Congratulations, your hard work has finally paid off. You overcame all the hurdles and achieved your goal. It is time to pat yourself on the back. Enjoy and celebrate. You deserve it!
About me - I am a second-year student at IIM Calcutta. I will be writing a series of articles to prepare you for your upcoming days in college. This is the first article of the series. More will be published later.
In this series of articles, I will give you some crucial tips that will help you gain an advantage over your peers. In this article, however, I will focus mainly on the academics part.
Before you move to your college virtually or physically, you should know a few things about life at B-schools. It is very different here, in comparison to a typical undergraduate college. Life is very fast-paced, and there is a strict deadline for nearly every activity. The folks are quite competitive too, which can be expected from them, given the fact that they have slogged years in jobs and have seen how tough it is out in the outside world. People have worked hard to get here, and they are going to work even harder to extract full benefit from it. So, in order to survive, you need to plan. Currently, I am assuming that most of you are in your home and have plenty of time on hand. Hence, it is a perfect opportunity for you to prepare yourself for the upcoming days.
In most of the colleges, the first few terms comprise basic courses from different domains. For example - you will be taught Financial Reporting and Analysis, which is a basic course in Finance. You will also be taught the fundamentals of Marketing, Economics, Statistics etc. Those of you who are from commerce background would probably have done these courses in your college. You guys can revise the concepts and will be good to go. But others, like the engineers, who aren't familiar with these topics, must self-read these to prepare themselves to avoid lagging behind their prospective batchmates.
But don't worry too much. Because as I have said, these are the basic courses and are not hard to understand at all. B-schools know that many of the students are learning these courses for the first time in their life. So, the professors will teach you from the basics. But, they pick up pace very quickly. And the fact that you will have to compete with your batchmates, who might already know these stuff will make things a little tough.
So, it might be a good strategy to prepare in advance. This will smoothen the academic load, and you can participate in many other activities in the college instead of slogging day and night into studies. So, I have prepared a list of most common courses for you that are taught in Indian B-schools over the first few months. I have also included links to
free course videos/resources for you to check out.
Please note that you don't need to earn a certificate for the above courses. Simply, watch the free videos and learn the concepts.
Go through the above courses to put yourself ahead of everyone else.
Please put your comments below, to tell me what else you would like to know from me. I will try to write about those things in my future articles. Till then, signup and stay connected.
Best of Luck !!