Last exam of my career, and a mixed bag of feelings about my MBA

Tomorrow I’ll have my last exam herein IIMB, and almost certainly the last exam of my student life. Phew..it’s been around 20 years of classrooms, teachers/Madams/AcharyaJis/Profs, exams, Vivas, attendance, practicals, projects etc..and finally all of this will come to a rest tomorrow.

Can’t help but devote half an hour to savor the moment and reflect back on all this, especially the last two years in IIMB. It has been busy like hell, I have missed out on lots of other nice things in life to be able to write this mail today 🙂

t me try and give a flavor of this, however tough it may be but let me try and recap this in a paragraph, whatever comes to my mind:

..entry in the college, lots of new faces, unexpected ragging on the very first day, managing between being a fresher at B-School and a week old marriage, shuttling between Insti and home, first quiz that had 10% weight age, getting to terms with this grade system, taking the printouts and running hard and reaching the PGP office just a minute before the deadline, end of first term, seeing how people get bracketed into their respective boxes within a few months, Summer placements, when one piece of paper was all you had to show someone who you are, feeling awful and disgusted, sitting like call girls, waiting for 3 days and hoping that some tracker will come and call me (for an interview), bruised ego, learning some hard lessons of life, ending up with 5 offers to choose from, rejecting all others for Reliance, life goes on..scoring no As and no C grades in 2^nd terms..only Bs..was I also getting bracketed and learning the easiest way of survival? Continued shuttling as no room was available here, leaving the home at 3 am on the days of exams, waking up one day just 15 minutes before one quiz and missing it, a slightly frustrating summer internship, back to college, participating in lots of competitions, lots of back to back night-outs, launching a website, spending hundreds of hours on the site, getting to the finals of CTS boardroom competition, Catching the flight to Pune for the final presentations after spending whole night in completing the BDMDM project, continuously worsening economic meltdown, the exchange term, CMS course and the satisfaction of being the number one team by a great margin, the IBP course, going to Singapore and those 2 weeks over there, coming back to face the placements term, extremely bad job scenario, tracking the CGPA to the second digit .. 3.14 to 3.07 to 3.05 to 3.02 to 3.11(/4) is how it went in the last 5 terms. Directi’s lateral process, CTS’s laterals rejection, overall gloom, a few rays of hope.

That’s how it has been; overall it was an experience I will never want to trade against anything. All the hardships that we all go through in this environment are worth it. I have seen a transformation within myself from someone with dreams to someone with a plan and confidence to achieve them, a better understanding of what I want in my career, and on a more cosmetic level..from a timid speaker to a decent presenter 🙂

Perhaps this crisis is there to help us, to let us do what we wanted to do in our life and not what was offered to us(I don’t know if any good job will be offered to me at all). Perhaps this was the day for which I am much better suited after these 2 years than I was before. Perhaps it’s a time to reject those easy choices and take the decisions that might not please the majority..perhaps!