On June 1st, 2020, amidst the COVID scenario and the prevailing lockdown restrictions, the happiest moment of my life occurred when I got the most awaited news from my father that I converted the seat in one of the premier B-Schools of India. I excitedly filled out the application form and confirmed my seat within the next few days. I was eagerly waiting to get onto the campus for I have heard a lot of the most interesting, enthusiastic, and adventurous MBA life stories and wanted to live those hectic but beautiful days of my life.
Then came the lockdown extension and a notification that the college would start its induction program from July 15th, 2020. Meanwhile, to keep us connected to the campus, the college has provided us with online pre-induction material to bring us on par as we, students, are from diverse backgrounds. Excitedly, I started going through the material on a daily basis. As our college is student-driven, our seniors of the admission team have given us our first task with the name 'Virtual City Meet' wherein the whole of batch 2020-2022 was divided into groups of 12-15 each to collaborate and come up with a creative video introducing ourselves. This task has helped those 15 members to interact a lot and get to know each other who are from the nearby regions. This served as a platform to know a few peers in person through the online meetings we had for ourselves in the name of the task and got to know about each other's hobbies and talents. We all worked as a group despite the fact that we never saw or met each other before and sometimes forget the names of each other. We had a time length limit for the video and we had multiple discussions to fit all our introductions and submit it on time.
After all the groups have submitted their respective videos on the given date, our seniors have released each of our videos one by one and it was mesmerizing to see so many peers out there on the screen and a couple of videos had a commendable reach. Then came in the interaction with our seniors where we had to come up with creative ideas to conduct games in order to know them and about our college in a better way. We had quite a fun interaction virtually for those two hours and wondered how amazing would it be on the campus present physically. The day arrived when the college has kick-started officially with its induction program for about two weeks which were ranging from introductions of our director, faculty, and other staff and the campus to our individual faculty interaction. It was a whole lot of experience already.
Right then arrived our seniors to take this experience to a different level by preparing us to get accustomed to the MBA rigor, they conducted batch meets, gave us assignments to complete within a stipulated time. This again helped our batch bond even stronger among ourselves as each one of us hailed from different educational backgrounds and had to collaborate intensively to understand different topics, concepts, and approaches. At the end of the week, we had sleepless nights, many virtual friends with countless laughs and memories together despite staying miles away. Once again our seniors proved us that they are always having our back in all these unforeseen conditions.
It was the first week of August and our online classes had started off, our seniors came up with the committee rounds which went on for the next five days. Being in a committee with the seniors, working together with them gives a different experience and get a lot of guidance individually. It is equally fun to hang out with them late in the nights virtually. We ought to come up with creative ideas to stand out from the crowd for the upcoming events.
However, I believe that everyone thinks that it's a huge task to maintain a good friendship online through different platforms like Teams meetings, google meets, zoom calls when we didn't even meet for once in our lifetime previously but I feel that we are having much faster bonding despite the internet issues, call lags, unavailability of a few batchmates in one go. All we had is to keep growing into a good family along with maintaining social distancing and taking proper care of ourselves.
MBA is an amalgamation of experience and learning. I am looking forward to living my MBA life on campus as and when our college reopens. Everything happens for a reason and my MBA journey started off when the world came to a halt. This might be leading to once in a lifetime experience like never before and ever after. I would tell this story to the generations to come, full of excitement and I bet they would listen to me with all ears.