I must agree that this blog should have been published at least 2 months back....but somehow, couldn't complete it till now. Well, better late than never.....
The journey started some where during the fag end of summer in 2008...the world had just woken up to the shocking demise of Lehman brothers and the good story was slowly turning sour...My work life had started showing signs of the same and it was getting dull day after day. This is when I thought that I should give a shot to my dream of doing a MBA from a reputed college.....in India off-course, wanted to be at close proximity with my family. Though everyone of us wants the best, but somehow God has his/her (not sure of the gender!) own ways to decided who gets what, and so I was given a chance to get my B-degree from XLRI, jamshedpur.
Talking about XLRI, it's one of the oldest colleges started in India in the year 1949 and has consistently been rated among the top most B schools in India. I was selected for a 1 year business program where the group size was 97 with average work exp of 7+ years. We had a diverse group of people in our batch coming from backgrounds like medicine, Army, Airforce, Architecture, Banking, Sales, Core engineering and off course the omni-present IT!
We started off with a three day preparatory program, which did give us a flavour of the subjects and the days to come ahead.....and believe me it wasn't a rosy one!
The next one month we started off with subjects like MAN(i)AC , QTMD (Quite Torture Mental Disaster) , MCN (ahh!) etc which were an eye opener for most of us....and we started gearing up for more sleepless nights and sleepy classes ahead....then in July we did get a break from the classes in the form of Village trip and the TSAF (Adventure Trip). The village trip was an amazing and humble experience, where we met village folks near a place called Jamadoba in Jharkhand and saw some amazing entrepreneurial spirit amongst them, in spite of the difficulties. Seeing them I realised how fortunate we are to get such opportunities...after that we had an exciting adventure journey with TSAF, where each one of us irrespective of their age and gender did all kinds of adventure tasks, starting from mountaineering, rappelling, boating..and what not.....I believe by the end of the 3 day adventure trip we all must have lost at-least 3-5 kilos and grown darker by a shade or two!
Soon, the first semester came tumbling our way and by the time we finished up with the gruelling 7 days of exams , the 2nd term started without any break...and then came even more tough subjects.....soon we were done with the second term (the fastest and the most gruelling term) and were getting ready for the international Immersion...By this time the whole batch was trimmed and grounded....people who were flying high the first day where grounded, people who were speaking in a low voice were debating like they have been doing this all their life....The placecom was elected and the brochure team was racing against time to get them out and send it through the various corporates......We had our part to play by posing for the photo shoot for the brochure and trying to give out the best look we had. By end of October we were off to different destinations across the world for our international immersion. Some went to US, some to Germany, few went to France and I accompanied the team which went to Manila, Philippines. International immersion was a great experience for everyone, specially for people for whom these was the first experience abroad. They not only experienced world class universities and professors but also world class cities, industries and other experiences !! . As soon as we were back, we were gripped by the placecom fever....there were debates , debates and yet more debates.....Placecom guys were trying to make both ends meet. On one hand they were trying to woe the companies and on the other hand answer the questions of the students. People gave advises and went ahead to help the place com. Also, there were others who gave advises and went ahead to their rooms....By the end of Feb most of us had their concentration on the placements rather than studies, professors gave in their best to rope in companies through their contacts. In these hard times we did experience some very good subjects (electives) and professors, and my personal experience was that if given some more time, I would have loved to take a few more electives!(though some of my batch mates might disagree with me.) Some of the students amongst us were instrumental in Strengthening the ties between us and the students of other flagship courses in the college, between the batch and the professors. In these hard times we saw some amazing leadership capabilities from some of batch mates and their true colours were inspiring...In the fourth term we went ahead to Mumbai, bangalore for placement week and we were fortunate enough to place most of our batch mates by the last day of our 4th term exam (April 25th)....and by the day of our Convocation (mid may)we had almost everybody placed or in line.. this was one of the greatest achievement for the placecom, for the batch, for the faculty and for the college....The convocation was presided over by the MD of Tata Steel, Mr. HM Nerurkar ..... we ended in a happy note... after all that is what matters, isn't it?
After 2 months, of that journey, as I write today, I strongly feel that the last one year was worth the investment and it wouldn't have been possible to go on that journey alone; fortunately we all got the support of our family, friends, fellow GMPians and Faculty.....and today we all remain highly indebted to them and have to prove that their effort and sacrifice didn't going vain....So all the best to the batch of 2009-10 GMP.....Go conquer the world.....!!
