When you prided yourself in creeping into class unnoticed, you hadn’t met the concept of 23:59:59!
While ‘deadlines are sacrosanct’ is something you will routinely hear from Day 1 at IIM, failing to adhere to these deadlines has far worse consequences. Be it the time for a student body meet, an application form deadline or just the closing of doors before class starts, time is the most precious commodity at B-School and everyone adheres to punctuality right till the last nanosecond! This is a far cry from the tendency for all events at engineering college to start half an hour after the scheduled time.
When you conquered the JEE and felt that the rat race couldn’t get any worse, you had unknowingly just created the first ‘spike’ that would help you in the ‘CV race’!
There are engineering placements and then there are B-school placements; the gap couldn’t be wider; the stakes couldn’t be higher! I still remember the tense atmosphere in the air during placement season in engineering, but 3 weeks into B-school, one meets fierce competition around every corner. Surviving in an atmosphere where excellence is mundane and ingenuity is valued drives you to spend your entire first month in B-school striving to perfect that 1 sheet of paper that is going to be your stairway from HelL to heaven! And the twist in the tale is that all those technically challenging engineering internships suddenly have far lesser value when compared against equally challenging ‘CA internships’ which happen to have so much more ‘impact’!
When you pictured B-School life as a 2-year sojourn filled with plush facilities and a life of comfort, you had fully forgotten the fundamental principle of Indian Institutes - all hostels are alike!
Coming from an NIT where I had survived 50 degrees heat with a rattling desert cooler and rooms that were filled with families of lizards, I was looking forward to a drastic change in living conditions. However, my heart sank the day I pushed open my room door at IIM. Engineering days flashed back- the same matchbox-sized room, the same cooler, the same shared bathrooms, the same mess food. But B.V Doshi’s architectural beauties house an air-conditioned library & computer centre that are accessible 24/7 and here lies our refuge.
All in all, to each and every one of you engineers out there, it’s time to say goodbye to all your prejudices and biases, and embrace possibly the last 2 years of your education with an open mind! Make some great friends from all across the country and all walks of life, learn from some really approachable and inspiring teachers, and have fun along the way as you get placed and enter the corporate world. For after all an engineer has always been about jugaad, it’s just that initially, everything seems to be ‘globe’ to us at B-School!
Also read - Trapped In Mediocrity: A Peek Into Life At IIM Calcutta, and 35 Truths About Life At Indian B-Schools
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