My MBA Journey - I

This is one side of my life that I have never blogged about. My MBA Journey. Two years into this journey I am getting more serious by the day.

I have rarely blogged about this aspect of my life partly because I am yet to achieve something in this area. But now I get the feeling that this is a big aspect of my life and I need to pen down some of my thoughts.

Being an Indian, competition is something I have faced right from the day I went for my Kinder Garden :). Believe it or not, if you are an Indian, if you dont grab the first bite, you dont get a second bite. Fierce competition would be an understatement.

This is most visible in the case of an admit to one of the top B Schools in India, namely the IIMs. I come one of the top colleges in India for engineering, i.e BITS Pilani, and have met some of the best brains in the country there. The BITSian culture has had a great impact on me, and becoming a big shot in the industry one day has sort of become my dream.

I always thought gaining some experience is a must before you get into a B school , and I still believe experience is something that is very valuable for an MBA. The reason is quite simple, if you are just fresh out of college, you donot know one bit about working in projects, being in a team, meeting deadlines, paying taxes, facing real life competition (mind you there is a difference between competition at college and competition at work, ....at college it does not make much difference if you get an A grade or a B grade, but it hurts bad when someone says your work is anything but outstanding), and an exposure to industry and business in general. Also, one matures as one gains work experience and can really decide what one wants to do with his/her life.

The advantage of doing an MBA without work-ex is perhaps that one might still be in touch with the education process (studying long hours etc.) , and the math would be strong. But the actual value that one derives out of the course I believe is lesser for a non-experienced.

Anyways, my journey began while I was into roughly a couple of years of experience. I belong to a very common background - a middle class, engineering graduate with IT experience. I started out by taking the Common Admissions Test (an entrance to some of the TOP colleges in India). My journey started by attending classes to crack the CAT at the TIME institute at Hyderabad.
The very first impression I had when I joined the training was that Math was going to be a nightmare in clearing the CAT exam.

I prepared hard for the Math part of it (we call it Quantitative, and Data Interpretation). I have a decent hold in my English abilities, so I did not spend too much time for preparing for the English part of it. I used to score somewhere in the top 3 odd percentile of students writing the exam and I Was fairly confident of my clearing the entrance.

The D day came. Nov 20 2004. The test : Objective type 150 odd marks. CAT is always known to spring surprises and there was a big bombshell waiting to explode that year. They had introduced a differential marking scheme. Till the year before it was always one markers.

We had to take a spot decision whether to go for low risk low yield 1 markers or high risk high yield 2 markers. I took a higher risk in the English as I was always good at it, and took the low risk route in the Math. My scores finally read : Quantitative : 97 percentile. Data Interpretation : 99 percentile. English : 89 percentile. Overall : 98.43 percentile.

With two years of experience in a multinational, I thought I would certainly get atleast 2-3 calls from the IIMs (I did not try for the lower rung colleges in India, because I did not think their programs were a good fit for me). I got 0 calls. I was even more surprised that year, when many people managed to get a call from these institutes even though their overall score was much less than mine. I could not find out where I really missed out and it left a very bad taste after almost 6 months of practising for the exams went down the drain.

However, I had gained a lot of experience from this exam. I gave another attempt at it. Nov 21 2005. Another bombshell. Too less questions. Tougher exam, and increased ambiguity in some of the English questions. From the earlier experience, I decided to go into spending more time in English, as they seemed to give more preference to it and that was the costly mistake I did in this paper, because apparently, this year I should have given lesser importance to it since it was of very high difficulty level.

Another blotched attempt. My score read Quantitative : 96. DI 92 English 92 and overall 97

But surprise came in the form of an interview call from arguably one of the best institutes in India , the IIM B. I gave it a good shot. Got great recommendations from my seniors. Wrote well thought out essays. And was quite well prepared on the day of the interview. But somehow I could not get in....so will try once more....

More to continue.....