Part A: Peter England - A love affair
It was a long humid day. Completely drenched in sweat, I reached home after an hour long metro ride from Gurgaon to Delhi. It was my third interview in the last three weeks. But today, I was feeling special and there was a smile on my face. I knew I was about to get this job. I took off my Peter England shirt and stared at it for a couple of minutes. It was my first Peter England shirt which I bought last week.
I never thought that something like a shirt can boost up my self-confidence and help me get into my dream company. After two days, I received the job offer and told the entire incident to my mom. Mothers are the sweetest thing in the world. She knew I got this wonderful job opportunity because of my abilities but for the sake of my happiness, she gifted two Peter England shirts and asked me to wear one on my first day in the office. And since then my love affair with Peter England started.
Unknowingly I started trusting in Aditya Birla Products. Last year when I thought of investing in Mutual Funds, the fund manager discussed about a few funds and he named “Aditya Birla SL Floating Rate Fund”, and I automatically said yes to it and till date I am investing in it. I now believe ABG is someone who cares for me. ABG is someone who provides the best to its customers. ABG is someone who treats us like family.
ABG has impacted many lives over the past hundred years and I’m glad that I am one of them. We don’t need to meet someone daily to build a connection; sometimes a shirt is enough for a lifetime relationship.
Part B: An unfulfilled dream, a fight, a learning
Being born and brought up in the coaching capital of India, Kota, I had a dream to join IIT and experience the lifestyle of a typical engineering college. Though I could not get into one, I joined a private college and completed my engineering in Computer Science. I enjoyed every bit of those four years in college and experienced a lot of ups and downs, made some lifelong friendships and felt satisfied, but somewhere inside me I knew that I really wanted to join a top college and this dream will never be completed.
Job life started and I got into a very good company, I was working on a latest cloud technology in the CRM analytics domain. I had around two years of work experience but a management degree in Business Analytics could help me establish myself in this domain. Hence I started looking for the top colleges in India which were providing master degree in analytics; a few names appeared on my list.
A six year old spark of getting into a top college was suddenly started burning like a flame again, and I knew it’s now or never. But preparing for an entrance exam along with a full time job was never going to be easy. It was not the challenge to crack the entrance exam, but it was the last chance to achieve something for myself, it was a fight against me.
Everyone was now shifting from hard work to smart work. I wondered what this smart work thing all about was. How could I be a smart worker? So I changed my strategy of studying for long hours and going through the concepts again and again. I adopted a new strategy of “One concept, many applications”. I used to learn a concept and tried to master that concept by applying it into different type of problems. After initial two months of preparation, there was a drastic increase in my speed of solving mock tests. A very big learning which I got was that we don’t need too much of formulas or concepts to solve problems quickly, multiple types of problems can be solved by a very few concepts.
Eventually I cracked the entrance exam and got into a top B-School of India. Sometimes we just need to sit back and observe the bigger picture, a small dream can teach us great lessons. It’s the process which is important; the result is just a mere destination.