For economics, free lunch might not exist, but free riders at IIM who does everything slowly or most of the times nothing at all, at their own pace to the sneaky Kotler derivative who cries and dies for rules, let’s meet more specimen variety while forming groups, you find at an IIM than you found in your Biology Lab at school.
A right study group is perhaps the second most important thing you need to get right at an IIM (the first being your balance sheet in the Financial Reporting and Analysis exam).
While the PGP Office does the Achilles’s hill task of forming study groups for the first trimester, you are left at your own will to continue the legacy for the rest of your course and believe me this process will surely make you lose your fat, if you have been a lone wanderer in the mystique world of group forming exercise at IIM. Since your choice of group has a significant influence on your grades, owing to tones of group assignment you would encounter here, makes you wonder, why writing CAT is an individual exercise.
Coming back again to group formation exercise, you will encounter three different kinds of individuals, from picky noses to die-hard friend zoned categories and at last, the one no one cares about people.
The picky ones are generally good in corporate finance, they analyse the whole batch with respect to the returns one might offer while being in a group. They make sure that they lay their hands first in right set of people, in IIM jargon known as subject experts.
Die-hard friend zoned, you might have got it, they can’t bear to stay apart from their friends, given a chance they might include people from other sections or courses to your group provided they have been friends with them.
Last but not the least is the sole wanderer; they think they are so flexible that they can work with anyone, only to be left devastated of their misconception at the end of disaster group results. Or to be practical they form groups with the left ones.
Since your peace of mind depends on your group you made, next comes the challenge of finding those people you made team with? If you are successful in both of these endeavours, then pray, yes you better pray even if you are atheist. Now you must be wondering what might go wrong now? Well, few things might become a black cat in your path of getting good grades.
- The person who is supposed to submit the soft/hard copy, forgot doing that, or let’s be practical he was too lazy to do that on his own and might be cursing the whole group for ending him with such a responsibility of sending the final mail, while rest of them are sleeping.
- The faculty hates your group, because you didn’t have gender equality or maybe you sounded snobby, or let’s be practical he didn’t like the way you tucked in your shirt in your trousers, damn man, it reminded him of his own failure days….contagion bias, sorry can’t help.
- So, what are the typical group mates?