It has been a whirlwind of a first season, from July 2015 to June 2016. Summer placements, the screwed up academic schedules, SAC elections, section wars, sports trips, never ending parties, student exchange, summer internship finally and of course personal problems. The first year of B-school has shown me so many ups and downs that it is needless to say I have seen more than a few changes in me. Okay, make that five. I am sure you will relate to one or more points as mentioned below. It is by no means an exhaustive list but it definitely encompasses the finer points.
- Wear not the best suit, but your confidence to an interview – Before coming here I used to think that you need to be on your toes every moment and that you have to have a concise knowledge of every single thing that happens in the world markets. That is the only way you can succeed in this business world, ONLY if you have very strong theoretical knowledge. WRONG! The only thing you need to succeed as a business person is your confidence and guts to do something which others might berate you for. Engineering was in fact where I should have laid focus on fundamentals but sadly I never did there either. Your personality and social skills will go a long way to determine how successful you are. They even taught us the same in “Learning to be a Management Consultant”.
- Having raised the above point, my appetite for business news has increased – Be it class participation or a group discussion, you put forward a point that you read in newspaper that day or the day before and you suddenly have made an immediate lasting impact. It is not a necessity to know a lot of things but knowing them doesn’t hurt either.
- Be strong and believe in yourself – It is in the nature of human beings to gossip. People say a lot of things about you. Either you listen to it and decide to be sad or else you decide to make the best out of it. My first year has imbued me with a feeling of invulnerability against all such negative things. Keep your friends closer than ever before; your enemies won’t even come close. The hectic life and the pressure demand that you have a few people in the campus who are nothing short of family. I am glad I have more than just a few.
- Change can only happen if you do something about it – I have always been somewhat of a diplomat but the first year in IIM Indore has put that rebellious side of my personality in full throttle. As Dante said, the darkest places in hell are reserved for the neutral. There have been few instances where I have put my case forward even when I knew no one was going to back me up. I am glad I won’t regret it when I am old that something wrong was happening in front of my eyes and I decided to sit back and do nothing about it.
- Last but not the least, I have managed to overcome my fear of a few things like swimming, finally got myself a guitar on which I am hoping to get some practice during the Student Exchange, I know better what I want in life and more importantly who I want in life, today I live life as of the moment and there is much less planning as compared to earlier and of course it goes without saying that there have been few “trips” during the past one year, each one of which has a story to tell.
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About the Author:
Sidhant Kumar Singh - Instrumentation Engineering graduate from IIT Kharagpur. He was a summer intern at American Express during the summers of 2016 after his first year of b-school. He will be travelling to Greece for 3 months on the Student Exchange Program. He considers himself as much more than an average lawn tennis and football player and the field of analytics fascinates him.