That New Girl At An IIM

Getting out of your home and facing the world alone is something that seemed very exciting, the need to be independent is just too strong to hold a girl in her home city. So when she got a chance to do just that, she grabbed it with both her hands. No long would she miss all the fun because she lived far away from home. No longer would she be left out.

But little did she know that she would have a greater struggle with her emotions when she was alone in a foreign city, living in a flat with three other strangers and in an environment which had a real strange mix of people from all around the country. People with different cultures, different attitudes, different traditions and altogether too different from her were now supposed to be her only source of human interaction. In her quest for independence, she forgot that there was something she would have to trade off for that independence – her home, where the mere presence of her parents seemed to make everything better.

Life at IIM is very well explained in a hundred different articles written from hundred different perspectives. This girl had read them all. Hence, she was prepared for late nights (or early mornings) midnight Maggi and snacks, keeping her eyes open with 10 cups of coffee, high-stress levels, (un)healthy competition among batch mates, etc. But there was something that she wasn’t prepared for. She was so busy in the first couple of months that she never got a chance to stop and think, that how alone she was in this part of her world; since she was in denial of the new people around her, she never really made an effort to form relationships.

So that day, after having a tub of chocolate ice-cream, she observed everything around her. She observed how people talked to her, what they were thinking, how they reacted to any change in the environment, in all what type of people surrounded her. She wanted to find that one confidant who would make her feel at home. She knew what made her happy here; it was the whole professional package that MBA brought with it. She loved that she was kept busy all through the day and through the night either doing assignments, solving cases, participating in competitions, preparing for events, etc. After all, this was why she was here for. What she managed to do in 24 hours here, used to take at least a week during her under graduation! Of course, she was happy with that. So now, for a perfect life, she just needed to sort out her personal life. But was it really separate here?

When she set out to find that one person, she found that in the course of these two terms (6 months) somehow she had gotten used to this batch of 69 people. She expected to find these people everyday in her small campus. Sure, she had her moments of getting irritated with a lot of them, she surely wasn’t best buddies with most of them, but somehow they had become her comfort zone. In the end, she found that she really didn’t have anything to complain.