With 26th November already behind you, its halftime to your journey of getting into the b-school of your dreams. Now that you have eliminated a major chunk of your competition through your aptitude and analytical skills, the next half begins. It’s now that you will be competing with students who are of equivalent or higher calibre and belong to crème de la crème.
I am a South Indian with very less exposure to Hindi (I was forced to take Hindi as an elective during my 3rd year in Undergraduate (YES! :/) and am still clueless how I ended up with a C (I was expecting an F :P)). So, you can imagine my state when I got an admit into IIM Indore! I had months to pick up on Hindi before stepping into Madhya Pradesh for the first time, but as usual, I was like Blah and spent time catching up with family, and here is why. Almost 2 years now and still I manage to shameless say “ Sir, Hindi nehi maalum.. English se please explain kardeejiye..” (Hey I am proud I have come this far!) Anyway, here is how I am still surviving happily :D The main goal of this article is basic survival tricks, and here is how:
“Tell us something about yourself.” This was the quintessential question that greeted me as I sat before two distinguished professors of IIM Lucknow. What followed was a barrage of discussion on my background, cities I had lived in, the college I had studied, projects I had worked on, interests and a lot of other things. Did I do exceptionally well? Not really. Looking back, I can certainly say that I could have tackled some questions better had I been more prepared. Therefore, I decided to write this piece to help other aspirants prepare better and ace their dream colleges. Don’t worry; I will not bore you with a word by word description of how the interview progressed. I’ll only talk about what I learned from the interviews, not only of IIM L but also of other colleges. I sincerely hope it helps
After cracking those MBA entrances, WAT becomes the next nerve-wracking process to crack. It is totally unpredictable as you do not know who will be grading it, if the grader has the same inclination as you and most importantly you can roughly gauge yourself in a GD or a PI but cannot in WAT. You may end up with questions like, do you stay neutral on a topic or take sides? What do you do if you have no content for the topic asked? How do you structure your thoughts and reciprocate that in writing? How do you practice for WATs? etc.. So, let me help me. Below are pointers for you to prepare for WAT and also what do you do during WAT.
On 19th December 2017 a news story popped out, Ola acquired Foodpanda – India Division for a stock deal and was going to invest $200 Million into that business. Most of the people didn’t understand that move and why Ola would want to enter a completely different business from what they have been successful in i.e Cabs and Transport. Ola bought TaxiForSure for $200 million a year back but that made sense as it would come under the market expansion as per the Ansoff matrix and reduce one of its competitors and increase its fleet of vehicles but what are they looking for in food delivery industry which comes under diversification (new market and product). This is a little risky move. People can understand this move if they are closely following the moves and strategies of Ola. Now let’s analyze in detail why Ola made this move. Let’s start with analysis and growth of the 2 companies, Ola and Foodpanda in India.
It has been about 13 months since the government announced the much criticised demonetisation policy on 8th of November 2016. Much has been debated and written about it since then. While the opposition and the intellegisia of the country has been hounding the government day and night about its failure, the government still calls itself the champion of anti-corruption crusade based on the slew of economic reforms that they have bought in including demonetisation.
Stress and interview go together like peanut butter and jelly when it comes to the Personal Interview Rounds of an MBA School’s selection process. This is because (1) MBA is not a joke. It gets very hectic and stressful. You will have multiple exams on the same day, midnight surprise quizzes, long lectures that you would have to prepare for beforehand etc. (2) MBA graduates when letting out in the wild encounter very stressful conditions under which they might have to take crucial decisions. Most of the panellists are professors of that college and they do not want to stress you out and enjoy that but rather test if you will be able to cope up with all that stress. So here is what you can do to prove to the panel that you will be able to squish stress as easily as a pulp!
