Fuqua Days!

A Problem of Scale and Scope in India

2011-03-05T22:45:00.000-08:00

When one talks about growth, more often than not, there are two dimensions that people are really talking about. One is Scale and the other is Scope. Scaling up means doing more of what is being currently done. If you're a manufacturing unit, you create 10 times more of the same part. Scope is a bit trickier. Scope is about the variety of products or services. It is about defining the boundaries and answering what, for whom, when and other such tough questions. For example, it is deciding whether to design the part for a life expectancy of 10 years or 20 years. Or whether it should be launched in one country or many countries; whether it should fit into one particular tool or multiple tools across various industries, and so on and so forth.

Scale is almost synonymous with growth. But the problem with mistaking scale for growth is that it is a horribly narrow view. What I often like to say is that if you lose $2 on every unit, making 100 units will only leave you poorer by $200. And that is certainly no way to grow. It sounds simple enough. And yet, companies fall into this trap all too often.

To understand why that is the case, you have to understand Scope, the poorer cousin of Scale. Where Scale talks about bigger numbers, 'growth' curves that look like the trajectory of a rocket just fired, Scope is hard to pin down. People who talk about scope talk about unpleasant things. They talk using words like 'define', 'focus', or (God forbid!) 'limit' - none of which sound like growth words at all! In fact, one can be forgiven for mistaking 'scope' to be synonymous with 'reduction'. Contrast that with someone who is talking about bigger numbers, more units, support for 10 more file formats, bigger addressable market, entry into a new industry sector; and you can guess who comes out all smiles and triumphant from that meeting room.

If Scope can get an equal hearing alongside its flamboyant, adrenaline-pumping cousin, Scale, it can do wonders to business growth. It is not always obvious how and when Scope puts up its meek hand to speak (and is snubbed) or when Scale rears its ugly head (and everyone regales in its mathematical beauty). Here are some places to watch out for these two things:

1. Are you jumping to calculations too fast in your head? Of course, you always have to run a few numbers. But if number-crunching comes without taking what the numbers say to its logical conclusion, then something is wrong. For example, is setting a higher price for your product after adding a few features the right thing to do? Or is the optimum price that will drive volumes and maximize profit actually lower? Have you considered that? Or here's a really simple one; Are 20 features better than 10? Or a more nuanced one; Is Mac+PC support better than only PC support (2 is better than 1, right?). That last one is actually a scale solution being applied to a scope problem. It is a slippery slope indeed.

2. Does it all 'seem the same' sometimes? When building a screw for a car seems very similar to building one for a truck or a plane, think again! Are they really the same? Or are you looking at the problem through the Scale lens? Is your scope of business the car or the screw? As much as we would like it to be the case, the world is not made up of only the things that are supplied, but also the things that form the demand (and no, they are not the same). This is a topic that gets into marketing, and merits a blog post of its own - perhaps some day in the future.

3. Can something really be done in '10 minutes'? This is my favorite simply because I have seen it happen all of my professional life in one form or the other. The time to do something might be 10 minutes, but there's probably a host of other things that have to be considered before something is actually 'done'. Is it being done the right way or will doing it the 'right' way take not 10 minutes, but 2 days? Or just because it will take 10 minutes to do, does it mean it should be done? When will your team be able to get to it? If the answer is 'after these 10 other things, which will take about a week', there's not much point in saying 10 minutes, is there? The 10 other things actually create a scope problem, and you need a scope solution to arrive at the right number. We in the Indian software industry have been giving dumb 'effort estimates' to our customers for far too long, while they take care of prioritizing things and solving the scope problem. Do we even know a scope problem exists?

4. Is there something 'between the lines' that you are missing? This is a tough one to spot. Was there an implied context to the discussion that has somehow got lost in the last few minutes? If so, was it intentional or was it because the rocket-launching cousin, Scale just decided to take you for a ride? Doing a spot check and bringing the discussion back to its essence is vital before the horses run too far ahead. There should be no shame in doing that. Brainstorming is one thing, but what the writers on the benefits of brainstorming often fail to mention is the rigorous analysis meeting that comes a day later to put things within scope and cut out things that only served to squeeze out the creative juices. Not all meetings can be brainstorming, and thinking that some cool idea that came out of a brainstorming meeting is going to cut it in the real world is, for the lack of a better word, brainless!

Living in India these days is like living on steroids, or at least living amongst people who are high on steroids or drugs or something. Nothing less than 'anything is possible' is a fashionable thing to say. A discussion on touch-screen tablets quickly degenerates into a discussion about augmented reality, and how Google/Apple will bring it 'tomorrow' (Really? It took 30 years for computers to go from mouse to touch). Hiring a CEO for a start-up has become an exercise in finding the person with the biggest Rolodex for maximum lead-gen, and not about someone who can drive the company through a complex maze of tough choices. How many product feature discussions happen in a vacuum purely based on only 'neighboring' features, regardless of what users really want? There's cribbing about why the iPad does not allow phone calls. (Does just having a SIM card make iPad a good candidate for a phone? Or should we leave something out for 2012 also? ;-) Ok, that last bit was pure sarcasm.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for the go-get-it attitude. In fact, I love it. But I say we've been the intelligent engineers and number-crunching nerds of the world for far too long. I say we wake up and look around a little now and see what else is needed. And an intelligent discussion on the scope of our capabilities and the scope of everything we're building is definitely high up on the table. A discussion about 'scaling up' is meaningless (nay, dangerous!) without one on 'scoping it'.

Location:Pune,India

My Three Big Takeaways from MBA

2009-05-23T10:22:00.000-07:00

The one question that I get asked a lot is "what are the top 1 or 2 things you learned during MBA"? It takes a while to put your finger on what MBA gives you (at least it took me some time to figure this out). Blame it on the nature of the degree, it's vastness, and the nature of business itself (a blend of analytics, science and an art in many ways). So, if you were to ask me that question, following are the three things that I think you would learn in an MBA from a top school like Duke:

How to cut through the clutter and gather information. I spend days on end reading, researching, validating, observing and thinking about information. This might seem trivial, but much of the information out there is based on shaky assumptions or is driven by wrongful incentives. Some are just downright inaccurate. Even when you are not looking for information actively, you see things around you in a different light. An otherwise great commercial on TV might start looking ineffective when you see it through your "MBA lens" or a downright irritating one will start making sense. A casual remark by a colleague about politics or life or celebrity will get you thinking about how people think and react to information. The courses in an MBA delve into fields ranging from philosophy to sociology to psychology, statistics and many more apart from the usual ones like economics, finance etc.

"Managers ought to be good at skimming the cream from different fields of expertise and putting them together in many different and interesting ways."

Which leads me to the next big takeaway.

How to take a step back and structure information. Gathering information and being able to poke holes or criticize or appreciate the right information is one thing. Putting them together in a structure and template, drawing up patterns and getting your hands around what it all collectively is telling you is a very different thing. During MBA, you will learn how to structure information, how to put them together in models, how to drop or pick up relevant information, and how to make realistic assumptions for parts that are not available or not visible clearly. When you have to look at your industry, the economy, the competition and what have you, the way these interplay with each other and the amount of factors that you have to deal with can become mind-numbing. You might not get the right answer, but you cannot afford to have no answer! The real deal is to be able to gain insights from the information.

Once, while doing a competitive analysis, I was taken aback by what came out of it. In an emerging field and a nascent industry, the companies I analyzed were taking six different approaches to running their businesses! It is very hard to predict how an emerging industry would structure itself, and you have to look at everything from regulatory environment to disruptive forces to consumer behavior and myriad other factors to be able to take a stance. Even if you believe you can change course during execution, you have to know how and when, and why! Time and again, I have seen people getting the individual pieces right, but still struggling with the comprehensiveness of it all.

"For what it is worth, it's like getting one face of a Rubik's cube right. Solving the whole puzzle is a very different ballgame."

How to present information. You can gather and structure information in the best possible way, but communicating the information to others is paramount. Business world is ridden with skepticism. There is attention deficit and information overload at the top no matter which organization you pick. When you walk into the boardroom with information and an analysis that you think truly provides a way forward for your company or your product, you have to be able to present that information really well. You need to have all the bases covered, and be ready for the tough questions that will follow. This is not about making your slides pretty. This is about carefully uncovering layer upon layer of information you have gathered and structured to create the right impact and convince the folks in that room. I have seen managers jumping from slide 3 to slide 10 and then back to 5 and so on in order to answer a question. I have seen them fumbling with their notepads and Excel sheets for the right data points - yes, during a presentation (you can guess how well and how long those meetings went!). So remember,

"What you present is at least as important as what you have."

Of course, none of the above is exclusive to MBA. But they are fundamental to running any business. And sure enough, a good MBA will give you a shot at doing these three things - gathering information, structuring information and presenting information - really, really well.

(Truth be told, it is Feb 2011 as I publish this post. I wrote this post almost two years ago. I didn't publish it then, but I found it surprisingly relevant even today. This would probably be my last post related directly to MBA - as the MBA itself is not a big part of my life anymore. I do feel a bit silly posting it - just like how a school-time crush feels silly when you reach college - but it closes an important chapter nevertheless.)

Teledora.com

2007-02-11T04:35:00.000-08:00

It has been a long while since I posted anything on this blog. The second year is close to an end and there doesn't seem to be much more to write. I am not even in school right now. I am in India, in a different world altogether, working on a project of my own. Oh don't worry, I am going back in March to finish my courses! MBA meant a lot to me, and I figured I would do well to try something of my own during school. We have done enough case studies (believe me! :-)), but it was time for me to create and solve a case of my own... and it feels wonderful to create a problem of your own, analyze it and then try and solve it in your own style.

In any case, Valentine's Day is coming up and I am busy promoting Teledora.com through all the modern marketing channels available. It has been an interesting ride and I am so glad I took this up and executed it that it is hard to mention what I feel. I have spent endless days and nights thinking about Teledora. Not unless you catch hold of something new and try to do it will you realize how different the world of entreprenuership is. The amount of choices you are faced with are mind-numbing. I have no boss to tell me what is to be achieved. I have no CEO laying down the direction the product needs to take. At one point (and it still is the same to a large extent), the number of things I could have turned Teledora into was quite simply overwhelming. When you are leading through the unknown, how can you predict which strategy is best, going forward? The answer to that question leads to endless pursuit of data, thoughts and feedback from friends. The fact that Teledora could have been any of the 20 different things that I thought about, has been the most surprising part of this venture. Only time will tell if my choices were good enough, but it does feel wonderful to be truly on the driving seat for once!

I have had a pretty decent stream of visitors on this blog over the last couple of years. Going by the comments posted here, no one's probably hated this blog! I don't know when I would next post into this blog, but it has been a fun experience. This blog started as a way to keep my friends and family updated about my life in school. The blog description above (that hasn't changed ever since I started) talks about how the content here could change into something more serious. To be honest, I am quite taken aback myself! This blog has helped me keep my sanity through a life-changing experience.

Until we meet again.... check out www.teledora.com and hope you have fun recording your voice!

Second year term 1

2006-10-05T20:46:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since I posted anything on the blog. It's partially due to lack of good content, but also because my laptop crashed at the beginning of this term and I am having to use the school's Windows machines to do everything from checking mail to finishing assignments!

Let me start with my electives this term. The courses I have taken in this term are Venture Capital and Private Equity, Hightech marketing, Macroeconomics and Corporate Finance.

It's a good spread in terms of breadth and here is my rationale. Fuqua MBA program, and at least some if not all top school MBA programs, are general management courses with emphasis on building leaders with broad skills that can be utilized in their careers that will span another 30 years. 30 years! And I am still not 30! One of the questions I asked the alumni who interviewed me for Fuqua was how do you keep yourself updated with new stuff after getting out of the school? He answered my question well - that's not important - but what is important is that this MBA is a kind of thing that you do once in a lifetime and it has to last a lifetime!

So my electives will span a spectrum of functions and industries: right now it's marketing, economics and finance. Pretty soon, I intend to cover strategy, operations, accounting (shudder!) and decision models. (By the way, if you plan to follow this path, be careful because every time a recruiter asks me any question like "where do you see yourself in 10 years" or "what are your long term career goals", my answer sounds wishy-washy incoherent stream of words... and I prefer it that way.)

Coming back to my electives; being from the software industry and the kind of exposure to finance I desired, venture capital and private equity fit in nicely. It is a subject that would interest the analytical person in you, the entrepreneur, the hard-nosed business person, all at the same time. It is an industry that is immensely interesting, and full of seemingly heroic stunts pulled by people!

Hightech marketing was sort of an obvious choice for me although I thought my MBA is becoming a little marketing-heavy. The core marketing course, then a couple of electives previously, an internship in marketing and now this! Well, some amount of Duke would rub off on everyone I guess, and it's just hard to avoid such great courses in marketing with very good faculty and research pool at Fuqua. In any case, I am glad I took the course, but I promise to cut down on marketing going further! :-) The course itself talked about the nuances associated with high tech, cutting edge products, be it in biotech or IT. We learnt models on diffusion of technology, forecasting and more traditional concepts like managing channels etc. in such products.

Macroeconomics is one of the courses that I came to MBA for! It sounds lame, but I was dying to understand global economics of countries, currencies and what not. Yes there was strategy, there was marketing, finance and the rest, but macroeconomics was something that you read about and wondered about a lot! The course turned out to be great and it feels good to be a little more knowledgeable and have more topics to talk about over dinner at home!

Finally, Corporate Finance. I just can't describe how useful this course was and how good it feels to understand the engine behind corporations. Great professor, fantastic course structure and team assignments that completed your understanding like nothing else!

We have our exams next week, the fall break, and then we will all be set for term 2! I know this post read like a forward for a horrible book, but it's hard to get your creative juices going sitting in a computer lab at midnight, even if Fuqua feels like home. (By the way, I have been brooding over the end of first year since summer and very soon, this will all be over. Three more terms and that's it! It really can't get any sadder - I have come to love this place!)

So what do I do to get into an MBA school?

2006-06-17T16:12:00.000-07:00

The title sounds so formulaic that it seems like I am almost giving in to the capitalistic clutter of dozens of books on "how to get into a top MBA". Am I really doing that? I don't know. Is there a formula? Obviously not.

These are some of the questions that I was faced with while applying to MBA and am asked regularly by prospective students. This post, as some others on similar topic, is a modified version of a mail that I sent to an applicant. The questions covered a wide gamut and I thought it might be worthwhile to make a post out of it.

How do I convince the school of my career interest?

There are mechanical/software engineers who claimed to want to do finance in Wall Street. There are lawyers who want to get into tech. marketing, nurses into consumer packaged goods. The list and possibilities are endless. However, there has to be something buried deep inside that motivates you to make such a shift.

I am sure the schools approach with an open mind about your interest and they have certainly seen more weird (and successful) cases than yours. Many people applying for MBA don't get in the first year that they applied. The whole process from first thinking about MBA, to preparing for GMAT, to giving it, to drafting essays, to polishing them, applying and then interviewing takes a couple of years for many. Two years is a long time to think about your motivation and your future career. If you think this sounds abstract, you have no idea how abstract life is for an MBA student. As students, we are actively encouraged to look at things from far above than we ever have. This is what a school is looking for - and let alone school - even your first employer is looking for answers to the same question. It's just the beginning.

Though there are no specific answers, I will try and get into some specifics. In thinking "Why MBA", think of your background, the things you did in college, school, and during work and see how they relate to your goals, whether changing career or not. For example, entrepreneurship requires successful interaction with varied kind of people in life - accountants, lawyers, govt. officials, engineers, managers, building contractor etc. It requires an inherent drive in you. Something that you did or put together completely on your own, regardless of how much support you got from people around you - you just went on. Marketing requires understanding business fundamentally at the level of consumers and their needs. It calls for exceptional teamwork skills. You are after all going to work with people from different divisions to get, launch and milk products out in the market. These are of course, just examples and neither exhaustive nor prescriptive.

So think of stories from your life that provide

a) a sound basis for your interest and
b) proofs or display of the underlying skill required for that interest, from your past life.

This seemingly simple process can actually be quite difficult to pull off. When you plan to make a change in your career, your transferable skills are the ones that will take you there. For example, it's hard for engineers (me being one) to detach and think at an abstract level to make a transition to investment banking or marketing. (Well, what an irony that engineers - the nuts and bolts guys - don't really understand the nuts and bolts of what makes them!) As you think of your transferable skills, there is really no alternative to introspection and almost brainwashing yourself into thinking that you are made for it.

Extra-curricular activities and community service
More than considering them as a "check" in a form, you should try and see what you got out of them. If you were involved in such activities, think why. What do you bring to the school from that experience? Can you tie your career aspirations and future to that? What aspects of your character and personality are attached to your involvement? To make that link (of these activities to your character), you will have to dig deep. You did it for some reason - only you probably don't realize it. Even if you did it only because your parents forced you into it, you would have definitely got something out of it. If you can start thinking on these lines, you can tie a nice story together that portrays your character.

Readiness for MBA
I guess every school has some form of assessing an applicant's 'readiness' for MBA. If they do not understand your short and long term goals, it means you fell short of articulating them. You are in the marketplace to sell an idea. From the time you think of getting an MBA, you need to keep narrowing your focus and building a good story. Talk to your friends and instigate them to challenge your thoughts. Let them poke holes in your idea of your future.

Here's a trick. I am a firm believer of healthy and intellectual discussions - sometimes even just for the heck of it! So when you are sitting at your favourite restaurant for dinner with your friends from office, challenge them about the work you are doing. Say things that are mildly provocative about the life you all are living. ("Doing R&D is hardly a life to live"! "I would rather sit at home than take one more sales call"! :-)) Well they might beat you up... but the more likely outcome is that they will retaliate verbally and you will have successfully instigated a discussion. They will challenge you, try to prove you wrong - all the while defending their own career choices. The more you discuss and argue, the more things will make sense to you. You will start getting more meaningful answers to your own questions and will be able to articulate them better. In the process, you will end up completely convincing yourself about your MBA. After a while, you won't be able to imagine not doing an MBA. That's readiness for MBA.

Lastly, I would say that perseverance is everything. There is no right age for MBA and people reach 'readiness' at different times. An engineer would find it harder to be MBA-ready than a financial analyst or salesperson. You will join school and might see someone much younger than you understands "business" better than you! That's the way it is.

The most important thing to realize is that there is no straight answer to anything in management - and indeed in MBA. Not GMAT, not interview, not essay, nothing can get you in by itself. It's all in the story! Try and make a story and talk to as many people as you can to expand, contract and mend your story as you go along. It's a very enriching experience.

And while you are at it, watch this interesting talk by Seth Godin to Google about marketing and making stories:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294&q=seth+godin&hl=en

Fuqua Idol pics of me!

2006-05-14T21:31:00.000-07:00

Fuqua Idol post!

Singing Chuck Berry's "Johnny B Goode"

...Go Johnny, go, go!

Conducting a successful off-campus search: An Indian perspective

2006-04-27T08:06:00.000-07:00

I know for most people, off-campus search is something that the "few others" do. Business school, that too a top-ranked one is supposed to have a career center that can take care of bringing companies, and so many of them, that you won't really have to go out of the school looking for a job. Most people think that way, I certainly thought that way, and I think it is natural to think that way. Here is the point of this post: As you join a business school, be prepared to go off-campus, because you will be doing off-campus searches... and a whole lot of it. The good news is, in hindsight, it is not really as daunting as it seems; it is a matter of applying some brute force, and then some... This is especially true in a good industry situation as today. (No idea how it would be or would have been during tough times, but I can only think it will be the same to a higher degree!)

Let me start with a short story.

A man walks into a low-ceiling office with rows of tiny cubicles shared by many people. He is wearing a badly-ironed white shirt and a trouser with straight pockets. He crosses over and at the end of the row is a desk with a receptionist sitting with papers strewn all over the desk, phone almost hanging out from her table. The man walks up to her and says "I am here for the sales executive interview from the newspaper". The receptionist looks up and gives a bored look, asks him his name and jots it down. Maintaining the same expression in her face, she points behind him. The man turns around and suddenly realizes that there is a small waiting area behind him, almost full with people!

He takes his seat, next to a stout, smiling bloke wearing a crisp suit who strikes up a conversation almost instantaneously. Within precisely 5 seconds, it is made abundantly clear that our protagonist is sitting next to and idiot! After what seems to be an eternity, the bloke's name is called out. He enters through a door and comes out smiling after a few minutes. He leaves the area, wearing a triumphant look on his face and waving a final goodbye to our friend. Our friend's name gets called next and he enters the office. It is a tidy little office, with brown wooden furniture and he takes the empty seat opposite a middle aged, unshaven man.

After what seems like a very productive interview, where our guy rattles off a series of stellar achievements from his college, prompting vigorous nods of approval from the man, the man finally says, "Look Mister, your achievements are really great and you are a great candidate for this job. However, I cannot extend you an offer". The expression on our man's face turns into disappointment and then quickly into quiet rage. He points at the man and says, "I see how it is! You are giving this job to that jerk, aren't you? Why are you doing this? Because he was recommended by someone you know? Because he has the money and the resources to pull strings?" In a fit of rage, he rushes out of the office, angry with the whole system, angry with himself to have even tried.

This is an all-too familiar scene from many Bollywood movies of the seventies, when movie makers finally came down to topics dealing with Indian masses from the elitist and westernized characters in the sixties movies. The dreaded word in that era was "Sifarish" (Recommendation, referral). It was how the bad guys and the un-deserving lot got their jobs. There was no place on this planet for the well-deserving, academics-cracking, outgoing and smart graduates.

The reason I bring this all-too-familiar and dramatic (maybe over the edge) scene is that all of us Indians have been brought up with these images in our mind. Reaching out to people to make relationships that might bear fruit later on in life is wrong. Asking a favor is accepting your inability to do it on your own! And getting a job through recommendation? Sacrilegious!

Life as a business school student will strike at the very foundation of this value system. No longer is the referred candidate a symbol of un-deserving, rich kid, who can pull his weight around and displace a perfectly meritorious candidate from a position that he was born for! That referred candidate is you, a perfectly meritorious, outgoing and smart individual. As one of my good American friends here said, "No one is going to give you a dollar 10 million business unless he knows you well". Knowing you is not knowing personally, but seeing your commitment to the professional relationship that you have developed with him or her.

When I started at Fuqua, my biggest frustration (and so of other Indians here and perhaps other communities as well) was how to get around this networking business. Many a time, you feel awkward about contacting someone and setting up a phone call to talk about his or her background and experience in the company. For the first two terms, many of us avoided the thing completely. It is extremely uncomfortable to make a connection with a stranger and then maintain it. Reaching out is probably one phrase you will hear again and again all through your recruitment season. The truth is, most of us Indians are not wired to do it. We rely in the old-style exams and objective interviews. Not any more.

A common adage here is that anyone here can do the job that you applied for! While that statement is definitely a stretch, there are two elements that this statement captures. One, there are defnitely many people who are very qualified to do that job. Two, your predisposition to do that job. It's not that anyone doubts your ability to do it, but are you really inclined to do it? Given perfect conditions, would you still pick that job? Or is it even one of the top 2-3 choices that you would make? Given the choices and options that an MBA from a top school has in front of him or her, will you stick around because you are really interested, or will you defect? What is it that you want to do in the long run that makes this job relevant to you?

What I have said so far is not schmoozing. It is simple, proactive relationship building. Schmoozing is not something that is expected of everyone (except banking, but I am not the expert in that. I am merely relating what I have heard). You certainly don't have to schmooze in order to do good networking. Networking is about relationships; genuine ones. As an Indian, ask yourself if you can strike up and sustain a decent conversation with a stranger... only remember the following: they don't know Cricket, you don't know (or don't care about if you are me) about Baseball or Football. You have a very sketchy idea about US geography and no idea about the weather here. Talking about family is a no-no, about friends is... nah... what else? Marketing and Strategy, it sounds stupid coming out of a first year student; Dhirubbhai Ambani, Amitabh Bachchan? nah... Quality of Airtel connection in your house? Your schooling? Booooring! You see where I am going with this.

There are things you can talk about: Travel, hollywood movies perhaps, ummm... help me out here, will you?

This is it. Last few days as an FY!

2006-04-26T20:55:00.000-07:00

This is our last week of classes for this year. 4 terms, 9 months, 15 courses and upwards of 75 cases have gone by. I know I want to write something, but there isn't really much to write. I can talk about courses, but I guess I will do it later.

As I sit to write, I have no idea what to write about. I enjoyed writing all this while. Suddenly, it doesn't seem as much fun. I have become comfortable with the MBA life, have made friends here, know the ropes and things no longer seem surprising or even shocking as they used to! I wrote about parties, about singing, about courses that were so different from what I had learned so far, and about life at Fuqua that was so different from what I had been used to.

Suddenly, I am at home here. I am at an equilibrium again. Even the dreaded N-word seems to have lost its luster. We are the rising SYs now. I guess if you read from my very earlier posts to this one, you will notice that they have changed not merely in the topics, but also in their very nature. Fuqua Days! was about the life at an MBA school, the life of late nights, assignments submissions, classrooms, case discussions, parties, career planning, company presentations, seemingly unrelated and unconnected courses and diversity of students. Some of my recent posts have been quite off-topic, as I get on with my life here. Yes there are parties going on (as a matter of fact, almost a party a day with all the clubs wanting to exhaust their budget before year end), but they are always going on. I love it, but I am home.

I guess I will keep posting in my SY as well, but those will be quite different. I don't think they will be as dramatic as some of the posts so far. They will be about life of an SY (duh! of course) but what I mean is, they will be (and I hate to say this) more advisory than "you know what happened today". I hope that doesn't piss people off! :-) Maybe I will change the name of this blog to Fuqua Ways!

So here's my last post... for year 1.

There is one core course that we are still taking, and it's Strategy. It is one of my most favorite courses. The cases are great, the profs. are great, the class discussions are intense and the course structure is really good as well. This afternoon, we submitted our last assignment, a 15 page Consultant's Report on a company of our choosing. The company we chose was Federated Department Stores, the owners of Macy's and Bloomingdale department store chains. I had a feeling that choosing a retail company was good for analysis, a great way to learn about customer mindset, supply chains, competition, product and so on but I never expected this to be so enriching! The industry is tough, the competitors are varied, the customers are diverse and supplier, simply numerous. Imagine the playground that we got!

The electives I have taken in this term are both marketing subjects; Marketing Intelligence and Product Management. One piece of advice that I have is that if you are looking at marketing, take marketing electives in term 4. I have seen people take MI and Corporate Finance in this term. While that will have its benefits, taking marketing subjects helps you make a case while interviewing that you are indeed serious about pursuing marketing in your career. The other argument is that you are looking at GM, so a finance and a marketing elective serve you well, but then you should pursue GM in that case.

That being said, Product Management is a very pure CPG-type marketing course. The discussions are mainly qualitative, revolving around customer value, packaging, promotion, advertising so on and so forth. I can totally see people simply not interested in such a soft course. It was a great course for me in the following sense: It gave me a good insight into American consumers and consumer companies. The amount of thinking that goes behind a product's packaging or a simple advertising is simply amazing and this course gives you a lot to talk about. If you are not the brand type of person, chances are you might be disappointed. This course lives and breathes brand management.

Marketing Intelligence is widely regarded as a must-take course for everyone in Fuqua. It's almost a core course in that respect. It goes behind the scenes of marketing. Analysing data, gaining insights, making hypothesis, driving conclusions and taking decisions, all based on information that you gather from your consumers, test markets and market research agencies. It is a good mix of quantitative and qualitative discussions. One of the profs. John Lynch, is a world renowned researcher in this area and his experience and expertise just shows as he teaches. All in all, very well-balanced, useful and enriching course.

This reminds me of something - It's almost 2 and I have an 8 AM MI class! I better get some sleep, I have a feeling John is going to cold call me...... (Life story of an MBA!)

Good day for me!

2006-04-15T19:25:00.000-07:00

I went out on stage, wearing 1950s style Tuxedo with a bowtie and belted out "Johnny B Goode" by Chuck Berry! The occasion was Fuqua Idol and the contestants were students. You have to believe me when I say this. The talent that students bring to school is simply amazing! I just don't have a word for it! One after another, they came and they sang absolutely amazing songs and you had to sit there and think, "What the hell are these people doing in a business school?" People sang some of the most difficult songs, Whitney Houston, Jewel, Bee Gees, Michael Jackson and more! It was something to remember. Oh and I forgot to mention one important thing! Tina (Attagirl) did my makeup, and my hairstyle was like the Elvis Presley one!

From what I hear, our batch is extra enthusiastic. I have heard this couple of times over the last one year. Last fall, when all of us were new to school, the number of applications that went in to fill cabinet positions was apparently crazy! SYs were blown away and had to create special rules for filtering coz. they could not even interview everyone who applied! But yesterday was something else! Singers, guitar players, drummers, it is inexplicable! People loved my song, but I didn't win the idol. I didn't even come close actually, but what can I say, I am in good company!! :-D

Lately, I have increasingly started thinking about the group I am part of today! Picture this. First, you pick one thing you are good at. You know you are good at it because people have told you multiple times that you are good at it. They encourage you and you nurture your strength, bask in its glory for a while. It is a magic wand that you use and things work out and you feel exhilarated! It gives you a high that can't be explained! Then it kinda gets boring, so you push yourself hard and try to do something else. You crack a couple of exams and interviews and stuff and you make it to a place like Fuqua. There, you meet many people who have struggled the same way you did.

As you settle down among the new group of people, you realize one fine day that the very strength that brought you here is not unique any more! You don't feel special any more... Well not for a while at least. You pick one skill of yours and you will see at least 10 more people having the same exact thing! It's uncanny! Well there are exceptions. Let me take an aside for a moment to explain. Yesterday afternoon, as I walked through the Fox student center, I saw an FY student playing a speed chess game with students. He is apparently a chess Grand Master or something. Students sat there with chess boards in front of them. This guy walked around playing them, one by one. As I walked past them, I thought to myself, "This guy (I happen to know him a little; He is a Russian, what do you know!!) must be feeling like he is on top of the world. At that moment, he must be like the most powerful man on the planet!" OK maybe not the most powerful, but pretty darn good, right? Later I heard that he defeated all of them! Not too surprising I guess. And I guess it is hard to admit 10 Grand Masters at Fuqua to "normalize" them, but I am sure that some day this past year, he must have had similar thought about some aspect other than chess where he felt he had something unique that has been snatched away from him.

What do you do now? You can't but feel helpless! Thankfully, the course and six week terms keep you away from thinking much about it, but it's still there. So you do something that comes as the most natural response. You try to innovate into a new niche! You work hard and build a new strength! You try to do something that would make you special again. But do most people do that? I guess that's what ambition is! They try their best at least. It's probably an addiction to be unique. It takes time and it takes considerable effort, but that's what you work on, over and over again! And each time you do this, you are evolving.

I say all this because we are pretty close to finishing off first year and a new batch is going to join the schools of their choice. "I closed my eyes in September. I opened it and it is April." But a lot of things happened in between. Studies was part of it. Of course I learnt a little bit of marketing, a touch of strategy, managerial effectiveness and economics, but it is the people that I met, the people that I felt envious of, the people that I never knew existed on this planet and the people that made me boring that I learnt the most from. I think the school that can make you the most boring is the best school to go to!

There is another piece of news. When I was rehearsing the song in Geneen [Auditorium], I felt the phone vibrate in my pocket, but I let it go into voice mail. When I checked, it was a call from a company I interviewed with that morning. It's marketing and it's telecommunications devices and I am thrilled! Later in the evening, I sang a song in front of the school, all dressed up and groovy!! :-D Yes, it's been a good day for me, but in way more ways than just getting an offer or singing a song! It's the realization that I am in good company (no pun intended)!

The Blue Devil Weekend and MBA Games Weekend

2006-04-07T19:35:00.000-07:00

This has been one crazy week! We had 3 big assignments due in 3 subjects and all of them due on Thu and Fri, so you can imagine! Term 4 is elective term for people who did not exempt any courses and you work with new people. It's great to get to work with some new people, but thankfully, it's good to know that the other people are as good as others in your section.

Last weekend was Blue Devil Weekend, where a bunch of admits from all over the country (and some from outside) landed in droves to Fuqua to see what Fuqua is all about! As far as I can tell, BDW was being planned since Janurary and was probably one of the biggest event for the school and for the admissions. It was awesome to meet the new batch and I hope most the people I met would join us in August! Some admits put together videos, there are pictures, good times overall! We partied at night and they sat through some sessions during day time (hopefully not too boring, lest we scare them off!)! I wasn't here for BDW last year, so I have no idea what they must have gone through! ;-) But it's hard to believe that we are wrapping up first year (Half an MBA??)! One of my new Strategy team mates said it best, "It's like you closed your eyes in September. You opened it, and it's April"!

(OK I left the post at that a few days ago and am picking it up from here)

After a relatively quiet term 3, this term is proving to be quite the opposite! I guess everyone is rushing to get one last streak of partying done before they leave for summer or for a long time, or the new leadership is in full form. After BDW at the beginning of this month, we had MBA games the next week. Unfortunately, I could not manage to attend the games (had a bad headache and stuff) but I did attend the Friday kick-off event right after the Fuqua Friday. Fuqua Vision had put together a great show for visiting students from many schools. The ones I remember are Michigan, Ivey, Wharton, Harvard, Stern, Tuck and UNC... and then some more. The teams from these schools (including Duke) had to perform a cheer and a panel of judges gave prizes for the top 3. I think Ivey won the first prize and Wharton 2nd. I don't remember the 3rd prize, but I remember Tuck put on a great show! The Fuqua Vision then took over and it was one of the best FV shows I have seen!

In case you are wondering what Fuqua Vision is, it's a club that takes the day to day stuff from student life and puts up skits, shows and parodies once every term, at the end of term, and at important events like BDW, MBA Games and such. Apart from being a fun show where we make fun of ourselves, it's also a great medium of feedback to the administration from the students! Staplers don't work in the lab, be assured someone somewhere is putting together a nice little jingle and skit to make a point! Now it's a different story that we oftentimes get the dean, admissions head and professors participating and those shows are runaway hits! Who wouldn't like the dean playing Gandalf from the Lord of the Rings and the admissions head playing the Queen. No kidding!

It's amazing how these students take time out to put such grand shows, but we sure know how to make fun of ourselves! Now that's what we do on normal days, but having students from so many schools was too tempting for the FV crew I guess! FV made fun of all the schools, including Duke (of course, it's student run, what do you expect?! ;-)) The spoof on Tuck was awesome!! I wish I could go to the events and stuff, but anyway.... There is more coming! ;-)

This week, we have Fuqua Idol! I guess you guys guessed what it is. It's a year-end show put up by the Fuqua Music club. I don't quite know how many participants there are, but I know moi is one of them! ;-) I am singing an old rock n' roll song, but I won't let the secret out so soon... :-) We'll see how it goes. If I'm spared by the audience and I live to write about it......

The evolution and potential of Cuban music

2006-03-26T00:29:00.000-08:00

This is from my paper on the origins of Cuban music and what makes it so powerful. I wrote this as part of the Cuba GATE course, so this has nothing to do with Fuqua as such, except that I got this opportunity to explore Cuban music while I am here! To all the music lovers out there...

As we sat outside at a plush restaurant in Havana one sunny afternoon, three musicians, wearing colorful Hawaii-style shirts, started playing what struck me as traditional Cuban songs. What caught my immediate attention was the simplicity of the music. With two guitars and a pair of maracas (1) and use of vocal harmonics, they were able to convey a variety and depth that makes Cuban music so enticing. After listening to a few songs, there was no mistaking their talent. Needless to say, when the lead singer approached our table with a CD, I grabbed my opportunity and bought their recording for ten pesos. As I was exiting the restaurant, I proudly showed the new addition to my collection to our tour guide and he congratulated me at making a good selection. Little did I imagine that this local album would become one of the most precious items in my collection.

One week later, I took the help of a new singer friend, and burrowed through numerous Cuban CDs, looking for authentic Cuban music that could tell a story about Cuban music as it evolved, and I bought music albums covering Jazz, Trova and Son Cubano (2). Long after we returned from our trip, the music I heard in Cuba was ringing in my ears and these albums became part of my regular hearing. It is one of the richest forms of music I have come across. This tiny island boasts of a tradition of music that is old and cross-continental. The roots of Cuban music is in Europe and Africa. Cuba was a Spanish colony for many centuries and like America, imported a lot of African people as slaves. Both these cultures brought music with them and along with Jazz music from America in the early 20th century, formed what is the Cuban music of today.

The African influence in Cuban music is primarily in three important ways: the singing style, the percussions and the musical form. The African singing was nasal and was the case for a long time and became one of the characteristics of Afro-Cuban music. Later on, it became embedded in the form of vocal harmonics and in portions in modern day Cuban songs. The second significant impact that was also clearly observable was the unique use of percussions. Like many eastern music forms such as Arabic and Indian music, percussions and rhythm form an integral part of melody in Cuban music. The African slaves lacked string and wind instruments and necessity being the mother of invention in this case, the African slaves made innovative use of percussion instruments to form their melodies. This was further enhanced by clever use of syncopation (3). Finally, with respect to the form of the Afro-Cuban music, the typical structure of a Cuban song is based on a call and an answer. The vocalist starts a song by a call to the people of the village and the people answer him or her.

With increasing integration of Spanish invaders into the Cuban society, string and wind instruments became more available and the spirit of the Cuban people took the form of melodies in these instruments. The work of slaves in the sugarcane farms in Cuba parallels the work on cotton fields by the slaves in America and the birth of blues music. The Cuban slaves were well-fed because work on sugarcane farms required energy and strength, but it was a tiring job, much like work on cotton fields in the middle of the day. This fueled creativity and the Cubans took to Spanish instruments, and this is one of the most discernible portions of what we know as Cuban music today.

However, in the modern day, what makes Cuban music even more interesting is the Jazz influence from America. This was the final and one of the most important influences in the formation of today’s Cubano music. Today in Cuba, you can find Jazz that is significantly more melodic, like that of José Miguel Crego (4), but what is even more interesting is that the typical Latin American salsa and rumba rhythms are interrupted by Jazz-like formations. A classic example of this interesting feature is the mixing of solo piano or trumpet from time to time into what is largely Latin American rhythms of Maraca (5).

The American trade embargo on Cuba has significant ramifications for Cuban music. America has traditionally been the most influential market when it comes to music and cinema. Though many of the rock n’ roll bands of the 60s came from the United Kingdom, their success was considered complete only when they made a mark in the US market. The embargo, which is nearing 50 years, has essentially kept Cuban music out from this mix, and considering the pace of innovation in music in the last half a century, the face of music today would have been very different. On the other hand, much of the Latin American music is only picking up now and Cuba can still play a significant role in this very interesting evolution.

Cuban music largely served the local market all through the initial decades of the Cuban revolution in 1959. In the mid nineties, a phenomenon called the Buena Vista Social club came into being (6). It all started with Juan de Marcos González, who sought to bring together generations of Cuban and Afro-Cuban musicians and record an album (7). This was a huge success and Cuban music started getting recognition and acceptance all over the world. This was further fueled by the relaxation by Cuban government in the nineties to allow Cuban musicians to emigrate and spread the music outside. Today, musicians are increasingly traveling abroad in search for acceptance.

Musicians from outside world are also finding interest inside Cuba. The recent concert by Audioslave in Havana was a huge success and was attended by over 60,000 people. According to my singer friend who happened to sneak into the VIP section, it was loud and it stayed on in the minds of people for a long time. The concert a few months later by Air Supply was dull. It is little wonder that musicians wanting to sell inside Cuba will need to break into long established and extremely rich Cubano music culture.

The biggest barrier for outside music in entering Cuba, in my opinion, is overshadowing the essence and richness of the Cuban rhythm. This was more than evident in our interactions with Cuban people. We went to Havana clubs with a group of graduate students from the University of Havana. When a particularly popular hip-hop song started playing, one of the students turned to me and said, “I don’t like this song. The beat in this song is loud and boring and you just can’t dance to it, you know.” I understood immediately. It will take a whole lot more to move a Cuban to your rhythm.

(1) http://www.music-with-ease.com/maracas-pictures.html
(2) For more information on these forms, please read http://www.danzon.com/eng/history/cuban-music.htm
(3) Syncopation: A shift of accent in a passage or composition that occurs when a normally weak beat is stressed.
(4) http://www.soycubano.com/pena/musica/grecoi.asp
(5) http://www.ahinama.com/maraca.htm
(6) http://www.worldmusiccentral.org/article.php?story=20030418170803562&query=Juan%2Bde%2BMarcos%2BGonz%25E1lez
(7) http://www.jmk.su.se/global02/annalena/buena/cuba/histclub.htm

Cuba GATE: Where I became a rock singer!

2006-03-21T18:14:00.000-08:00

Shivesh singing 'sweet child of mine' with a band in Cuba!

Joanne helps with the bridge!

Opening the gates to Cuba

2006-03-21T17:11:00.000-08:00

21 students went to Cuba over the spring break as part of the Global Academic Travel Experience (GATE) course at Fuqua. We spent about 8 days there, 6 in Havana and 2 in Varadero, a resort town. This is one trip that is going to stay on in my mind for a long time. Not only was it a very welcome break, it was also a trip where we learnt a lot and I personally learnt a lot about Cubans as well as Americans. The only two international students on this trip were me and a Japanese friend of mine. The trip was fantastic and I made some great friends in this trip. We have to submit a paper on our trip this week, elaborating general experiences, learning and observations as well as a specific topic of research, which in my case, is music.

As we reached Havana on a sunny afternoon, it immediately reminded me of Bombay, as I saw it in movies in the 1960s. We drove around the malecon, which looks identical to the Marine Drive in Bombay, with wide pavements and people sitting on the parapet wall separating the beautiful ocean from the city. It was not even close what I had expected, which was a backward city with narrow roads, age-old cars, visible poverty on the streets and generally dirty. Havana turned out to be a beautiful city with great historic structures and architectures, wide roads and generally, very clean. At places, the architecture was bizarre, telling tales of its turbulent past and influences from around the world.

One of the striking features of old Havana was the different color combinations of its buildings. No two buildings matched in color, but moreover, even the colors of windows and doors did not match the building color. So you would see an orange building with blue windows and doors and the building adjacent to it would be green in color. I wondered if this was because these buildings were from different era, or simply a matter of choice. I quickly learnt that it reflected the true nature of the Cuban culture, colorful, vibrant and full of contrast.

From there began our journey into one of the most vibrant countries I have visited and it reminded me again and again of India. Of course, Cuba holds a big mystery within due to its troubled relationship with US for almost half a century, and that only made it better as we tried digging to understand it. There are posters of Fidel Castro and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara almost everywhere, indicating that the government has a strong hold on businesses, media and many aspects of Cuban life. It's hard to draw a picture in mind of a country sitting at a five star hotel and traveling in luxury buses with the best guides, but many people have claimed that Cuba is stuck in a time warp. That would almost make anyone think that Cuba has stopped developing since 1959, when Fidel came to power. Is it true? How backward is Cuba, if at all?

We met government officials, businessmen, intellectuals, artists, scientists and local people. Perhaps the most insightful meeting we had was with a professor and editor of a magazine called Temas (Themes). This magazine is one of the avenues of expression for people and for them to discuss important issues in the society. The professor talked to us about Civil Society and what constitutes civil society. Churches, NGOs, media, unions etc., all come together to form civil society, which works with the state to guide the society to the right direction. As he spoke about Temas and the largely Marxist concepts of intellectuals engaging other intellectuals in debate to come to a decision for the common good, I couldn't help but think about Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. My understanding of socialism is very limited, but I learnt an alternative way of governance. Cuba today reminded me of India in the 80s, when I was a boy, saw the only news channel run by the government, co-operative societies for crops production, huge barriers to entrepreneurship through licenses and virtually non-existent MNCs or MNCs that came as JVs. So is Cuba stuck in a time-warp? Yes, but the time-warp is in not nearly as remote period as we think. The fall of the soviet union was a big blow to the Cuban economy, and marks the failure of socialism and communism all over the world. It is no coincidence that countries like India opened up their economies and started a slow, but marked movement towards globalization in the 1990s. Cuba started doing the same in 1993 in their so-called 'Special Period'; the main difference is that it is still trying to keep both sides alive in its parallel economies of two currencies, one for tourism (convertible peso) and one for domestic industry.

For an average American entering Cuba today, the policies might seem so different that it will be easy to say that Fidel has betrayed Cuba. Has Fidel betrayed Cuba? He is a dictator, no doubt, but if you look a little deeper, Cuba has problems quite similar to India. I keep coming back to India because I see so many parallels that I am almost certain that most of Cuba's problems have hardly anything to do with the totalitarian regime, and more due to an age-old failed system of economy and governance, socialist policies and communism. In the face of capitalism and globalization, these systems did not stand a chance, and in my opinion, will be wiped out of the face of the planet.

So what did Fidel do right? Definitely couple of things in my opinion. Cuba has a modest infrastructure, has a stellar literacy rate (97%), which beats even the US and is supposed to have great healthcare. These are not mean achievements considering a strong embargo and antagonism from the neighboring US. We visited a biotechnology research center in Havana and the gentleman we met there was one of the most bright and humorous person I have come across. He introduced us to the various researches being done in a string of facilities across the country. In a country that is run by intellectuals, this comes as little surprise. Soviet Union had cutting edge research establishments and India, thanks to its Nehruvian socialism of 50s and 60s, also boasts of world class research and teaching establishments like the IITs, IIMs, IISc, BARC and many more. Cuba is no different. These are direct consequences of intellectuals running your country. It is still a completely different issue if this is sustainable or even fair to you as a citizen.

US slapped a trade and travel embargo on Cuba in the year 1962 and the embargo is still in effect. As it stands today, only three countries voted against the U.N. resolution calling for the US to end the Embargo, The Marshall Islands, Israel, and the US of course. During the Cold War era, US and Cuba had a fallout and in the age of strong polarization, Cuba became a Russian ally. As is often the case with politics, there is no point in discussing who was right, who was wrong, or even what was cause and what was effect. Did alienation from US led Cuba towards USSR or did the communist policies of Cuba led US to take strong actions against it? I don't know the answer, but what matters today is that the embargo does not make sense. However, I can understand that US cannot lift the embargo from Cuba without losing face. During the last 4 decades, US has built an image of Cuba as a country drowned in troubles due to the dictatorial and totalitarian oppression. Of course, if I might say so carelessly, dictatorship comes with its fair share of oppression, but from what we have learnt in this trip, Fidel doesn't seem to have squeezed his people to pocket money for himself.

There is significant discontent with the archaic policies of Fidel, but there doesn't seem to be a very concerted dissident activity in Cuba, just small groups spread here and there. Given these dynamics, everyone seems to be waiting to see what will happen after Fidel. Fidel has appointed his brother as the Vice President, who can constitutionally take charge after the President, but only time will tell what happens. The US will play a large role (wanted or unwanted) most certainly in the decision and will probably get a good excuse (or valid reason, depending on your perspective) to lift the embargo. What will it mean for Cuba? How is the embargo affecting Cuba today?

US likes to say that the embargo is successful and that it is cornering the Cuban government. In reality, that's hardly the case and Cuba has almost rest of the world to play with. Of course, not having a huge market such as US for tourism and trade means a lot for a small country like Cuba, but it certainly didn't topple any governments in the past and is certainly not going to in the near future.

Our platform for Music Club presidency

2006-03-05T14:24:00.000-08:00

Our beautiful and colorful platform for the music club presidency!!

More 'stuff' (& end of term 3)

2006-03-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

I have so many things that I have been thinking to write about that I didn't really have a better title. Of course, it has been a busy time, with term 3 'n all. There are courses, elections, interviews, fellows programs, spring break, GATE trips, and then some more stuff.

Term 3 is over, there is one more final exam on Monday. I wrote earlier about the courses, Operations, Managerial Accounting and Decision Modelling. We are done with MA and DM so far. MA was a subject that was extremely boring and at the same time, very useful for general managers. We learnt about cost accounting in an organization, which means how the many costs incurred by an organization are allocated to the different products that they produce and all the challenges associated with incentive schemes, transfer pricing, peer interactions etc. associated with it. Decision Models is an awesome subject, and you learn tools that help you make complex decisions and optimize your actions. Operations was operations, so throughput time, inventory, queuing etc. Both operations and DM had a particularly great course structure. Term 3 had some really useful courses for managers in general.

The elections for most clubs and positions are over. Pallavi and I stood for Music club and General Management Club (GMC), and lost both! :-( But we lost to worthy competitors and it was fun to sit and make the platforms for these elections and to think through ideas that we would have liked to implement next year. The experience itself is so great that I recommend that every student should stand for at least 1 presidency. It helps you think through a lot of stuff that were done last year and what could be done and improved next year. Anyway, so that was on elections. I have applied to couple of fellows program and have interviewed for career fellow. I am looking forward to those roles as they seem very interesting and something that can be quite satisfying to yourself.

There is not much to write about internship search and interviews, and while that might seem surprising, it's just that it's going on as a process on the side! The market is looking up from last year we are told and that does seem to be the case. Companies come and companies go, and you get excited about the role for couple of days as you research and you apply to the positions, then you give your interview and wait for results. There is nothing really much to write about it, if you know what I mean!

Spring break is coming up and I am going to Cuba!! The Global Academic Travel Experience (GATE) trips are a great way to explore new countries that you are interested in for whatever reason. This is one of the trips where every time I say I am going to Cuba on GATE, the standard response is, "Cuba!? Why Cuba?" The only way I can answer that is to point people towards the speech given by Steve Jobs of Apple at Stanford, "Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish" and his concept of 'connecting the dots'. Cuba seems like an interesting place, great music and a great way to learn another aspect of US foreign policies. I can't say what 'hard' stuff I have learnt, but I leave for Cuba on Tuesday and hope to have a great time there, meet some government representatives, business men and artists. Maybe this dot will connect somehow to my life and career in future.

One interesting thing that I wanted to cover was something called a 'plant tour' organized by GMC this term to help with the operations course. Some of us signed up to go and visit a manufacturing plant nearby and see how they apply the operations concepts we learnt in classroom in real life. The company we visited was Eaton, a car parts manufacturer and the experience was simply fantastic! We saw a small 'thing' called 'Lash adjuster' that goes into the car's engine and releases the right amount of fuel into the engine. We saw how two basic tubes were cut to size, the metal being ground and heat treated, and so many more small operations that led to final assembly of parts to make a part that's the size smaller than my palm and is supremely important to the working of a car. I can almost understand now why some people are so passionate about operations. It's so interesting to see a product coming out of an assembly line!

So that's the stuff that we have been up to here and it's been a very different term from the last two. I can't quite explain it, but for me, it was a cakewalk after term 2, though there are people who found term 2 quite alright (I don't know which planet they are from!! :-)) The fact that we are finally well settled into our lives and have made some friends also helps. But I have to put in the word that term 2 was stuff that ghost stories are made of! We were roaming the corridors of the school like a bunch of zombies and I thought about 'Snapshots from Hell' by Peter Robinson on more than one occasion. I still maintain that if you are a person who has not taken any kind of accounting course at all in life, take a basic book-keeping course before coming to Fuqua at least (I am not sure how it is in other schools, but something tells me they aren't going to be much more forgiving either! ;-)) You will be thankful for your decision many times over! 6-week accounting is your worst nightmare come true.

Anyway, I digressed, so let me come back to the topic. But oh right! We don't have a topic, do we? Well, so term 3 is over. I liked to say that we are a 'quarter of an MBA' at the end of term 2, but for the end of term 3, I don't have a fancy name; just that things are cruising along, term 3 was a little light on extra-curricular activities overall too. It was the old leadership's last term and I guess they were tired too. The new leadership is all set to take over the clubs in term 4, and the SYs have put their feet up (in all the sense of the phrase! :-)) I wonder how it will be next time this year! Sad, sad, sad...

Corporate Strategy as a career; case interviewing

2006-02-22T19:31:00.000-08:00

I came to Fuqua wanting to do strategy or marketing and that was as clear as I was in my head. I spoke to people around and one advice by an operations professor who I spoke to at the India GATE trip of students was particularly useful, even if I understand it well only today (and of course, I am still learning!).

Strategy requires a decent understanding of the industry that you work in. In the conversation, this was the only sentence and it immediately made sense. Now I look back and think I was quite ignorant to have not known this simple thing, but I figured if I was ignorant, maybe there must be others out there! :-D Strategy requires taking all the inputs that a manager gets from the environment, analyzing them thoroughly, thinking through all the consequeces and interplays, building simulations, analyzing competitor responses (this is crucial), analyzing impact on customers and brand due to that decision and so on. Each industry, of course, has its peculiarity, and that's what makes it tough.

Every one of us has seen industries, products, companies from outside. We sometimes miss the complexity and sometimes we wonder how it works (What was Bill Gates thinking when he bought DOS?)! Most often, if you think either way (something is too simple or something is unbelievable), there is of course, a middle ground. The things that make strategy complex are probably the following (and there could be more!); competitive environment, customer preferences, company's culture and capabilities (the 3 C's of marketing), supplier relationships, distribution channels, logistics and operations, product positioning and perception, price dynamics (competitive price or with premium) and so on. If you drill into each of these, you will get into the 'muck' of things and your decisions will closely affect each of these aspects of your company. So my take is (and take this with a pinch of salt) is that if you want to jump into strategy or an industry, make yourself 'ready' to talk about these things specific to that industry. If you have been a production engineer or software engineer or have been a pharma salesperson, you will know the answers to these difficult questions in your respective industries. But what if you want to switch or simply open up your options?

Consulting case interviews are a great tool for that. Before the consulting interviews, people practice doing 20-50 cases and they challenge themselves to answer these questions in an interview setting with friends and classmates. As you struggle through these questions, you start thinking deeper into these dynamics. Consulting is a big avenue for doing strategy work in the corporate. A lot of top consulting firms focus heavily on strategy of course. Their interviews are case-based precisely to gauge your understanding of business dynamics. In the case, they try to reduce the noise due to industry dynamics, but they do challenge you to think what might be true about that industry. It's a great experience.

A lot of corporates also hire people for their strategy team and from what I see so far, even General Management interviews for strategy have cases, though not as full-fledged as what consulting companies do. They want to see how you think and do you think of enough factors and understand the implications. So in my opinion, it is a good idea for a wide range of people to do consulting case preparations. And if you are coming from a non-business background (engineering, military, research, teaching and so on), it is especially helpful. I have seen people here who come out of a GM interview saying 'He gave me a case (#&#&##!!)! I have not really practiced cases, so I just managed that questions somehow'. After a bit of digging, it turns out to be a 'mini-case' where the interviewer asks something like 'if you are running a grocery store and Walmart comes an opens a store near you, what will you do?' or 'if you want to bring a new product to market, how will you go about identifying key factors and doing market research?'. If a person does a few cases, these questions can become really easy, but if you have never 'thought through' these things before, its tough, especially inside an interview room!

In fact, I would also like to take it a step further, that case interviews are good to practice even for some marketing interviews. Corporate world is full of ex-consultants and they love giving cases. Everyone in the corporate world wants to see how you can unravel a business problem. They also would like you to talk in a flow instead of struggling to come up with an answer. If they ask, 'what are some of the factors you would consider', you have to give some 10 factors one after the other, neatly knitting them into a sentence and without struggling to think of each 'aspect' that he or she is asking. Most often, people start rambling, repeating themselves, looking at that vacuum next to interviewers head to think hard about an aspect, freezing (believe me, all those things happen in an interview, but no one would like to admit of course! :-)) It's really as simple or as complicated as that and case interviews are a great way to gain that 'depth' and 'practice' talking about 'business aspects' in a confident manner and coherent flow. So if you think that case interviews are only for consultants, think again. In my opinion, 'case interviews' is just a fancy name for it; call it 'business aspects questions' if you like or 'my-job-simulated-in-half-hour'!

Job in UK? Internship in the UK?

2006-02-16T18:05:00.000-08:00

Since I thought about doing an MBA, I had thought about the option of doing it from UK/Europe. In the end however, I came to Fuqua (for good reasons). However, ever since I came here, I toyed with the idea of interning in UK. I didn't know where to begin though. I did not have a work permit for UK, and even if there were ways to get it, would any company would process your work permit for a 3-month internship? Definitely not.

So in my free time (precious free time! :-D), I browsed around looking for options to do an internship in UK. There were many questions. How can I enter UK? How can I convince companies of my interest in UK? Is there a way for me to work in UK for 3 months and come back? How do I go about getting a visa without a job offer from UK company? It was a chicken and egg problem. Should I look for a company that might be interested in me first, get an offer, and then go to the UK consulate with that? Or should I first get some visa in which I can work and then go with that visa and look for an internship? The latter seemed more feasible of course. If I can pull that off, I can technically check the box "Have necessary work authorization to work in UK" and then of course, I get a level playing field for job opportunities in UK along with work permit holders and citizens.

So I looked around some more, found an appropriate visa, and succeeded in the process! And the least I can say is that I am THRILLED! Part of the reason I am thrilled is that I have been to UK before on visits and I love the country, its pubs, music, people, diversity, literature, culture! In addition to that, it is the fact that I am now technically eligible to work in the UK for up to 1 year! I still don't know how feasible it is to get a job in UK, but nevertheless, trying this option out was really really fun!

So here are the mechanics. I don't quite know where to start, so let me start at the beginning and give some background. UK has something called the Highly Skilled Migrant Program (HSMP). (If you know about this, hold on a second because this is not the solution to doing an internship there). This is a migrant program for people with certain set of skills that might be useful to UK. To read more about this program, you can visit:

http://www.workingintheuk.gov.uk/working_in_the_uk/en/homepage/schemes_and_programmes/hsmp.html?
"The programme is designed to allow highly skilled people to migrate to the United Kingdom to look for work or self-employment opportunities.... The Highly Skilled Migrant Programme is different from the work permit scheme because you do not need a specific job offer in the UK to apply."

So I guess you get the gist. What's more? There is something called the MBA provision in HSMP. Read:

http://www.workingintheuk.gov.uk/working_in_the_uk/en/homepage/schemes_and_programmes/hsmp/mba_provision.html?

"The 2004 Budget announced a new provision for graduates of 50 top business schools to work in the UK for up to 12 months on completing their MBAs. This provision is now part of the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP)."

Needless to say, Duke University is part of this "list". So, in essence, after an MBA from one of these universities, you can apply for this migrant program and walk in freely into UK! But WAIT A MINUTE: It says "on completing their MBAs" above. So technically, you can't avail of this opportunity until you pass out of the program. I am looking for internship and clearly, I don't think this clause will help. Before I move on, here is a link that lists these universities and has more information about this clause:

http://www.workpermit.com/uk/hsmp/mba_provision

(The only unfortunate thing is that there is no Indian university listed there, not even IIMs, so I hope UK government adds at least a couple from India) :-(

PART II

OK, so that was about the MBA clause of HSMP. And it is useful if you are interested in working in UK.

For internship, I explored the visa site and came across a visa called Working Holiday Maker. Under this visa, you can stay in the UK for up to 2 years and during your stay, to support yourself, you can work for up to 1 year. Here is a website with more information:

http://www.workingintheuk.gov.uk/working_in_the_uk/en/homepage/schemes_and_programmes/working_holidaymaker.html?

"You can stay in the UK for up to two years as a working holidaymaker, in line with the validity of your visa... You must intend to take work in the UK only as an incidental part of your holiday, so you must intend to spend no more than 12 months working, and to spend the rest of your stay on holiday."

Two important conditions (please check the above website for the exhaustive list) are that you should be from one of commonwealth countries (I know India is one of them) and that you should be between the ages of 17 and 30 to apply. The list of commonwealth nations is given in:

http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1006977150124

My idea was simple. I want to go to UK during summer and do my internship there to support myself. It is 3 months, it's a fantastic time to visit UK (I think, with the nice summer sunshine and weather!) The next question was to look at the Fuqua alumni list and see if I can get contacts in UK to apply for jobs. I found a reasonable amount of Fuqua alumni in UK and went ahead and applied for the visa.

I heard back from the consulate today and my visa has been approved! Now I can check that checkbox in job sites and hopefully will have a better chance. Here are the logistics: (Please note that these might change depending on your country of current residence. I applied from here in US and this is the process from here. From other countries, there would be of course slightly different procedures)

Website: http://www.visa4uk.fco.gov.uk/
Cost: ~$200 (Again, in US at least, but it should be same everywhere I would think)
Split:
App. Fee - $162
If you apply by post:
Postal charge (for returning passport to you) - $12
Postage charge (to send your material to UK consulate by UPS/FedEx) - ~$20
Main documents:
Passport
US stay document (like I94, H1, green card etc.)
Bank statements to support your application and financial strength (3 months statement)

That's it!

I am hoping that with this visa, I can go ahead and apply to UK companies for internship. Most companies hire for internship with your long-term intentions in mind, so if you have JUST this visa, then they might say "OK you can work for us for 3 months, but if we like you, what next? We will have to process your work permit for UK once you pass out".... and that might not be necessarily what they want to do. Here is where the HSMP clause kicks in. If they like me and I like them, I can get the HSMP status and go and work for them! So this theoritically makes me as good a candidate as anyone else.

I am not even sure if I will apply for positions in UK, now that I have this visa. However, it is an option for me now. As I come across good companies and good roles, I would like to use it and just might spend my summer at a great country!! :-) Cheers mate!

Leadership transition to FY

2006-02-14T16:01:00.000-08:00

So the second year students are going to be here only for a couple of more months. I can't believe more than half our first year is already over! They said it will rush past like no one's business, and boy it did! We are already halfway past the third term and lots of interesting stuff happening around in school. The MBA Association elections are over and we have new President and Vice-President to lead the MBAA next year. For the rest of the term, they will work with current presidents to take over the reigns from them. The elections were held last week. Two of my ILE team mates ran for the post, but unfortunately lost. I do have an ILE team that's absolutely awesome. (ILE team, for those new here, is the 5-member team you get assigned to, to work with during first year). I am fortunate to have an ILE team that has my section representative and these two awesome people who stood for MBAA!

Many clubs are also now having their elections to select their leaders for next year. I guess I got a little influenced by my powerhouse of an ILE team and am standing for a couple of posts myself, though I don't think I can disclose what exactly here right now. (It's not really a secret, but Fuqua is a no-campaign environment for student elections and it would be inappropriate! :-)). We have some tough competition and spent half a day over last weekend working on something called the 'platform' for elections. It is essentially a 1-page 'advertisement' that is submitted to the current presidents and which is put up on the notice board for club members to see what the new leadership plans to do next year in the club. So it's fun! I know a lot of people are bogged with term 3 and internship search, but working on this platform was totally fun and we'll see how it goes in the next couple of weeks.

In addition to the club leadershp, there are 'fellows' programs who are selected by various groups in the school. The fellows are: Leadership fellow, admissions fellow, career fellow, executive fellow and marcomm fellows. Some are paid, and some of these are not, but they are all great ways for SY students to get involved. As far as I know, all of them are selected through and application and interview process. I don't know intimately about each of these, but but here is the brief:

Leadership fellows: They run projects throughout the school, that have to do with improving leadership in Fuqua. I think the projects are varied and have a lot to do with conducting activities, workshops, working with MBAA and administration to help with leadership initiatives across the business school. They also work with FY ILE teams and facilitate feedback and periodic reviews of the working of the team and iron out issues, if any.

Admissions fellows: AFs are involved in admissions process. A subset of them travel around the country to conduct information sessions. They also interview prospective candidates. It is supposed to be the more time consuming job, with 45 minute interviews and another 45 minutes easily to write the review of the candidate. The crunch times are terms 2 and 3 and it definitely is a cool paid position. The AF travel team traveled internationally this year, thanks to increased applications from Asia and the alums there struggling with the load!

Career fellows: Career fellows work with FY students. Their essential job is to review resumes, review cover letters and conduct mock interviews for FY students. While AF I think impacts the school on the outside, career fellow is a much more in-school thing. It is of paramount importance I think because it takes FY students through the whole job search and a lot of scope of really helping people out.

Executive and Marcomm fellows: I don't know much about these and Marcomm is a relatively new fellows program. Marcomm deals with external marketing and communication of Fuqua. The brand of a bschool is extremely important to it, and marcomm, I think is a great way for students to take part in controlling that to whatever extent. Executive fellows, again from the little I know, help organize the Distinguished Speaker Series, where top leaders from top companies around the world come to Fuqua to talk on a subject. We had some great talks this year so far by UPS, Deloitte and few more (I know those 2, coz. those are couple of the DSS I attended and really liked!). It's probably a great post for people who have passion for contacting and hearing from industry leaders!

I am quite keen on career fellows program, AF, and Marcomm (though I don't quite well know the role much yet). Marcomm will probably have an information session soon that will give us an idea. It is probably not very easy to get into one of these. There seems to be fair amount of competition for these 'fellowships', probably more than club activities. They are quite prestigious I believe and maybe also probably because some of them are paid positions.
One thing that really catches my attention is that things move so fast here! We are about 3 months away from end of year and things are already happening! I signed up today for help with Blue Devil Weekend, the admissions weekend of Fuqua in beginning April where all the prospective students come and Fuqua shows them what it is!! :-) I was not able to attend BDW when coming to Fuqua, but it is supposed to be a weekend long party, true Fuqua style and some great activities for the incoming class. Beginning term 4, we will have new presidents of MBAA, new leaderships for all clubs, the second years would probably already be 'checked-out' of school! :-) We would be tumbling over to replace them! Wasn't it yesterday that I was sitting at Geneen, listening to some of the speeches by SYs and administration welcoming us to Fuqua and what not?! :-)

In case you are thinking what happened to partying at Fuqua, I am running over to one right now and will catch you guys later!

Of career switchers and job search

2006-02-05T18:22:00.000-08:00

This is a loaded topic in all sense of the word. The internship search by FY students has started in full swing. A certain percentage of the class has been placed already and the rest of us are looking. Needless to say, it is a time of uncertainties, anxieties and frustrations.

They come in various forms. Some people are walking away with multiple offers, some have interviewed with many companies but without success, some have resorted to off campus searches and yet others have not even got calls from companies for interviews, and some are slamming brakes on their existing pursuit to look for jobs in areas that they did not originally plan to work in.

This is a particularly difficult topic to cover. Emotions are running high, the career management center is trying to keep up, but no amount can really be sufficient. Come to think of it, placing 426 students in jobs is probably a pretty huge task. On top of it, international students (i.e. w/o work authorization for US) find even lesser options, as many companies would rather stick to people with auth than muck their hands with lawyers and papers. It is true that you don't need work auth to do internship, but these companies after all, do plan to hire you after internship. So it matters.

So how bad is it for international students? Where I am looking from, it's not easy. Maybe tomorrow, I will look back at it and say that it was part of the game. In the end, I guess people will get placed more or less where they want. When I say more or less, it's statistics, isn't it? But people are more than a data point. There will be people who get internship in areas they don't really want. And it is especially tough for career changers. A guy coming from engineering and wanting to go to (my favourite :-)) Wall street has a hard time justifying his contribution to the company. A corporate finance aspirant was asked "What work will you do as part of our team when they are deciding on whether to take up a project or not?" As a background, taking a project requires one to do financial analyses like Net Present Value (NPV) and others. Truth be told, I have no clue what else.

Now I am not looking at Corp. Fin. but I hope to learn more about this in some elective, but that is the point. I can afford to say that, but if you are a career changer, it requires a hell of a lot of dedication. You better know what you will be doing. To me, that doesn't sound easy and I am not that much of a career changer. It's not possible to change careers just like that. You can't just walk in to an MBA and walk out a new man. My advice? If you want to shift to finance/banking from engineering, catch hold of an accountant, cost accountant, CFO or local banker friend and shadow that person. Get to know what he or she really does. If you can't do that, (or even if you can) shift to business newspapers and try to understand stuff there. Non-switchers can wait till they get here to start learning their subjects. Career-switchers need to "re-wire" themselves sooner than later. I have seen some career changers succeed and some slamming brakes (at least for internship) and a major part of the difference is in their general awareness of the new area of work that they aspire for. I don't mean to belittle people's efforts here and make enemies. I am sure there are other factors, but you will face some hard questions in the interview and you better be prepared. And this preparation is not overnight! (Like I have my opertions mid-term on the day after and it's gonna be overnight for me!! :-D) You need to think like the new person, read newspaper regularly and be able to argue, defend and discuss those new topics like they are your own. You HAVE to want to do it.

So much for career changers, but let's look at some functions. Marketing and GM by far seem the most difficult roles for international students. Getting marketing in CPG for example is tough. And it makes sense. It is difficult to adapt to the native 'marketing types' suddenly for someone coming from outside US. While it is true that 'the marketing types' are outgoing and can speak beautifully to the extent that their creativity finds a fantastic outlet in their personality and speech, it is not just English. Some Indians here, for example, have better English than some Americans. It is much more than that. Familiarity with the culture, society, 'lingo' (if you remember Joey's 'How 'a you dooin'? I just can't say it that way!:-)), priorities, touch points, pain points. The list goes on.

Now there are some functions in marketing that are more open for various reasons. (And I am hoping desperately that they are). The only concrete example I can think of really is market research. There is Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and back office sales operations that I am hoping are fairly indifferent to nationality coz. I am just so interested in them. Both require analytical ability, a lot of comfort with data mining and ability to draw conclusions from data. That doesn't look like it needs one to be of any nationality or origin really. Well, we'll see...

General Management is a whole suite of things. Here, the explanation of why it is difficult for internationals is, I think, simply because many companies are fairly traditional and don't really need a big dose of international students. It's not a great reason, but I am yet to find one. It may be that American nationals make great general managers themselves. Or the companies just don't want to get into processing visa and stuff. These sound reasonable, but who knows what each company is thinking. There is a bunch of functions under GM like Leadership Development Programs (LDP), operations & supply chain management, strategic planning and finance and accounting roles. Corporate Finance role is quite open to everyone (again, just numbers and data) and others are somewhere between marketing and consulting.

Consulting and banking companies don't really seem to care. And those are probably the toughest to get in for various reasons. Consulting companies interview differently. They give you problems to solve in 25 mins (called cases) and if you do well, they take you. Cool stuff. Banking companies I don't really know much about, but from what I see, most of them require you to schmooze with them, you need to either have a finance background or you better be a cat at following finance columns of business magazines and papers. That was what was all the career changer stuff was about, so I won't get into it again.

Of course, I hope you understand that none of the above are hard and fast rules. There are no rules here. There are incredibly smart people here who pull off stuff you can't even imagine, and this is just a teeny-weeny thing called internship. To put things in perspective, we students wouldn't even be discussing it much (or at all) in a couple of years, I guess.

Addendum: I added this comment to another post and it relates to this. Since it is 2 fat paragraphs, I thought I will paste it here too:

Good luck for your results on Duke interview. I am glad my experience helped in your interviewing. Regarding the internship search, my thoughts relate to general job search for an MBA student. The two key points I want to get across is that if you want to change careers, start early and if you are an international student and have limited exposure to US society, you might have to find an entry into certain functions through different paths. I have known interns who got into brand management in a US CPG company and found themselves a little out of place. That is a reality that most applicants will face, so I just want to make you guys aware of it. Both these facts are regardless of you getting business education or anything particular to any business school. There are a lot of opportunities coming our way, and it depends on how seamlessly you can fit in. There is nothing to be freaked out about! :-) I am sorry if I painted a rather gloomy picture! :-)

To take my example, I came here with strategy and marketing in mind, and that's what I still want to do. In fact, I find myself more of a fit into some functions of marketing whereas earlier, I was inclined very much towards strategy. Overall, I would suggest exploring the strengths of schools and fit during the application process; the rest depends on individuals themselves. As far as marketing is considered, I found Fuqua fantastic. The Marketing Club is super-active, the profs. are very well known and really good and I think I have seen more companies in Fuqua campus than I could ever imagine! Anyway, I will stop my rambling and hope I have been able to answer some concerns.

Interviewing for MBA schools

2006-02-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

So I had to give someone some advice on interviewing for MBA recently. Frankly, I thought I had some material there that I can use in my blog and would hopefully be a little useful too to people. So here it is, what to expect and what to prepare.

MBA interviews are fun... if they go well. Otherwise, you kick yourself and say 'Damn that question was so basic, I can't believe I answered it like that!' Welcome to MBA.

Here are a few tips and things that I found useful.

- THE most important question perhaps is 'Do you have any questions?' The reason is that this question shows a lot of things. With one stroke, you can show curiosity, understanding, maturity, 'readiness' to do MBA, future plans, thinking style and so on. Here is my take on it. Ask day to day stuff. Don't ask about hi-fi things. Ask things like how is the school committed to alumni learning, what is a typical day at Fuqua (one always starts with 'There is no such thing as a typical day at Fuqua', but then talks for 5 mins! :-D), how are the leadership opportunities there, how international is the curriculum and the MBA experience at the school, what is the global recognition of the brand, what are the most active and influential student clubs in the school. Ask these questions enthusiastically and inquisitively. I also think being inquisitive and curious can be very genuine by itself even if you are faking it. You want to join this school, so hell, you are curious about all this basic stuff. In one of my MBA interviews, I asked the alumnus about some new exotic research initiative in the school. Turns out it was too specific and too high-flying and irrelevant a question to ask. I thought I was smart and this question would show my research on school activities, but it doesn't work that way. It essentially had the same meaning and depth as... 'blah'.

Preparation: I would suggest take a small spiral notebook (I say spiral coz. I just so love those!) and write down 4 why mba, 3 why us, 4 strengths, 3 weaknesses, 3 qualities you bring to school (*), 1-2 accomplishments, 1 difficult conversation (this might be important, gave negative feedback in performance appraisal for example), 1-2 motivated people example, 1-2 led people, 1-2 failures, 1 taken risk, 1 disagreed with supervisor, 1 handled a difficult subordinate, 1 had impact somewhere (maybe organization, school, community), 1 took initiative. There is no need to think of so many stories. You can reuse stories, but try not to use same story for more than 2-3 of the above. Writing so many points is painstaking (3 weaknesses, are you kidding me?), but you have to put in the effort. The best part is that you don't have to think of exotic stuff. Be basic about these. Simplicity here will simplify your interview a lot. (Yeah, that was some statement to make!)

(*) What you bring to school. This is very important, don't think hi fi stuff, just tell what you bring from your experience; project management, people relationships, sales insight, leading people, business perspective with strong engineering foundation, ability to identify with engineering and technical people etc. etc. The simpler you keep it, the better.

- Also think of a club you want to start. I personally hate this question coz. I think it can be easily practiced and anyone can fool the interviewer, but if it's out there, it's out there. It could be 'guitar appreciation club' or something. My personal take on this is that it doesn't even have to be a new club. Business schools have too many clubs anyway. You can even say you would organize a music show under the music club in both years and put in a framework so people will do it even after you leave the school. You can give it a name and add a person in the music club cabinet to organize it so it becomes a permanent feature of the school. Now how about that! Use a similar example and you are done. See what I mean when I say it's not really a good question? Anyone can say that and fill airtime.

Be prepared for an estimation question: Estimate the size of the squash ball market in India. You can start from top-down; how many cities, how many squash court clubs, membership in each club, how many balls a week per member etc. etc. If you are fairly analytical, you should be able to handle this. The key is to be systematic and push yourself to make ridiculous assumptions and move on quickly. I was asked a similar question and I got an answer like some 20,000 balls a year! Yeah right! I still got in at the school though! Your assumptions can be wrong, your approach can't be as long as you get the approach. (That was some statement to make again!)

One last big thing, don't lean back on the chair! :-) Not all the time at least. I know I am like that, I like talking comfortably. So you are a top school, I am a confident guy and am here to share my ideas. That's perfectly the attitude (in my not-so-humble-I-guess opinion). But showing enthusiasm is important once you have crossed other hurdles. I have realized that curiosity is a big tool to show enthusiasm. I interviewed for Fuqua sitting on a cane-and-cushion couch at a golf club in Mumbai. The table was a low tea-poy and we were sitting outside looking over at the course. I realized that I was leaning forward because of an orange juice on the table at the time I was asking questions about the school to the interviewer. I am no shrink or mind reader to say what happened, but it somehow makes sense. Or does it? Maybe I'm nuts! Anyway, forget that, take the first statement in this paragraph metaphorically if you want. But just be curious during the interview, like you have already got in and now are deciding whether to select the school or not yourself.

A lot of the above would be based on my personal style I guess and need not apply to many of you. But hopefully it gives you an idea of what to expect in the interview and one way to go about it.

Back!

2006-01-22T10:47:00.000-08:00

Finally I mustered enough interest and energy to start writing this post. I know what everyone thought! MBA finally caught up with him! Well, to be honest, term 2 was tough (and really bad) for me. However, that isn't quite the reason I stopped posting to this blog. In fact, my last post came right at the peak of term 2 mania and we have had holidays of almost 40 days (wahoo)! I did not post all during the winter break because I didn't feel any more like writing some stuff and sending it into a black hole (even if this black hole was the internet, hardly black enough).

Well anyway, to wrap up term 2, don't wanna think about it. The worst term, the worst courses, couple of bad course structures, we are slowly on our way to being MBA. I am quarter of an MBA, and that my friends, is probably the best thing about term 2.

So I did a lot of thinking during the holidays, about work, about school, subjects, blog, activities, life etc. etc. I didn't know where my blog was going. Heck I didn't know where everything else was going! I fell sick, but am recovering now. One thing I need to say is this. YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO FALL SICK! I don't know about post MBA jobs, but during MBA, if you fall sick, you can say goodbye to that term. It's of course, not the end of the world, but it's mighty annoying and makes you feel stupid. Good thing these MBAs are modeled after 'Whose line is it anyway', 'The show where
everything's made up and the points don't matter' (or so I hope!).

So the next best thing I have to do in this quarter MBA plan is to look for internship. I deliberately omitted the article before internship in the last sentence, coz. we had an extended, all-nighter debate over whether it's 'an internship' or 'the internship'. After a lot of debate that didn't lead us anywhere, we just avoid the topic now and have decided to get (uhha-uhha) internship and then start using the appropriate article next year.

There is lots to write, internship interviews have started, lot of bankers are disappointed coz. almost all the banking interviews are over and few offers were doled out. Other interviews will go on until end-Feb or so. Hopefully, there will be more companies next term and more interviews in March and April. We are told the recruitments are up significantly from last year, so hopefully, it will be good.

Since I am writing after so long, I need to cover a lot of ground (not to mention, read and prepare assignments for tomorrow's classes), so I am kinda all over the place in this post. Term 3 has 3 courses, Decision Modeling, Managerial Accounting and Operations Management. This term looks a million times more interesting than last term for us general managers. These are subjects that we can put to use tomorrow in our jobs.

Other than these 3 core, I have taken one other Fuqua course called the 'Global Academic Travel Experience - Cuba' (GATE - Cuba). There are a bunch of GATE courses, like India, SE Asia, China, S. America etc. The GATE courses are where we study about the country or region in class and in the end, go to that region to meet the businesses, government officials and people. I took Cuba as I was kind of fascinated by the culture, loved Cuban music and wanted to learn about a communist economy. We'll see where I go with it.

Finally, I have also taken a course outside Fuqua, in Duke. The course is called Music 55, Introduction to music theory. Here, I am learning to write music notations (I can do some basic reading) and also learn the structure and history of music. I am auditing the couse, which means it will appear in my transcript but no grades! I don't have to take any exam, no homework, no assignments, quiz, nothing. One can do as much or as little as he or she wants when auditing. Since I am taking it out of interest, it's not really made up but points still don't matter. Good fun.

OK, so that was a brief on things happening on this side of the world. I do have to get back to my case reading and also prepare for one interview that I have in the coming week. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are very few companies who make an impression on you (or maybe it's just me) when you are here, and this is one of those companies. So catch you all later.

Fuqua Brand Challenge and Diwali/Eid party pictures

2005-11-20T09:03:00.000-08:00

Me playing pictionary...

(From left) Shivani (From IIM B'lore), Ashish, Charu (From HEC Paris) and Sandeep. This beautiful picture taken by yours truly.

See more pictures at http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/shiveshvish/my_photos

Some more fun at school

2005-11-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

So after some serious posts about work, SIPs etc. let's get back to the fun stuff! Fuqua Friday's are still happening and boy they are fun! Last couple of FFs have been really cool, one with the Fuqua Brand Challenge and one with 'Taste of Durham'. Other than that, we had a 'Diwali and Eid' party last week.

Brand challenge is this really cool thing organized by students to collect information about different brands out there and also have fun along the way. We had stalls by students, running Dasani vs. Aquafina vs. tap water, heinz ketchup vs. generic ketchup, sugar vs. splenda, Google vs. Yahoo!, Playstation vs. xbox.. the list goes on and on. For example, you were asked to try out two ketchups and answer questions in a survey like 'Which one was sweeter?', 'Which one was more tangy?', 'Which one you liked better?', 'Do you prefer tangy or sweet ketchup?' and so on. The whole thing was really fun! For my part, believe it or not, I was able to differentiate between almost everything that I tried. I caught Heinz, Dasani, Splenda, really cool stuff! The only bad thing that happened was that I lost in the Google vs. Yahoo match. You were given a question related to school and you had to search for information on the net to find out the answer. I was asked to find out the PhD thesis paper of one prof. I used Google and a friend called Shivani used Yahoo! Now I must admit that I might be the tech. guy with a software background, but I suck big time when it comes to net. I am not your resourceful guy and I took ages to get to the person's thesis. Shivani won by a thin margin, and I soooo wanted Google to win!! :-(

Anyway, so that was brand challenge, we did some really funny stuff. I will upload pictures from the thing pretty soon, but it was great! Then we had the 'Diwali and Eid' party hosted by the Indus club last week! Got to eat some Indian food, danced to bhangra music (the Dj wasn't the best though, but whatever) and saw people in sarees and salwar suits and kurta-payjama n all! I was the odd one out wearing one of my 'jhatang' shirts that I am so well-known for! ;-)

Anyway, I am running late so I will write about the other FF, Taste of Durham sometime later perhaps. And we have Thanksgiving break coming up pretty soon and I plan to visit my sister for the 5 days, research some company websites to get some 'intelligent' question to ask them!! Will post some more too then. So catch you guys later!

Them disastrous SIPs

2005-11-10T19:34:00.000-08:00

Instead of talking about how the companies present themselves well in their Special Interest Presentations at Fuqua, I thought it would be more interesting to talk about companies who didn't quite do a great job at presenting themselves. It is surprising how many companies do a not-so-great job of presenting themselves, much less selling themselves in these SIPs! Believe me, you would be surprised!

Well, there is an argument that I might be a total jerk and picking on small things, or plain simple arrogant, judgmental, opinionated prick to be writing about companies this way and laying too much emphasis on something as simple as an information session by perfectly good companies eager to hire us. I accept this argument and that might be the case. However, I have spoken to my classmates around and many people seem to notice these things and I thought it might be an interesting thing to write about. For reasons of keeping this nice and only indicative, I will not take company names, but will only give some idea of what these companies are.

To be picky, out of the million or so SIPs that I have attended so far, I have found that maybe 10% of companies really do a good job of reaching out to students and being informative. Considering that these two are the primary purpose of SIP, it is indeed amazing! These are the companies whose SIPs you come out of learning about the work, their culture, values, history, a typical day in a life of an MBA, the role and work involved, priorities, competitive advantage, their strategy, important functions that drive them etc. Considering the breadth of information that I am talking about here, maybe it is not that amazing after all that only so few companies do really well. It's not an easy job by any stretch of imagination. So, let's stop being nitpicky and categorizing them into small brackets and run straight into the really worst company presentations!

In my opinion, about 1 in every 5 SIP that I attend is simply unbearable and you can't just wait until the thing is over and you hit the door! Here are some examples:

1. Bad presenter: One leading pharma company had a smart ass of a presenter who seemed more interested in cracking jokes, and not just jokes, but cracking some really obnoxious ones about topless women, ridiculing his own companies slides. Jokes might be a great way to connect, but one a slide gets a bit too much!

2. Plain simple uninformative: Some SIPs you come out of learning absolutely nothing about the company or its people. You come out of it gaining no understanding of even the work, why they want an MBA and what they do with an MBA! As it happens, I am just coming from a presentation of a reputed Indian company, and this company pissed so many people off with their mumbo-jumbo of a presentation, that it promptly prompted me to write this post! "We add value to customers by giving them a competitive advantage in their market place... (and then a little later) this work might seem like a very mundane job against some of the exciting strategy stuff out there, but at the end of the day, this is where the value generation is..." yada yada yada. You get the idea!

3. Cluttered slides: I come from a technical background, so I can perfectly understand the tendency to fill your slides with jargons, paragraph long bullet points, hard-to-read texts and pictures that make no sense, explaining the technology and industry instead of the management priorities and other stuff that I wrote above. Overall, consumer good companies do a great job presenting themselves and some of their marketing SIPs are a treat to watch with really fantastic stuff out there! That's what they do best: Targetted marketing in a tough, competitive and commoditized market, so I can perfectly understand why some of the technical companies would find it hard to match them. However, even if we don't factor that in, I think technical companies can do a much better job with their content if they are a little more considerate of the audience. Business schools are so diverse that it's almost unforgivable to not do this! By the way, out of the 10% that I said really did a great job, I can think of only Microsoft among the tech. companies that made it to that list! Apple is coming soon to campus and I have high expectations of them! I am sure they will do a good job. They have to! Finger crossed, they will.. I know they will... fingers crossed, there's no way they can't. OK that's enough, I'm rambling here!

This is probably one of my only strongly opinionated post so far, but it is indeed surprising to see how things are not all as 'slick' as you think they would be before you made your way to the hotshot world of a business school. I have much more appreciation for marketing, advertising, PR etc. after these experience and it is high time tech. companies started having some real fun (not just the geeky fun that I was fortunate enough to see in the good ol' days!) I must say I can't wait for this tech. industry to get all 'slick'! Microsoft and Apple would maybe lead the way, I am sure. (I would be the most disappointed person on this planet if Apple does not live up to its reputation! What about all my investments into the iBook and iPod! :-O)!

Start of term 2

2005-11-07T14:31:00.000-08:00

After all the insightful details on how one should have the right kind of momentum to enter a term and be ready to manage one's time well that I wrote about in my previous post, I ended up being royally unprepared for term 2. I had a lot of time during fall break, unlike a lot of my friends who were busy trotting the country, and sadly enough, I seemed like one of the most taken aback by the first week of the new term.

Believe me, first day of a new term is no different from any other day and it hits you so bad that you can't help thinking that someone just hit the pause button on this crazy video and resumed! Term 2 started with a bang... and what a bang at that! Marketing, Finance and Accounting, all started in full speed, and by full speed, I mean full speed. I haven't seen anything like this before. Finance and Accounting had a set of pre-course CD that you had to prepare from, and guess what; All the basics you will probably ever need in those courses are in those CDs and if you don't do them well (or do them well but don't really 'get' it), you are in for a fun ride.

I remember coming back one day from classes and thinking: "These guys are ought to be crazy! Or if not crazy, really not bothered about what we learn in school. Maybe it's all about the money! No one really cares how much you learn because the pace at which the courses are going, you can't really learn anything!" This wasn't even panicking because I knew I wasn't the only one with this problem. I was sure everyone was in the same boat and since we have relative grading, it doesn't really matter. Fuqua students, collectively as a group, are not learning anything! And if Fuqua students (you know, being such good ones from a top school and all) are not learning anything, maybe all business school students everywhere in the world are not really learning anything! Wat a minute, I'm onto something here... Business leaders, being as smart as they are, have found the perfect answer. Don't really teach or learn anything and we can all have fun and make a lot of money in the process. Hmm... 'Interesting!', I thought. Maybe running a business wasn't really about skill anyway. All the stories of Bill Gates, Lou Gerstner or Richard Branson were after all really based on their being geniuses... And maybe they had a little bit of luck to help them along. So the entire thing is just a cosmic coincidence between you being a born genius and luck helping you a little. It's a conspiracy! Could that be true?!

As I took up the books to start studying just to confirm or dis-confirm my revolutionary (and to-be-kept-a-secret-from-the-world) theory, I found that it wasn't really the case. (Sigh! There goes another one of my revolutionary theories) As a matter of fact, you do learn if you give it some time. However, for a second, it gave me the scare of a lifetime! I guess I will cover the learning aspect in a separate blog. Some of these courses are (yawn!) some of the most boring ones.

I have not really been partying much this term like the last one. I ended the fall term with a mild fever and a cold that has stuck to me since that time, and in fact, as I write this, I do have a mild fever. Believe me, one thing you really don't want to do when you are here is get sick. It just doesn't work! If you fall behind even by a day or two, you would have to catch up so much that you would either fall sick again or start theorizing crazy stuff like I did above!

Anyway, I just dropped in to say a couple of words since I haven't posted anything for some time, and now I'll get some sleep. I have an accounting quiz tomorrow and I don't want to go in there with a fever! Yawnnn...

The class format and the profs

2005-10-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

Let me talk a little about how the classes were in term 1 and something about the profs. I recently read a small blog entry somewhere from a woman who had visited classes in Columbia, HBS and Stanford. I thought the comments were pretty interesting and I never myself thought how different a particular class could be and even if it is, how much of a difference in your learning it could make.

Recently, since the admissions process has started heating up at Fuqua, I have seen prospective student visitors sit at the back of my class. They are usually welcomed nicely by the profs. at the beginning and the students sometimes clap for them if the situation makes it kinda unavoidable (you know, sometimes the awkward pause needs to be filled with something ;-)). They usually sit for half the class and then disappear after the break. I have seen them through the corners of my eye during lectures and thought to myself, "This dude ought to be impressed.". But jokes apart, I honestly don't know what they take away from the visit and what they write in their respective blogs (!), but I thought that it would be interesting to write about classes at Fuqua.

So lemme cover the 3 classes that we had in term 1, Stats, MICRO-ECON and ME.

PROBABILITY & STATISTICS: Probability and Stats is pretty much your typical math class with a lot of learning from traditional lecturing, doing problems in class and students asking questions. There are occasions when the class is involved in a discussion about how good or bad statistics can be for example, or how a *random* sampling among population can be biased. Sometimes, when team assignments are due at the beginning of a class, one team is chosen (by volition mostly) to present its solution to everyone and this lasts for about a half hour. The class is fairly fast-paced with a lot of topics being covered in a single lecture and then sometimes, you have a class where the lecturer spends more than half a class solving problems on the OHP and giving you a feel for how to approach problems. There are lots of slides (and two bundles of lots of slides sometimes!) and lecturing is the primary tool applied for teaching. The Prof. was Jill Stowe, a good natured woman who used to put up pictures of her 6 month old son Zack in between slides just to wake us up (we had early morning classes for stats!) Stats was also different from the other lectures in a way that it did not have mid-term exams. Instead we had 3 quizzes over the first 8 or 9 (out of 12) classes. The first quiz was monstrously tough and really grabbed everyone's attention to the course. Overall, quite rigorous and traditional course with a great prof. at the helm.

MANEGERIAL ECONOMICS: We had Jim Anton (by now, you must have heard the name couple of times!). He is a tall, well built, nice guy with a great demeanor. He is extremely punctual about class timings and usually walks up to the clock in the class, watches it closely, looks at the minute and (I think) the second hand and announces, "Please be back at 2:56". ECON, like ME, has a lot of reading to do before class and the class assumes that you have done it. Almost the whole class is interactive, from beginning to end with Jim asking people for their experiences in a grocery store, a convenience store, or with life in general, with cell phone companies, flights etc. In terms of theory, you learn a lot by reading a great book that is assigned as the required text for the course. The class, in my opinion, focuses more on the application of concepts that you have read. Jim also has a great way of plucking out topics and placing them in a real life in such a way that you will never forget. I think he is liked by many students for this, but the other reason why students like him so much is his classy and incredibly funny humour that is extremely tasteful.

Talking about learning how to apply concepts, he brings Wall Street Journal to almost every other class, puts it up on the OHP and discusses couple of articles from it for a few minutes. If you think that's practical, think about this: We played 2 economy games in class. We were grouped as suppliers or consumers, suppliers setting a price for 3 grades of a product and consumers choosing to buy one unit of one of those grade-products, such that they got maximum benefit when they bought it. Do this over and over again and you will see where price stabilizes in a market. In another game, we were the constituents of OPEC cartel and were asked to generally *supply* oil. The demand from the market of oil was fixed at a mathematical equation and depending on how your cartel performs, the constituents reaped profits. If a cartel constituent produced in excess to reap high short-term benefit, you saw excess supply in the market, eventually hurting the cartel operations and the constituent in the longer run. This is probably as practical as it gets in a classroom. Often, you came out of a class either thinking that what was discussed in class was vastly different from and had no connection to what you read, or if you did not read the assigned readings like.... umm.. you-know-who, you came out completely lost and panicking. However, at some point, when you are scared enough to sit down and (re-)read the chapters in the book, it all starts making sense (and making a lot of sense in real life!) That is how powerful this course was.

MANAGERIAL EFFECTIVENESS: Last, and by no means the least was the much talked about, much loved and much hated, ME. I don't know where to begin as I think about this course. Ah yes, class format. The pre-class readings were a lot in this class and every class had a case to be discussed. The readings were from books, sometimes articles and research publications. The readings were many and you had to spend a couple of hours before each class to finish the readings and the case. You also had to take a pre-class survey before 10 PM the previous night. These surveys consisted of general questions or questions based on the case. This was one class that went completely by discussions and students involvement. No one can lecture managerial effectiveness into your head. People shared their thoughts from the case reading and also sometimes their experiences in previous jobs. Due to the nature of the topic, sometimes you had heated debate between two groups of students, one, as an example, in favour of promoting the protagonist of the case, and one against the promotion. These cases were real life examples of ME at work. The surveys that we filled the night before were used to delve into the psychhology of a community and how they thought. It felt like this was a more of social psychology class at times. Overall, the lectures were handled very well by Rick but he always seemed like fighting against time because so many ideas were being discussed in class.

I can't even begin to explain the different tools used in this class. Let me try and put down the things that we did: Readings, case discussions, debates, results from experiments by researchers on social psychology, people behaviour etc., lecturing, results from surveys taken by students, and one role-play game. Typically, you had the first hour for discussions and the next hour for a combination of lecture and survey results analysis. This was one class that I think would have benefitted from more than 2 hours of class time, but my guess is that even that would have been consumed by discussions. If there was one class that had an electricity in the air during break and at the end, it was ME. The course was tough for most students because the topics were very controversial sometimes, or open to subjective interpretation, or at risk of being understood too *shallow-ly* or at face value perhaps, or concepts were too interconnected between classes, or because of personal opinions, biases and cultural, social or individual differences coming into play. (Ooh, man! That's all loaded stuff!) But not until you go through this course in some seriousness will you realize how difficult it is to manage a bunch of people in an organization.

So the experience of studying different subjects in a bschool is different. If you sit in a stats class, you would feel the class is more lecture-based with interactions mostly by means of questions and clarifications by students. It is practical with real life examples, but is mathematics that you are learning at the end of the day. Economics was very interactive with prof. engaging students and less lecturing. Students mostly self-learn the theory, with very practical applications being discussed in class. ME was very case- and readings-based with very engaging discussions and research-based learning. You might even think students are very competitive when they are debating in an ME class, but it's all a 'set-up'.

Also, a point to note that amazingly enough, these subjects linked to each other in subtle ways. For example, Game Theory from economics can be applied to ME concepts like *trading differences* instead of *splitting differences* when negotiating between your company and its labour union. It's a pretty direct application.

So attending lectures is useful in gaining an understanding of a school or business schools in general, but just a word of caution - beware of reading too much into it. Now I am beginning to get a grasp of why there are so many conflicting views on the internet about the top bschools. It is in the interest of learning in every bschool to have these different experiences. OK, that was a very management-type sentence that I should save for the recruiters; let me put it more simply. Different subjects need to be taught differently, and that is what all good bschools do, I am sure.

Of Led Zeppelin and cash flow

2005-10-18T22:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I wanted to celebrate fall break. I thought I will go to my favourite store, Barnes & Noble. The music collection it has is simply fantastic! They have kiosks that you can stand at and listen to previews of almost any song in the world. This is the store that I have spent 5-6 hours at a time, completely immersed in music, listening to previews of songs, deciding which album is the best introduction to an artist, which album has the most variety, maximum number of familiar songs... generally splurging and wallowing in music, spending the last penny of my savings on great music, be it jazz, classical, rock, pop, blues, soul or R&B or something as yet undiscovered by me.

However, yesterday was different. I went into the store. I went in with a firm will not to buy anything no matter what happens. (I don't plan to build up a suspense here, so let me say that I did not buy anything in the end!) But yesterday was the first time I said to myself, "Not earning money sucks! Big time!". I actually blurted out those words while I was at the store! :-) The stuff that I saw there cried out to my inner soul! Robert Johnson's blues were calling out to me and Led Zeppelin had yet another "tribute by various artists" to their credit. Yesterday, I realized how addicted I was to music. It actually felt like the days when I used to smoke. The urge is terrible and I would have picked up a CD, but for my iron-strong will... ;-)

It is actually hard to get used to living right within your needs. Even an occasional indulgence makes you feel guilty. Everyone tells the story of how they used to live during college days in 1000 or 2000 bucks (Rs.) a month. A few lucky ones get to tell the story of how they lived within a couple of 100 dollars a month after getting used to earning and spending 1000s on useless stuff like music CDs, iPod, Led Zeppelin branded incense sticks (yep! not very proud of that, I was in the moment!), never-even-touched Apple Macintosh version of computer (shooting) games. The list goes on, but for now, there's lull in this part of the world! Hopefully, a storm will follow (Yeeeaahhh, I'm going to buy BN!) ;-)

The fall break

2005-10-18T14:00:00.000-07:00

I am in the fall break right now and it is quiet in here. I am in the computer lab in school. I got so tired of sitting at home with not much to do that I couldn't stand it and came here. We have a bunch of pre-assignments for the next term and they all look pretty heavy! Accounting is a whole lot of reading, finance seems manageable for now and marketing has a case and a few readings. I haven't even looked at them yet, will do so at the last minute perhaps. No, let me say this to myself, "I will do the readings well in time". "I will do the readings well in time". Maybe it will work.

Today, I saw the results of ECON paper in my locker and... let's just say I did well in that; in the final exam as well as overall grade-wise. I told you the ECON final would be the differentiator! Do well in final and you would do well overall. The average was relatively low and I was quite comfortably above average. And it did the trick! By the way, it looks like all my theorizing about price-discrimination and the two-part tariff applied to the Rolling Stones concert worked really well! Talking of two-part tariff, I had ton loads of seven-dollar-a-glass beer for God's sake! I was learning ECON... even at the concert... betcha no one could tell! :-)

I am waiting for the ME and stats results and the wait is kkhilling me!! Never thought I would jump up and down like a kid to look at my grades, but you know what, it's pretty exciting to be back to school and give exams and see the results come back! :-) I keep checking the course page every few minutes and keep walking down to my locker every hour that I am in school.

The next term is going to be a very happening one! All of Accounting, Finance and Marketing are new to me. Marketing seems all jazzy and exciting, and I can already foresee endless hours of discussions in my ILE team on the Marketing cases. It is probably best to get the studies started with, but this break is also well-deserved and required to maintain some sanity. I don't know what my friends in NY must be going through, but if you ask me, I am so enjoying the lazing around and the 'nothingness' that surrounds me today!

In less than a week, term 2 will begin and it will again be the mad running for 6 weeks! It reminds me of a time when I was driving from Bombay to Pune after a weekend spent well. It was the monsoons and as I passed Lonavla in between, I saw a sort of a wall in front of me! In a fraction of a second, before I could give it any thought, I hit something at about 100 KM/hr. Nothing seemed to happen for a while. It didn't seem like I was in an accident. The car was still running, but I couldn't see anything in front of me. A second later, I realized that we had actually literally hit the monsoon! Ever seen grey clouds from a distance covering a whole city, and wondered, "it's raining there, will it rain here"? It was the same thing. From where I saw the wall, it was slightly sunny and it seemed like we would have a nice, sunny drive back home. And now, a second later, I was inside probably the heaviest rainfall I had ever seen in my life. The experience is still vivid in my memory, but it's hard to explain what happened that evening. It was like being pushed into a swimming pool, getting all disoriented for a fraction of a second, and then maneuvering your body back into a position from where you can get out safely. Only that you are in a car and travelling at a good speed.

I have a feeling term 2 is going to be another such soft wall.. and as we hit it, we need just enough momentum, but more important than that, we need to be prepared to turn on the lights, switch on the wipers and move our leg to the brakes as we go tumbling forward.

End of Term 1

2005-10-13T15:57:00.000-07:00

My term 1 is officially over with one last exam this morning. It was the stats paper and it was lo-ho-ho-hong... I remember at some point, I just wanted to turn the paper in and leave. There was about half an hour left to go and the last couple of questions were teasing me so bad, I could have torn my paper! I'm kidding, but stats really puts you on the edge. It's I guess one of the more rigorous topics that you have around. It's also so fundamental to everything that I guess all the nightmare is probably worth it. As Jill Stowe, our stats prof. said as she walked into the room to announce the end of 3 hours of paper, "OK people, the torture is over, you can turn it in!" Jill is also probably the nicest profs. around with one of the hardest subjects to teach in term 1. More about profs. in a later post I guess. I have one week break and in a way, I am looking forward to it. :-) Largely, term 1 was a blast and I dread sitting at home and doing nothing for more than a week! More on that a little later...

My other two exams were MICRO and ME. From what I figured, and if my intuitions are right (;-)), I think I did pretty well in both. I will have to wait and see and since this is just the first time we are finishing up with the subjects, I am not too sure about grades and how I fair in my section as a whole, since the grade distribution is relative. The distribution is roughly 25% Superior Pass, 40% High Pass, and 35% Pass, Low Pass and Fail. People are incredibly smart here and so, I think it's not easy to get an SP here. Since I started on this track, let me share an interesting, but kinda-obvious observation (A duh? moment perhaps). If a particular quiz, assignment or exam is easy, it probably doesn't add too much to your grade value as a whole. For example, stats quiz 2 was quite easy and I got a 20/20 on it. When Jill discussed the mean of class for that quiz, many people had got 20, the mean was quite high and so, there was not much scope for differentiation there. Contrast that with quiz 1 (shudderrr) and quiz 3, which were "tough". The mean was a little more modest and the spread was a bit more. If you do well in that, it counts more towards your overall grade. Overall, this is my take on it; Just do as well as you can *if you care*, this grading is far more complex than what you can make of it. I just thought it was interesting how you can surprise yourself once in a while when you outperform your class. But some people are more competitive than others and if you want to keep outperforming, that is ok too!

The MICRO final was one of those differentiating exams, I think. A lot of people had different answers for the same problems, found themselves making more mistakes than they originally thought and so on. That is good. ME, as always, will have a wide spread because of the inherent complexity of the topics. Overall, I did not come out of a paper and feel that I had screwed it up and that I didn't have a clue (like it happens sometimes). That's all that really matters to me.

So overall, term 1 was great (awesome to use the typical American word ;-)), the subjects were very fundamental to our future courses, and I have a week-long break in front of me. I am sippin' on a beer and my section is going for a pub-crawl tonight. Meanwhile, my roommate Navdeep just left for New York to do some Wall Street crawling! It's not his fault (don't blame him, poor guy! ;-)), Investment Banking folks are the earliest to start and apparently the earliest to land up with internship. I know little about their field and from what I see, it looks like a whole different world to me. From my shoes, it looks tougher with all the networking from early stages, more formal SIPs, more formal e-mails, attire, just everything. But hey, isn't bschool about the different perspectives? I find that difficult, others might find General Management, Marketing or Consulting tougher in terms of preparation. It's all about your personality... and that is just my over-simplified, beer-influenced, couch version of things!

Term 1 academics in some detail

2005-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

I promised I will talk about term 1 and the studies and some of those serious stuff, so here I am, ready to talk about the courses, the profs, the exams, the books, the readings, the cases, the assignments, the homework & exercises. Oh that's an awful lot! Never realized there are so many aspects to studies! Damn! What about job search! Gosh, I'm in big trouble! :-| Maybe I should talk just about the courses for now. (This is when I go back to the title and change it from the ambitious "learning from term 1" to "Term 1 academics in some detail").

OK so let me take this step by step and maybe I will be able to cover this in some detail. Now that I am through with term 1 classes, enough to gain some perspective, hopefully I can write a bit more than "Hey that Prof. is cool man. He cracks so many jokes in the class, doesn't let me fall asleep despite the last night!", or "That subject sucks! I don't see myself using that ever in my life!" or "The team assignments are a killer man! We spent half a day today trying to convince each other of what the problem was." etc.

So let me take a step back and try to put the 4 main courses in perspective in this post. Managerial Effectiveness (ME) is all about how to manage people in an organization. It covers wide variety of topics, from the organizational structure to put in place, the decision-making, managing information flow, how to motivate people, how to make the different groups (that you created in the first place) work together efficiently, how informal networks form in an organization and how the culture (or cult in some cases) are formed and what the incentive structure should be with respect to the hiring and retention policies for the company. (Hey this was a good recap for me, I have ME exam on the day after!) This amazingly complex maze of managerial issues were discussed in class throughout the term. What is strange in a bschool is that everyone has a different take on every single thing. I am not talking just about specific topics listed above. This is even true about who likes what subjects and who doesn't. ME discussions were a source of nirvana for me while some people struggled with the topics. I come from an organization that has tackled these issues, but there are ample fields out there that have no clue about how things work within the realm of an organization. People from these fields find it hard to grasp these discussions and the consequences of deciding where you want to be in this web of complex interactions.

One thing I realized as I prepared for bschools is that every person brings something unique to the table. You might think that it is nothing, or that it is natural (depending on your personality ;-)). However, regardless of whether you have this seemingly simple piece of realization before you come here or not, when you come to a place as diverse as Fuqua, or any good bschool for that matter I guess, you are in for a surprise. You will meet people who hate ME and others who travel to the corners of the universe when going through the readings from the ME course pack.

The second course, and let me be through with this real quick, is COMPUTER SKILLS. You have to do excel, word and powerpoint assignments in this and it prepares you for other course, as, of course, these tools are going to be the bread & butter for us. Nothing to write specifically about this course, except that it's a drag, a necessary evil and very boring to sit and do.

Managerial Economics (ECON or MICRO) is about what makes the markets tick, and what should organizations do to stay profitable in these markets. There are various theories with respect to supply & demand in markets, competitive markets, monopoly and oligopoly markets, price discrimination, costs, revenues etc. The main take-away of this course is that you have to be in a position to understand what's happening in the market. Almost all of us have subscribed to the Wall Street Journal, and when I read it now, I have begun to grasp some bit of why OPEC behaves the way it does, or whether the world is running out of oil, or how much room do companies have to increase output to gain profit, or indeed, do firms always make more profit by producing more, or would it pay off to enter this market given that these companies are serving it; will they act aggressively (cut prices for example) when I enter, or is it in their interest to make way for my entry. A lot of it is counter-intuitive until you look into these theories and you say "Duh?" or "Aha!". And if you are thinking we students have got all the answers, that's where I have to interject and say "We students are learning to ask the right questions", and then perhaps analyze the answers or the reality of the situation. The idea, in my ECON prof. Jim Anton's words is "to get the intuition."

This ties in nicely to the STATS course, so let me jump there. The idea of taking the stats course is essentially 'to be good consumers of statistics' that come by in every day world. Our world is fraught with statistics; you listen to them everyday, in TV, in newspaper, on the net and never do you stop to think how it is effecting your day to day decisions. I am over simplifying the idea and you might think that this might be a soft course. Quite to the contrary, most of this course is hard and mathematical. The stats course starts with probability and then moves on to sampling, random variables, central limit theorem, and finally, to regression analysis. Again, you are taught to be a good consumer of information that comes to you. Can you ask the right questions? Because the answer is in the questions you ask.

Pic from IFF

2005-10-10T00:33:00.000-07:00

Me at the International Food Festival singing "Chala jata hoon..."!

The aftermath (revisited)

2005-10-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

OK I will give this one more shot. It is extremely difficult to record this kind of thing because it's such an experience! The one thing that remains in my memory from the concert is that one portion of the stage moved entirely to the front towards the audience! We moved from section C1 to between C4 and B5. The stage had moved to the empty space in the middle that you see in the figure! We saw Mick and Keith from a shouting distance. It was close enough for the faces to be recognizable and had we been in an airport, I would have called out to those guys and they would have turned their heads! I was jumping about, thrilled to see them up close and I vaguely remember a hand behind my back as I did that. I turned to look and it was an old lady, afraid that this drunk 6-foot man might fall backwards over her!

They started with start me up, then moved through a string of classics like miss you, wild horses, you can't always..., satisfaction, jumping jack flash, brown sugar, sympathy..., it's only rock... and to my delight, honky tonk woman. They also played the classic Ray Charles song Night time is the right time. What an experience! After the first few songs, I vaguely remember myself jumping about and dancing around. I remember a guy joining me briefly and we went crazy. Then the guy's girlfriend joined me and we danced like crazy for a half hour. I even jived with her (I had no idea I could do that until then!!) The guy seemed quite visibly shocked to see his girl go so crazy, but there was no stopping us! We tried pulling him and Divya in, but I guess they weren't quite drunk enough! :-) We were the two loudest in our section and boy was it fun!

So I have a soar throat today and I finally sat down to study economics. There is nothing much that one can write about such experiences, I guess. As Jethro Tull said You're never too old to Rock n' Roll, if you're too young to die. I hope these guys never get too old to rock n' roll...

The aftermath

2005-10-08T22:26:00.000-07:00

I just came back from the concert. I honestly have no idea where to start. Maybe I should start at the beginning. Maybe I should start at the beginning tomorrow! Yeah, that's a good idea, I have no energy left to write anything... I am drunk and I am disoriented. I am trying to think hard about what just happened and I have a frown on my face right now, trying to think.. I will catch you guys tomorrow!

The Rolling Stones

2005-10-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day of our term 1. It is unbelievable, to say the least, how fast this term has gone by! Sometime last week, I also realized that this blog is becoming more about the fun that I am having here rather than giving anyone, any kind of idea of what business school is about, academics-wise, career-wise and job-search-wise etc. I realized this when a friend of mine said "Looks like you guys are partying like crazy!" While we do party about off and on and the parties do tend to stick around in my head a little longer than academics, we do some amount of studies too! ;-) So I promised myself that my next post will be about some of the serious stuff that I am at Fuqua for and also that I get around to doing.

But just when I try to get all serious and wise, they pull me back in! And this time, it's none other than the Rolling Stones themselves in all their devilish, bad-boy glory! They are in town and are playing at a stadium right opposite Fuqua! After much procrastination and lazing around in a classic Shivesh style, trying to decide how much I should spend from my tight budget, I finally bought two tickets for $100 each. And in her own classic procrastinating style, Divya has agreed to join me to the concert. I think I got a good deal, bought it from a Fuqua Alum from NY, who apparently got stuck with work at the last minute! Sounds ominous,, doesn't it? :-) Well, hopefully, I will have better luck when I am out there with the bad boys of the industry! :-)

So my ticket is right on the floor, but not really up close (what do you expect for a 100 bucks, hah!) Here is the seating chart.

My seat is in section C1! I have no idea if it is any good. My MICRO ECON professor, Jim Anton also happens to be a Rolling Stones fan and as he said about the Rolling Stones tickets in class, "It's all about price discrimination. You are not quite sure about the seating arrangements, which section is good, which is bad. They don't reveal much in that seating chart and it's all about gathering as much consumer surplus as you can by product differentiation and maximize profit for your firm." Well, I will be off to the stadium in a couple of hours and let's see some price discrimination in action! (By the way, do you think I will be able to touch Keith!?) :-|

As if to protest the good times that I was going to have at the concert, my car broke down this morning! Well not broke down, but the battery got discharged. Almost all the parking spaces in the University have been blocked for the concert. So this morning, as I drove into the campus looking for a spot close to the school, the slightly drizzly weather was beautiful. I had my windows down and was listening to "Honky Tonk Woman" on the radio, feeling pretty good about the prospect of listening to it being performed live that same evening. My car evidently did not like the idea of being parked at one of the far off spots while I enjoyed the Stones from Section C1! And that too for a 100 bucks! What a shame! Fortunately, it was a small alley where it gave me the boot, so I promptly left it there and started the long walk to school. The drizzle turned into a downpour, and after an hour of some adventure, I finally arrived at the school to announce to everyone that I am going to the concert! It's amazing what the Stones could do to you! Despite everything on my mind and the long walk, I had a bounce in my stride and a song in my heart ...Gimme, gimme, gimme the honky tonk blues...

My ILE team!

2005-10-02T09:48:00.000-07:00

Finally, I have managed to grab hold of a picture of my ILE team! And it is from the ILE "ropes course" that we went to right after the Orientation week. My ILE team 9 was paired up with team 8 from our section.

Standing L to R - Ryan (9), Matt (8), Dave (9), Doug (8), Shivesh (9), Gonzalo (8)
Kneeling L to R - Amit (8), Jenny (9), Bhawna (8), Jaime (9), Julie (Instructor)

International Food Festival

2005-10-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

The International Business Club at Fuqua organized something called the Food Festival this Friday and needless to say, the event was a great success! International students prepared stuff and the guests, other students (like me), parents of students, faculty members and partners of students had a jolly good fill Friday evening. Now I am not really the kind of guy who can report such stuff with great detail, so if you ask me what countries were represented, I am not so sure. Some that I noticed were China, Japan, India, there was mediterranean cuisine, French, umm, that's it. I kinda spent most of my time at the mediterranean stall. There was stuff like Pita, Hummus, falafel and I had a jolly good fill myself! :-) The Indian, Chinese and Japanese stalls had such a big queue that I didn't dare taking that road. India, BTW, got the best prize for stall decoration (or something like that, but so cool!)

After the international festival, there was a show at the good ol' Geneen auditorium called 'Sights and Sounds of the world'. As you might have guessed, this was a cultural show showcasing dances, costumes, talents and traditions of countries around the world. Not until you see some of the shows put up by the far eastern countries or the African continent will you realize how different and exciting they are! The Japanese did a great pop show. About 12 dancers danced to a totally pop tune, much like "dil to pagal hai" or something (and now I know why Rajnikanth is supposed to be so famous in Japan). The song and dance sequence was crazy. It was Japipop!! Pop to the core, but still very Japanese. I have still not recovered from seeing a bunch of quiet Japanese folks doing some of the Jitendra-like dance steps. What a sight! :-)

Well, so the other countries put up some great shows too. Thailand did a folk dance, Chinese did some cool marshal arts stuff, Koreans did a fantastic drum-beat thing, Africans did a fashion show with their long gown-like ummm.. things.... In the Korean thing, 6-8 of them had different percussion instruments and their beat was awesome to say the least! The Chinese marshal arts stuff was scary, especially for the first benchers in the auditorium; they had sticks flying over their heads! :-) Our Indian Junta did a fashion show and a nicely choreographed dance to "Mahi ve" (difficult to absorb for a Led Zep freak like me, but what the heck, it was a 'culture' thing you know... ;-))

Let me come to the main point of this post now. Yours truly did his bit too for the show! ;-) He sang the good ol' Chala Jata Hoon of Kishore (looks like that is the only song I was born to sing; when will I get over it man!!) and guess what, it was a cool hit! :-) I thoroughly enjoyed singing to the claps of the audience (determined not to lose my rhythm due to the claps! kidding...). People seemed (or pretended ;-)) to enjoy it very much and I even got an offer from an amateur student guitarist to jam with him! How cool is that.... :-) Still going strong on the rock singer thing... Some day, some day. :-)

Well anyway, the show was a hit. I got to see the fun side of being Japanese (;-)) and overall, what an experience!

Duke Basketball Campout pictures

2005-09-27T22:22:00.000-07:00

The ice luge

The UHauls and Budget trucks!

The check-in rush. Well, the end of a check in actually.

Darren gone asleep (a trained eye would look at the number of bottles around this guy!)

Campout tents, nightfall

Duke Basketball Campout: The coolest thing

2005-09-27T21:19:00.000-07:00

Last weekend was the most fun I have ever had in my whole of 2-odd months that I have been here. All the graduate and professional school students of the Duke University converged at a giant parking lot in the campus to spend the 2 days of weekend. The reason? Basketball.

Many of you might know how BIG Basketball is in Duke, but in case you don't know, it is big (even I don't quite know yet how big, but there is aweful lot of fuss about it at Fuqua). So anyway, campout is a way for graduate students to buy season tickets to the games. The price? Forget the money, you pay a bigger price! You book big UHaul or Budget trucks, RVs (Recreation Vehicles, full with toilets and what not!) and camp there because the organizers keep blowing the whistles and you have to go and stand in a line and 'check in' every time. The whistles are blown, of course, at random and throughout the day and night. Check in is a way to prove that you are still camping out for the tickets.

The campout starts at 7 PM on Friday with the first whistle and then its just a thread of whistles throughout the two days. You can't afford to sleep coz. you might miss the whistle. If you tell a buddy, well, he might sleep off too and you don't want to miss the chance to buy cheap season tickets to the game that defines Duke! So essentially, what campout turns out to be is a big huge Woodstock-like party! You drink and drink and drink and party and party and party! The atmosphere is like a carnival to say the least and you have very innovative beer games being played all around the area. You spend the nights dancing like a mad man or a mad woman, but just enough so you don't fall asleep... Or pass out.

I think there were about 20-25 whistles blown between 7 PM on Friday and 7 AM on Sunday, which is when the campout ended. The whistle frequency increased as the night got thicker and we had people running in the drunken, sleepy stupor at 3 AM and barely standing in the line, enough to remember and announce their names and numbers assigned to them at the check-in counter!

And if you think doing all this guarantees a ticket, thing again! If you manage to check in all the time (you are allowed one miss), your name merely goes into a lot! So out of around 1700-2000 people at campout, I am guessing maybe 13-1500 qualify for a lottery and I think around 25-30% of them get tickets. I will post the correct numbers if they give it to us, but suffice it to say that the chances are quite slim!

But who cares anyway! I am sure some do, but a lot of us just went there to party. And party we did! Two nights and one day of nothing to do, but drink and dance and drink some more! The whistles can get pretty irritating for some people, especially, when you are half-asleep in a chair out in the cold (so you don't get too cosy and miss your check in) in a drunken stupor, tired of all the dancing around and playing stupid beer pongs and flip-cups. Oh did I say irritating earlier!! :-) Nahhh....

Here is a partial list of things you typically do in camout; drinking, dancing, playing beer-pong or flip-cup, basketball or football, sleeping, flirting, walking, studying, talking, reading, watching movie or sports, and ahem... networking (man, how can I forget that, and yes, people were found studying, that too someone from Fuqua, and I am not proud of that! :-)). And finally, you hear the whistle blow and you find yourself running to the check-in counters. You don't quite know why you are running (you will check in anyway), but everyone is, so you do too! I wish I had more tools than just this stupid keyboard to give you a feel of campout, but I will upload some pics I guess. Campout is the most fun I have had, not just here at Fuqua, but just anywhere and after a long, long time!

My first few activities

2005-09-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

Just thought I would quickly sign in to tell about the first couple of activities at Fuqua that I have got involved with. I just got the word that I have been selected as one of the copy editors for The Fuqua Times, Fuqua's in-house weekly journal. As you can imagine, I am quite excited about it (I got a call just an hour ago, in fact and am already typing away to glory!) and as always, love the exclusivity associated with reading articles before they make it to the paper. Oh of course, also the thrill of putting on my editing scissors and cutting down the errors in style, grammar, language, layout etc. etc. of the biggest of shots at Fuqua! ;-)

From the little I know right now, copy editing is the final stage before a paper goes to press and copy editors are responsible for the presentation overall of the paper. Painful maybe, but great for a writing freak like me! I am actually joining a team of copy editors consisting of 2 second year students. It's worth mentioning that many of the student posts at Fuqua are shared by couple of people because people are usually busy intermittently.

Another piece of activity that I got my shot at is the hosting of Microsoft on their visit to campus for a SIP. SIP stands for Special Interest Presentation and there are a multitude of SIPs organized throughout term 1. SIP is just a fancy name for an information session about the company and the roles that they typically hire for. So it's basically our good old pre-placement talk as they are called in India, except for of course..... take a guess... the "networking" portion man! What else!? (I am actually now able to utter this word without the certain amount of discomfort that I had before! Good for me, I guess! :-)). So SIPs are where companies come to give information on both the first year internship positions as well as second year jobs. So if you are thinking Shivesh has been here for a few months already, you are wrong! It just happens that SIPs start quite early in the year. This is my 3rd week in the school look at what they are putting me through! :-) SIPs have already started and I know today was Morgan Stanley and I didn't go for that; not really interested.

So hopefully things will work out fine with the additional Fuqua Times responsibility and I will get by without flunking any of the subjects; but then again, you never know. So stay tuned in for some excitement.... :-)

BTW, our second stats quiz results came out today and I totally rocked! I got a full score! Now how about calling that some sweeeet revenge! ;-)

But you know what! The test was really easy and around half the class scored full marks I think! But who cares... :-)

My pic!

2005-09-09T20:42:00.000-07:00

That's me. This is a picture from last year. We actually have a photograph of ours taken at Fuqua, but I am in a suit in that, my neck is jutting out and my head is tilted slightly to the right on photo to give a feel that I am a very smart, successful and nice future manager! It didn't quite work out that well though... ;-)

Term 1 courses

2005-09-09T11:31:00.000-07:00

Long time, no see you say? I know what you guys must be thinking. Shivesh had a sorta busy week. Yeah, it was a pretty happening week. Before I get into some of the interesting stuff that this week brought, let me introduce you to some of the subjects I have been studying here.

I have 4 courses this term, Managerial Economics (Micro/Econ), Managerial Effectiveness (ME), Statistics & Probability (Stats) and Computer Skills (Excel). A term at Fuqua lasts 6 weeks. We have to learn these subject in quite some depth and we have 6 weeks for that. 6 weeks is a month and a half. At the end of 6 weeks, we have the term examinations, which account for quite a significant portion of our grades. But guess what, there are the mid-terms! Yup! You got it, 3 weeks into the start of a term. That's 3 weeks and no more. And you know what? We have 2 classes per week for each subject, 2 hours each. So imagine this: You have 6 classes and then an exam to tackle! Pretty interesting hahn! 2 classes a week means classes packed with all the information that you care about.

For every class, a student is supposed to do a certain set of things as preparation. For example, ME usually requires one to read a couple of articles and a case study about a company. You are then supposed to go to the class and discuss it amongst yourselves. The Prof. of course gives a whole lot of framework for the discussion and also moderates the discussion. It usually works out pretty well and gets quite interesting! You sit and discuss what incentive structure is useful given a company structure, culture, values etc. or what structure fits a company's needs in the emerging gobal world and so on. I find it the most interesting class. I surmise many other do, but I am sure there are some students out there who just can't figure out what's goin' on!

I am saying this because that is the case with me in Probability. I am supposed to have a science background, very quantitative, analytical and what have you, but I am in the bottom 20-odd percent in the class. Now you say how I know that? Suffice it to say right now that I know that for a fact; I will explain shortly. So yes, the classes are less, but the preparation is usually huge. If you are not prepared, you are lost in the class. At the end of a class, assignments are given out, sometimes team assignment and sometimes individual. There are problem sets to work out for your practice and if you don't work them out soon after, things pile up rather quickly. With the do-nothing weekends, it's unmanageable! :-)

OK you must be thinking an exam in 3 weeks is baddd! There is more. You have the quizzes in addition to the exams and I had two quizzes this week, one in Stats and one in Econ. Quizzes are these short, half-hour tests at the beginning of a class (once in a few classes) that count toward the overall grade. We got the results of the Stats quiz also today and as it happens, I got 9 marks out of 20 in that! The class average is some 13.5 with a std. deviation of 4.5 or thereabouts. And from the little statistics that I know now, in a normal distribution, 68% of the population lies within one std. deviation from mean. So I am one of the outliers, and in the bottom 15-20 percent. (Boy have I picked up stuff!! I am moving quickly towards charts and tables!)

But not all things went that bad. There are other things that went well. My ECON quiz went quite well actually. We have a particularly good Prof. for ECON and he makes things really easy. We also got our grades for our first ME team assignment and my team scored 9 out of 10; the highest in class. We got the case paper we had submitted back after grading and it had a 'Very Good' written on it!! I haven't got a Very Good since my second standard man!! Wow! ;-)

So studies is the meat that I have primarily come here for and this week was pretty eventful (before you jump to any conclusion, let me say that I have no reason to believe any of the coming weeks is going to be any different; in fact it only gets grimmer from here). However, apart from studies, I also applied to a few student club positions in the school this week. I have given one interview and am waiting for calls from others. More about it later when I hear from them. Overall, the curriculum seems pretty strong and the Profs. really know their stuff (Yeah! Like they wouldn't at Duke!). The subjects are pretty interesting and there is a lot of class interaction which makes the classroom really happening.

The student clubs

2005-09-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

So clubs are a big part of the business school experience, right? Yes they are. There are a thousand clubs out there and much to the dismay of students, they are all doing things at the same time. :-) Well not really, I am kidding; they do coordinate stuff and ensure that they are not stepping on each other's toes. But then, much to the dismay of students, they are doing stuff back to back!! You see what I mean? When do I study? :-) Let me give you an example. There was this one day during this week (remember that its only one week since I started studying; I have to keep reminding myself that there are so many more similar weeks to go when one week itself seems like eons with so many things to do) when we had 3 back-to-back club-kick-off meetings. The clubs were Marketing Club, General Management Club and the Leadership Development Initiative. All very active and high-profile clubs in Fuqua with an overwhelming response. We actually ran out of pizzas that had been organized for the last two of the meetings. I spent less time in the school that day with anything remotely to do with studies and more in these club meetings.

While that might be a good excuse for a back bencher like me to not study, but it does really present ton-loads of opportunity for students. Every club has like a 1000 positions each. There is director of promotion and marketing the club, the social chair responsible for liaising with the social clubs etc. etc.; I can't even remember all of them. The best part of it all however, is that they are all completely student-run. I haven't sat in any club meeting where a member of the Fuqua staff or faculty was present. There are times that I look at the second year students suspiciously (you know, looking out of the corner of my eye kinda thing) and saying to myself, "Is this kid really doing all the stuff he is claiming to be doing for the club? He is the co-chair of the club, so I believe him, but come on, isn't he just a student here?" Well anyway, as it is said, bschool is a relatively 'risk-free' environment to try out your stuff without running the risk of getting fired (wait a minute, you are already jobless, so it can't get any better, can it?). So if any of you come to Fuqua next year and find me sitting at the throne of the co-president of the GMC or the chief editor of the Fuqua Times, don't worry; I might falter a bit, might suddenly go underground for couple of months, miss couple of editions of Fuqua Times once in a while, or what the heck, maybe even mix up the schedules of Bill Gates and Jack Welch when they arrive to talk as part of the Distinguished Speaker Series at Fuqua! I am sure we can all have a good laugh and learn from it! ;-) OK, before I am rejected for the position I recently applied for at Fuqua Times, lemme say that I am kidding. :-) The programmes here are really quite well-arranged by the students.

Well yeah, going back to the point of number of activities, its really amazing how many clubs keep doing something or the other and how you suddenly want to do stuff that you never even thought of in your wildest dreams! Its like watching an info-mercial (the long 'informative' commercials that you find yourself watching late-night on TV, usually with a line "Buy this product coz. its really good!" or some nice old woman pretending to be your grand-mom walking up close to the TV screen and saying in a particularly nice and old-fashioned way "I have used this product and found it to be extremely useful. I highly recommend it!"). Jerry Seinfeld once said "I have found myself sitting late at night in front of TV at 1 AM and thinking to myself 'I really don't have a knife that can cut through a shoe! I think I should place a call to 1-866-THEE-KNIFE today and cut up all my shoes'".

In a bschool, you see so many options in front of you, its like your dream-come-true. Have you realized that most of the stuff we thought we would do in life when we were kids are some of the stuff that we are the farthest away from today? Strange, but that's how it works man! So maybe its too late to become an astronaut, but the again, you could write an article on space ships for the next Fuqua Times, maybe its too late to become the President of the United States, but then again, you can surely invite the President and have a tete-a-tete with him (or her, some day hopefully soon) while others eye you enviously, maybe you can never become a singer now, but then again, you can produce the work of some upcoming artist! As you can tell, I am not much of a philosopher, but I think you get the point! :-)

So clubs are the killer! Your classes are not a drain on your time and if you are lucky enough to have a great ILE team like mine, you can spend all the time you want in student clubs. But remember this; there just ain't time enough!

The school

2005-09-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

So this is the end of our first week of regular classes. Its a bright Friday late afternoon and I am sitting at the Fox Center, on a comfortable couch close to the glass walls. A lot of people are sitting around, doing their own stuff. Fox center is this pretty big 'student center' at the business school where students can sit around tables, have their meals, sit and pound away at their laptops and umm... generally do things like sit around and work on their blog.

As I sit here, the last 3 weeks seem like ages. I have not even explored the school building or the university as a whole. I am just not that kinda guy, you know. The classrooms are pretty impressive actually. Well you would expect a guy from India to say this right, but this is what makes it impressive: There are 71 students in one section and the class seems smaller than any of my previous schools, even though they had like 40 students max. As you would expect, I was a happy back bencher and could do whatever I wanted with the teacher standing a mile away! (I have done the sort of things that back benchers are typically proud of; let's not get into that ;-))

Here, there are only four rows! Not only are they staggered, but they also form a semi-circle around the prof. No back bench!! You just can't escape the prof! He or she is right there, looking at you. You know what is worse? They have these giant name cards that you have to put up right in front of you so the prof. can call you. And here is the biggest of them all: Class participation.

When I first heard that class participation counted towards your grade, my heart sank. So here is what I thought: You are throwing in a bunch of bschool students together (a-ha), and not just 5 or 10 of them but 70, in one room that has an environment that is virtually asking of them to open their mouth (coz. they feel so 'wanted' and visible in this staggered, semi-circle of a classroom that they just can't contain themselves!) and expect one poor man or woman to control them?? On top of that, you know what? You have to learn some pretty tough subjects also!

I thought we bschool students would probably be the most boisterous lot of people you can find and 70 of us together would be quite more than enough for anyone. But believe it or not, against all probability (forgive me, I am taking probability classes as of now), we seem to be moving along quite nicely! There are a couple of "gunners" (the friendly Fuqua term for the 'so full of themselves that they can't control raising their hands at least once in 5 minutes') in the class, but overall, its pretty impressive!

OK, it is a Friday today and there is something special about Fridays at Fuqua that I want you all to know. Its 6 PM right now and people have started crowding the Fox center for the 'Fuqua Friday'. Don't go by the name n all, its just a party with free beer! So before the beer and the pizzas vanish, I will make my way to the party and catch you guys later...

Integrated Leadership Experience

2005-09-01T19:36:00.000-07:00

The second week of the MBA course in Fuqua is something called the Integrated Leadership Experience or ILE. The ILE 1 is conducted for the first years and is revisited at the beginning of the second year. Briefly, ILE is about some of the basic concepts around leadership, ethics, cultural diversity, team work etc. As we were going through it, I really couldn't make up my mind if we were really learning something. In hindsight, though, it seems quite thought provoking (which was what it was primarily meant to be, I think).

Well, the important thing about ILE was that we all, for the very first time, did something in a team; that too, a team that we were going to be stuck with (or the more politically correct, 'working with' ;-)) for a year. So my ILE team has Dave, Jaime, Jenny, Ryan and me. We played some weird outdoor games, did a mock case together and what not. The games were pretty physical, and moreover, in order to build trust within team members, involved some crazy stuff. For example, there is a mesh of ropes between two poles, resembling a spider web. Each team member has to cross through the openings without him or her touching the ropes. Figure this: you have to lie down on the ground and keep absolutely still because you will now be lifted by others and passed through the mesh. You are transfered to the people on the other side of the mesh. This goes on until everyone passes through the mesh. What is the idea? This was the 'metaphor' for trusting your team mates and working together to solve a problem. There were some other pretty scary ones, like parallel tight-rope walking by two members balancing against each other and some more such weird stuff.

Anyway, I know you must be curious about the two questions that I spoke about in my last post. So these were the questions that we were asked to ask ourselves, as some of the future leaders coming out of a top school. Here they are:

1) Who are you?
2) What are you doing here?

Pretty basic, eh? Try betting a 100,000 dollars on a horse and asking "What is this horse?" and "What is it doing in my stable?" If it doesn't give you the creeps, come to me and I will make sure I dedicate a post to your name. I thought hard about these questions (people will tell you that I think too much, you know and I come up with some pretty good answers). So after some introspection, I came up with the following:

1) I thought you would never ask.
2) I am here because I didn't know where else to go.

I think there is some scope for improvement in those answers and that's what I intend to do in the next 2 years, but overall, that's pretty much what I know today. I am in week 3 right now and the classes have started. My frame of mind is a lot different from what it was during the last post. When I was writing the last one, I was hanging on to my life (especially trying to answer those questions at the same time), trying to survive, trying to maintain sanity between my ears, trying extremely hard to find faces that seemed more miserable than mine (that wasn't really very hard, actually). This time, I am more relaxed; my ILE team just submitted an assignment, I raised my hand a couple of times in class and asked the stupid questions that make students feel so nice, tried solving some tough problems on probability, failed, looked at the solution and hit myself hard on the head a few times etc. But nevertheless, you will still find me squirming in my seat.

The ILE week ended with every team drafting its first 'team charter'. This is the place where you record everything that your team collectively wants to do in the next year, what the priorities are, what each person brings to the team, what each person expects from the team and so on and so forth. I am very glad it worked out pretty smoothly for our team, but there are certain teams out there who had more fun than us in preparing the charter ;-).

In any case, we have the labor day long weekend coming up and I hope to catch up on my sleep and hopefully will post some more!

The very beginning

2005-08-28T19:35:00.000-07:00

(Disclaimer: Some of the statementsb below are exaggerations and huge generalizations. If you talk to some people who know me, they will say it is true to my nature. For what its worth, let me say that I am simply trying to put across my state of mind during the first few days. So take them with a pinch of salt and I hope you enjoy it!).

Its been almost 3 weeks since I arrived here at Durham and I would be lying if I said they were the easiest. New place, the weather (there are places in North America that are worse than India, believe me), no car, no phone, an unsuspecting neighbor's stolen internet, new flatmate, seeing other anxious bschool faces. And that's just the beginning.

My days started quite well, with a very nice gentleman called Jones (a second year student) picking me up from the airport and taking me shopping for the essentials. You must be thinking what was the first thing I bought? It was a shower curtain. A shower curtain. Apparently (and as I realized later), you would be in quite some trouble if you do have a shower, but no curtain in US. I saw "Team Fuqua" in action the very first day and was feeling pretty happy to be here.

That was the start of settling down here. The first week went by without any incidents. I had no tools to create incidents with, if you know what I mean. My flatmate, Navdeep arrived couple of days after me with his sister Harpreet Kaur. Things did start moving a bit and we were frantically looking for cars. Here's another thing about US. You are a dead man if you don't have a car in US. And I am not just saying that to make you feel horrible. You don't exist here without a car. If you keep it up for a while, you will actually not exist because you will die of hunger! Good thing I had packed some food from home and MTR totally rocks!

By the end of first week, I had not visited my college. I had no inclination left to go check out the place that I was going to spend most of my next two years at. Navdeep and I rented a car for the first weekend. We gave a lot of reasons for doing that. Going to buy some food was among them.

Well anyway, days progressed much too slowly. Navdeep got a car just in the nick of time for us to start going to college for orientation sessions. Boy were they a drag! To be fair, it wasn't anyone's fault really. The second years tried their best to keep up our spirits. "You should be proud of where you are", "There are people who have their noses pinned to the windows from outside, while you are sitting in here; the best business school in the world" (I almost looked to see if there was a window in the auditorium), "Start networking from day one; exchange names, backgrounds, interests from other students" and my (and Navdeep's) personal favorite, "Get out of your comfort zone!"

With respect to networking, I just have one thing to say. "Yeah right!! I must have asked that guy who is wearing that white t-shirt today at least 4 times this week what his name was. If I ask him his background one more time, I am sure he will start regretting having such an interesting and unique background that I am sure he has!"

"Get out of your comfort zone!" That was something that hit me hard. And it was not because it was a profound statement with very deep meaning and connotations that my already overworked, GMAT-cracking brain wanted to chew endlessly as I made my way through those corridors. It was because I realized that I was already here. My comfort zone was left halfway around the world. I had no friends and I was in the middle of these strange faces trying very, very hard to remember each one's name (and backgrounds, of course).

So that was orientation. It did orient me, I must say quite successfully, to the reality of what I was doing. But it wasn't until the 2nd week of college when I tried answering two of the most fundamental questions. They made me squirm in my seat at the grand Geneen Auditorium of the Fuqua School of Business.

Signing in

2005-08-25T23:07:00.000-07:00

The first few eventful days at Fuqua are already over. I call them eventful more for the anxiousness than anything else. I will perhaps sometime post why 'anxious' but for now, let's see if this works.