mistakes again (just think of how many man hours would go into repeating all those mistakes and learning from them.)

But learning from each other does not make all the 150 into a similar person at the end of the 2 years… each one still maintains that individuality or else what is the use of specialists… some of us are naturally creative – we learn a little bit of creativity from them and in case we need more we know where to find it… some of us are born speakers and we learn the art of making small presentations and maybe a little bit of public speaking too… some of us are born writers and from them we learn the framework for what makes a good document… some of us are naturally studious and from them we learn the theoretical concepts…

it is totally unnecessary for the big guy sitting up there to make each one of us different… else he could have just used a standard die cast.