Imagine you are on a roller-coaster. Sometimes, you feel your heart beating faster with pure joy before it is plunged into inexplicable sorrow the next second. Because everything you do makes you feel like you’re letting your family down. It makes you ashamed of your status as an ‘outlaw’ not entitled to the pure emotion of love. “The fundamental right to privacy, life with human dignity, equality, freedom and the pursuit of happiness; weren’t those meant to be in the American constitution and all those western liberalist agendas? We don’t tolerate such immorality in our culture, please.”
While April marks the onset of the heat wave in India, for MBA students it opens doors to the industrial exposure they have been vying for, since the moment they stepped into the B-school.
I stepped into JBIMS with an aim to pursue Marketing as my Career and Hindustan Unilever as the place I want to be at. I started my preparations to make that dream come alive, on Day 1.
Most students focus on the written test to make it to a b-school. Many of them actually ace the test but are not able to get through the PI round. It is the PI round which differentiates one from the other and determines which institute you land at.
MBA and cases are almost synonymous. B-Schools are characterized with loads of cases and pre-reads for each and every subject. A statement often used by the b-school professors is “We are just facilitators. The onus of learning is on you!” And the best tool used to further this cause is the case studies. While these are mostly Harvard cases of the highest quality, the learning actually depends on the way the course is structured by the professors. Let us look at a few types of case-based courses:
We were walking by the marina bay shopping mall, everything was so fascinating and so beautiful. Stores of luxurious brands one after the other, brands whose name I have never heard of, names which I couldn’t even pronounce, these stores were everywhere all around us, with beautiful lights and an enchanting aura around them. I couldn’t even afford to buy a single thing from here. This was the luxury segment about which I have read so much, In theory, I knew that wearing a $50,000 watch is luxury but now that I have seen it in front of me placed in the shelf. Now I can feel the ‘force’, and it was very compelling, tempting me to open the shelf and wear it, to walk out of the store with the watch on my hand and this frenzy was getting out of control. It was the voice of the salesman which brought me back to my sense. He was around 5”5’ lean clean shaved with neat black hair, wearing a black suit. He asked me, “what would you like to have, sir?” I came back to my senses. I could see it in his eyes, he wanted me out of there, or was it my own insecurity? I looked at him he was smiling and then he asked me again, “what are you looking for” I stepped back and told him “Nah...nothing I’m just looking at the stuff here, I can’t afford this” this was my defence mechanism! Somewhere in that moment, I felt in his eyes that he wants me out of his store. Then and there I had a realization, I was aspiring to that watch knowing fully that I can’t afford it.
