When life closes all doors to a meteoric growth of personality and exponential rates of learning, it opens another door too!

It starts with a 'Master' and has a 'Management' in it. Not so difficult to guess.

But behold - it is not easy to get into a good B-school!

It all started one fine day when the achiever in me started to question the regular me. So then began the 2 years of constant problem solving, reasoning with tangled logic of grammar juxtaposed with verbose literature and solving data charts looking like Spider-Man's most awkward creations.

After toiling hard and burning mid-day oil in office, came the jubilation of finally cracking one of the world's toughest exam which gets tweaked and twisted every passing year.

But it was short-lived!

Cometh the hour of joining, I ventured into the corporate manager factory. Starry eyes and expectations running sky high, it was a dream come true moment to be counted amongst the country's cream of the population who get a chance to set foot in the hallowed portals of a top-10 B-school. But when the haze of the initial honeymoon period started to fade, the real picture started to get clearer.

The expectation of solving cases and curing all troubles of the world in a single stroke was replaced with mind-bending schedules of tasks, tasks and even more tasks. Sometimes, it was even coupled with marathon classes and assignments. Firstly, we had a "nice" interaction with our dear seniors who left no stone unturned in making us get a feel of how the corporate world's worst case scenarios look and feel like.

Then came the turn of the real bosses of the college, aka " The Profs " .

It was in a popular folklore running around college that if someday you come face to face with Shakespeare, you stand better odds of defeating him than the mighty professors of the great MBA dream at any verbal duel.

So, after the initial introduction into the dream, we got a taste of the real characters in the play. There were sessions where the learning was so high that you forget who you are and try and keep the information stacked up in your head.

So, in between these sessions and the great parties the likes of which are difficult to find anywhere else, learning happened. We soon realised that in order to solve the greatest challenges of the world, you have to first know how to wrap your heads around problems which look so trivial that you think they won't matter in the long run but finally as you move along the case, you realise that the huge furore that arose was the child of that small spark.

It is often said during times of pain and metamorphosing pressure that time stops moving at its regular speed and slows down, but the phrase completely reversed on its head for us and the time ran away faster than a speeding bullet train. Such was the experience that you need to be there first hand to get a complete feel of it and I can bet you would want to relive those moments again even after what you've just witnessed.

Having gone through the roads which my peers say were the most challenging times in an MBA curriculum and coming out of it unscathed but with a few scars that would be a reminder of the learning and growth during this phase of life, I sit back and sometimes think was it a nightmare or was it a dream?

The feeling that I get internally was somewhere closer to a dream than anything else. Maybe it was just an essential nightmare you had to go through in order to enjoy the dream.

Thanks for reading the article and I hope further more insightful and thoughtful articles would come up from this mere mortal.

So stay tuned and be happy!

arpit pati

Living The MBA Dream At XIMB