This post is an entry for the Great Indian B-School debate 2014
Name: Nadeem Raj
Team name: The Holy Hand-Grenades
Team mate’s name: Abhishek Ahluwalia
B School: XLRI, Jamshedpur
Article I am refuting:
http://insideiim.com/the-emergence-of-a-new-minority-freshers-in-an-mba/
I used to be a person who moved with the herd. I did not do anything out of the ordinary and bucked no trends. In school, I got a good score in my 10
th board exams so naturally my parents and I decided that I must take up Science as the stream for high school. There was no debate or discussion over it. That was just the way things were done. And that’s what we did.
In Science, I did not take up Biology so that automatically meant that I would be getting a graduation degree in engineering. There were no ifs or buts. In those two years I prepared for the IIT-JEE, didn’t make it and got into a private engineering college in the University of Bombay. I then proceeded to spend 4 years bunking classes, watching movies and getting a degree in computer engineering. I also got placed in one of India’s biggest IT firms because that’s the way things roll. Nothing up to this point had been out of the ordinary, I had stuck to the template and followed instructions to the T. I was virtually indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other young people who had stuck to the script.
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It takes courage to break the mould[/caption]
Now came the time when I felt some dissonance. Graduation was almost upon us and there were serious questions being asked about what we intended to do in the future. And the majority of my classmates were stricken with USA-fever, the decision to go to America for their MS. So many people, most of whom couldn’t differentiate between a kernel and a thread of an operating system were now going to go to that faraway land and become masters in the field. There was another section who wasn’t too inclined to stay away from Indian food and therefore decided to prepare for an MBA. There were very few of us who actually thought of taking up the jobs that we had.
Now this was in the year 2009, and if you remember that was the year when the recession had made jobs most difficult to come by. There were many companies who had to withdraw previous job offers and I also got my joining date 6 months after I graduated. Naturally my parents were very concerned, they’d followed the well-beaten path all this while and were concerned about my future. They were adamant that I should prepare for GRE or CAT or both. There was no real sense of what I wanted to do, just an attitude of pre-empting risk. Just to be doing something was the plan, there was no time to step back for a while and evaluate the big picture. But this time, I didn’t feel like doing that. I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Engineering had been less than stellar and I did not want to get sucked in for another 2 years doing something which I would hate.
So I took up my job offer after 6 months of lolling around the house at the expense of my palpitating parents. Two months in, I realized that I wasn’t cut out for an MS. I realized full well in that short span of time that the lines and lines of illegible code (or as the cool nerds call it, the Matrix) was not for me. I chose the red pill.
But did I want to pursue an MBA then? No kind reader, I did not. I was quite sure that this technical line was not for me, but I did not know whether the big bad world of spreadsheets and fancy presentations and sharp suits was either. It took me two years and a big shift in job profile to realise that this is actually where my interest lay. It is then, revelling in the understanding that I did not want to be embroiled in this cauldron to get away from a lousy job or the impending threat of a blissful nuptial encumbrance that I finally went about the business of getting into a prestigious B-school.
Why does this make me happy? It’s special because for once I did not follow scripture. I stuck it out, evaluated options and did not do a Science -> Engineering -> Crappy job -> MBA or a Random Undergraduate Degree -> MBA. I figured out that this was what I wanted to do and that’s when I did it, not because that’s what everybody else did. And that requires a thorough understanding of yourself and what you want which only comes with some time and experience.
The second vindication of my decision came during my summer internship. One late evening when my boss and I were the only ones left on the floor, I went to have a word with her about something I was working on. And while discussing my project we strayed to talking about what most people now look for in hiring MBA graduates. The answer then was a little surprising to me then, but now having chewed it over for a while it makes sense to me. Her statement was that people don’t go to the top B-schools to hire people who are very good at Marketing or Finance or HR. They go to the best places because that’s where they find the best talent. It’s the selection procedure and exclusivity of a particular institute which most attracts the biggest brands.
Many of the top industry leaders who have come to speak to us over the past year, have also said that one of the first things you do when you get into the industry is un-learn what you have learned over the past two years. On this portal itself I have seen more than a few posts debating whether an MBA actually adds value to you in terms of skill-sets or is it just the ability to sustain pressure and the tag of being exclusive or brilliant that really does the trick (Take a look
here and
here).
And if that really is the case, wouldn’t it better to get a taste of the real world first? When you approach people with years of experience, within campus and especially during your internships and final placement, would it not be much better for you to have an idea of how organizations really function?
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"What the hell is going on!!" Don't let this be you[/caption]
What one needs to understand is, things get crazy, people are busy, there’s a lot of politics and many big egos bumping into each other and most importantly nobody likes a naïve person who treads on them without even realizing he’s doing serious damage. And to handle all of that you need diplomacy and skills they don’t teach in a B-school. So if you’re reading this and haven’t got an MBA yet, please do yourself a favour and work for a bit first.
- Nadeem
Nadeem is an amateur storyteller at
42shadesoctarine.wordpress.com
Drop him a line on Twitter or Facebook. He doesn’t usually bite.
