I know I havent blogged in ages. I stopped writing here sometime towards the end of my first year at IIML. My academic journey there (a little under 2 years) has now come to a close. I have learned a great deal on campus, made tons of new friends, and can easily say that it was the best experience of my life and has changed me as a person and the way i think and perceive others.

I stopped blogging because I got inducted into the Placement Committee at IIM Lucknow. To put it mildly – “secrecy” is one of the keywords there . That, and of course, the fact that most of my life at IIML started revolving around placements (boring, right? ).

Anyway, this final post is just to bring this blog to a logical conclusion. It was fun while I was blogging, and I hope you got what you wanted reading it. IIML is a great place to be, and I really envy all of you who are yet to undertake the incredible 2-year journey. All the very best and have fun!

Sincerely,
Mahesh

PS: No queries about placements please! And, also, if you want to read a more comprehensive life@IIML experience, please head over to my batchmate and very good friend Shivkumar’s blog (http://iimhell-2009-2011.blogspot.com/) – he has blogged on every single day he spent on campus – what a splendid effort!

Since my last blog, I’ve had two of my friends come down to campus, one from XLRI, and the other from FMS. The XL dude was here for Varchasva – which is our annual sports-cum-cultural meet. The event was a smashing success – not just because IIM L pretty much thrashed every other team in every competition, but also because we had Dominos and other food stalls on campus . Some yummy cheese burst pizza only added to the awesome taste of victory!

My FMS friend was here for a strategy-based competition organized by GlaxoSmithKline, which her team won. Procter & Gamble held their own competitions recently. So did Mahindra & Mahindra. And Uniball. And Cognizant. And Johnson & Johnson. And so many others. This has quite been the season of contests and is a blessing in disguise for everyone and their uncle who’re looking to garner some “CV points” even if they sound like “157th runner-up in an knee scratching competition conducted by You-knee-ball (out of 158 participants)”. Of course there are some real studs on campus, who win 50k and Summer internship offers and what not and have bombs rather than bullets on their CVs. During my college days I used to read about such people in the newspapers, thinking that one day when I join an IIM, I’ll also be featured like that for coming up with some awesome ground-breaking glass-shattering solution, but all those years hence, here I am, still reading the same newspapers and still looking up to others here.

Speaking of newspapers, I haven’t really got the time to read one in some three thousand years. I do subscribe though, and I just toss the day’s paper onto a mile high stack of old papers. It’s the same with most of the junta here. Term 2 as I’d blogged about earlier, is supposed to be the killer one. So far, it’s certainly living up to its name. If you thought that we’d be given any sort of leeway by the profs considering its summer placement season, you’d be surprised (like I was) to learn that “placements” is the last possible excuse you should be using. This apparently is because pre-, during- and post-placement processes sometimes disrupt class/quiz schedules and profs get wild at this. They are of the opinion that students should come to the IIMs for knowledge and not placements. I cant even begin to explain this one!

A lot of foreign exchange students have come to campus from various parts of Europe. Apart from having some really wild parties, they’ve also added to the overall beauty quotient, something that was briefly upped when the famous XL ki kudiyan were here for Varchasva.

Oddly enough, this term when activities are already at a high, profs in almost every single subject expect everyone of us to come prepared after reading cases and solving questions and readying presentations. Some people manage to do all this once in a while, but most classes start with a show of around 60 hands (in a class of 63) of people who haven’t prepared a thing for class. Some profs have explicitly mentioned that they would be giving marks for Class Participation (usually out of 10). Needless to say, there are a group of 7-8 highly enthusiastic people who ask so many (often nonsensical) questions, it leaves you wondering whether these guys will write questions instead of answers even in their final exams. One particular prof’s CP marking methodology really takes the cake though. According to his rules, everyone in class starts off with a 9 on 10 in CP. For each class you bunk or miss 0.5 will be deducted. Apparently coming in late is worse than bunking (go figure!), so that will make your CP account poorer by 2 marks. Ask random questions and try to act oversmart and you’d get a -5. And if you’re caught sleeping, you get a big fat zero. Now that’s what I call CP – Cruciverbalistick Pomegranetization (I’m all for randomness).

We’ve got 7 subjects this time around – including a lot of part 2 subjects of some really nightmarish part 1 subjects. God save me. (Overall though, it’s a good mix of subjects I must say, and certainly more business focused than last term.)
1) Management Accounting 2 – (Shiver)
2) Economics 2 (Shudder)
3) Marketing Management 1 (The Da Vinci Globe)
4) Quantitative Management 2 (The Lost Symbols)
5) Operations Management 2 (Shudder-Globe-Shiver)
6) Financial Management 1 (Om-Namah-Shiver-aaya)
7) Designing Work Organizations (Who am I kidding?)

All this shivering and shuddering isn’t only because of the subjects, but also because of the cold, which suddenly descended a couple of days ago. After around 12 am, the entire football field is enveloped in a low-lying blanket of fog – its definitely a sight to see!

By the way, a nice thing happened a couple of weeks ago. A business executive from the e-learning website www.testfunda.com got in touch with me and asked me to blog for them as they liked my writing style. Although I dont think I’m a talented writer or anything, I’m certainly happy to help aspirants who might just need the “If he can do it, then so can I” kind of motivation. You can read the interview here, and the blogs here (which for now are just mirrors of this blog).

Celebrations and Diwali puja will happen tomorrow on campus – I’m hoping we get some Diwali special delicacies too. Happy Diwali to one and all – Play safe!

Post mid-terms we had this insti-parti or insty-party or instie-partie – all the same to those who get drunk – with lots of free flowing booze and some cool music – courtesy 3.4 (Three Point Four) – IIML’s own music band which performed live. Very nice selection of songs I must say which really got the whole place grooving to their tunes.. It was fun for a while, but I dont really dig all the prancing in the dark kind of dancing and I dont smoke or drink either, so as my friends always tell me “Doood, you’ll NEVER understand the fun of the HIGHway”. Vroom!

Committee selections comprising stress interviews, task rounds and presentations was what kept us first-year’s busy for the next 3 weeks and man wasn’t it a totally funny culmination when every single committee took its new members to the very same hotel to celebrate. Don’t blame the engineer in me thinking about frequency matching!

While many of us started to dream of cooling our heels a bit after these strenuous 3 weeks, our academic secretary informed us that we had *just* 2 weeks for the end-terms. Saaaaay WHHAAATT!!! Whatever followed was a mad rush to first identify who the members of each group were for various subjects, what the project and presentation topics were, what deadlines had to be met, what groundwork had to be done, which quizzes were scheduled for when….you get the point. In some groups, there were overly over-enthusiastic people who single-handedly finished off their projects well before their other group members even stepped into the identification stage explained above. In my group however, each of us was waiting for the other one to start working, and this continued right till the time of the actual presentation. Lucky me.

Amid all the confusion, my seniors’ term had ended and many were seen loading their bags and suitcases onto autos and leaving for the station/airport – freedom! This evoked a “not so near, hence so far” kinda feeling among me and my batch mates. But time was already at such a premium that we could barely even afford to think anymore.

The profs here are good. I must say that. Especially if you pay attention in class – and if you take notes. As I already mentioned in one of my earlier posts, each prof will teach in a different style and cover a different syllabus and set a different paper compared to the one in your neighboring class. The stuff taught may not even be from the one or two books you are given to refer. And hence if you – like me – stay awake most of the night doing committee work or working on projects or chit-chatting or just whiling away your time – then you better be ready to be picked on in class the way I was picked on. Feeling ravenous the previous night having skipped dinner and way too bored to be leaving my room for the night mess, I slept off at 4 am and awoke at 6 thanks to a grumbling tummy. After an impatient wait till a heavier-than-usual 8 am breakfast, I entered class at 8.30 with my seams bursting. Wiiiidddeeeee awake till 8.29.59 and uncontrollably sleepy at 8.30.01, the classroom AC really helped me achieve inner bliss. Before I knew it, the prof swooped down upon me and said “You are sleeping”. I tried to frantically deny to which I got “No. You are sleeping. I don’t like people sleeping in my lecture. Go and wash your face and come!” I tucked my tail between my legs, gave the sheepish-est of grins, and ran out to save/wash my face. Of course not all profs are like that, but for this one fella, I ensured never to have breakfast before his lecture – even if it meant going hungry the rest of the morning!

We had 2 new subjects take the place of LAM and Comm from pre-midterms. The first was Operations Management-I (supply-chain, inventory, facility design, location detail and more what-not) and the second Information Technology Concepts (advanced MS Excel 2007 and MS Access 2007). Thankfully, evaluation here at the IIMs is progressive and so attendance, submissions, quizzes, presentations and exams all count, which is a lot better at least for me than if *only* exams mattered.

The end-term exams were “challenging” for some and “interesting” for others but for me they were just a countdown to the vacations. ’nuff said!

We have 7 subjects next term as against 6 in this one. We’ve also got our summer placements coming up which seniors tell us is an emotional roller-coaster in itself. Add to that our inter bschool cultural-cum-sports festival Varchasva and I can bet that term 2 beginning Tuesday is gonna be one truly maniacal ride. Stay tuned for more!

The student council elections were held sometime back (as I’d mentioned in a previous post), and the newly elected joint Acads secy in all the enthu that is associated with a new job organized remedial classes for Eco, Manac and Qam – each taken by a God level student in their respective subject. Let me clarify that everyone here is a scholar. Everyone attempts all questions in all exams. Everyone thinks they have done really well. And UNLIKE in engineering college, nobody feels shy about admitting that they have actually done well. Check out this sample conversation I had:

Me: So dude, we’ve just 20 hours to our next exam. You’ve finished studying all those one-billion chapters?
Dude: Yeah – its quite easy man. I actually finished them off while I was in the loo.
Me: Wow, that’s some efficiency you’ve got going there! How about yesterday’s paper?
Dude: I really SCREWED it up man.
Me: Really? (feeling a little happy and relieved that there was at least someone in my sinking boat)
Dude: Yeah, I was unable to attempt the last question worth 0.00005 marks. (Ding Dong Boing?!)
Me: Why, what happened? Didn’t you cover that in the loo?
Dude: Actually I wrote a four-and-a-half page answer, but I forgot to put a full stop at the end and a comma somewhere in between.
Me: Hah – That’s where I score above you loser! My answer only contains one comma and one full stop. Muhahaha.

We had all our exams starting at 2 pm. 2 pm to 5 pm for a half-credit course – which means its the equivalent of an end-term exam for that subject, as half-credit courses are there only for half a term. 2pm to 4 pm otherwise. I have this hostel neighbor who is a major nerd, who sleeps at 11.30 pm, wakes up at 8.30 am, has breakfast (kiss 1 hour goodbye), studies (nah, revises) something, sleeps off again for an hour or more, and then goes off to give his exam. After the paper, I’m generally perspiring, wondering what hit me – when Mr. Sleep-the-whole-day-yet-crack-all-exams neighbor would come up and say “Why dont these people set tougher papers?!”

Coming back to the point about Remedials. For a person of my level of academics, it’s probably a good idea to sit through all of them – as previous year papers are also discussed. I missed one of the 2 or 3 Manac remedial sessions there were, and the very same question that was solved that day was asked in the mid-term exam. Talk about bad luck! I made it a point to attend the other subject remedials only to find not a single question appear in any exam from what was discussed. Makes me wonder if someone were conspiring against me

Did I mention that mid term exam portions don’t carry over to the end terms? Yup, Boy am I happy! The worst thing in the world is to have to revisit chapters you have read 2 months ago and try to cram for an exam twice as big!

Let me share some subject-wise details about the exams here (Each prof sets his/her own paper):

1) Manac
We were asked one easy question on trial balances (which everyone and their brother cracked), one question on balance sheets (they should be called imbalance sheets) and one theory question where people usually unleash their pent up fury and write pages enough to fill five copies worth of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

2) Communications
Why aren’t all papers in the world like this one? We were given one text book as part of the course material. I don’t think anyone ever opened it. The questions were all so generic it was a pleasure to write an exam of the kind. Questions included “Spot the grammatical errors” (there were some really jarring mistakes too), “Summarize the article below”, “Rewrite this email in a better tone”, “Give one situation where you displayed creativity”…you get the idea. 3 hours of pure unadulterated bliss!

3) Economics
Eco is a very logical subject. You understand everything in class. Your understanding is greatly reinforced when you read the text book. Then you make some notes and you feel really nerdy about yourself. And then you take the exam. This is when ALL your logic will vanish instantly. Supply curves will look like demand ones, you’ll find the total diminishing value of your brain increasing unto infinity and all awesome formulas will appear in your head except the one you really need. Did I hear someone say ‘freakonomics’?

4) LAM
Legal Aspects of Management is a half-credit course, which makes the exam a 3 hour one as mentioned earlier. Funnily enough, the first person submitted his answer sheet within 45 minutes! One of the questions was “A sells a house to B, but doesnt handover possession yet. B sells this house to C and gets paid some amount by cheque. The contract between A and B falls apart. C goes to court demanding his money back. Which law is applicable. What do you think the Supreme court should do in this case?”. LAM is a good subject, but I cant understand for the life of me how someone can actually make simple English sound so complicated.

5) BIO
Behavior In Organizations. This is what is called “Globe” in the truest sense of the word – which in IIML parlance means “bullshit” (not in the true sense of the word ). In the exam, we were given 4 short cases – for example – “You are the manager of ABC company. Despite all your efforts, employees aren’t motivated. Why do you think this could be so? Use what you’ve learned in BIO on the basis of commitment, values and satisfaction to come up with solutions.” I am so used to expecting direct questions that when I saw these cases which required applications of what I’d mugged (yeah had to mug, no way out) I just totally blanked out for the first 10 minutes. Somehow I managed to write something by the end of 2 hours. As usual there were people who left in 45 minutes

6) QAM
This is Quant. or Math. or Probability – which is NOT particularly my favorite. Wasn’t the easiest of papers I thought. But post-exam discussions revealed that people were expecting god-marks in this paper as well. Why can’t all papers be like Communications?

Whatever the case may be, my marks notwithstanding, I’m through with the midterms here at IIM Lucknow. Unlike my college where exams would last more than a month, 6 exams were completed in 6 consecutive days flat. Time has flown past. 6 weeks are gone. This is where I think the beauty of an MBA really comes forth. A month and a half back I was sitting at home relaxing, watching TV, sleeping, sleeping, sleeping and absolutely unmindful of anything business related. But today, half way into the first term, I can proudly say that in record time, I have learned to analyze a company’s balance sheets and income statements, understand basic economics, look at Law from a different perspective and appreciate the importance of organizational behavior – although perhaps not as well as some of my loo-scholar-buddies

My next post is going to be about post-midterm celebrations and some quirks about the new subjects we have. Comments, suggestions and questions most welcome

This is just a short update. Will post in more detail once my exams are done with. Wish me luck!

Student elections for the posts of Joint Infrastructure – Acads – Cultural – Sports and Mess secretaries are being hotly contested as I blog. The process goes something like this. First, students who are interested in contesting for the posts apply to the ‘Senate’ (a body of seniors who maintain the ‘constitution’) by writing a manifesto – which is a list of changes they think they can implement to make the system better. These manifestos (with a LOT of globe and impossible items thrown in for good measure) once okayed, are put up in the mess notice board – all one-pagers. Other junta (like me) head to the mess and go through these manifestos.

Here’s my very own classification of the various manifestos you’ll find:

Mess – mani-feast-o
Acads – mani-wish-i-hadnt-applied-hey-presto-festo
Sports – my-knee-hurts-i-confess-to
Infra – mani-reduce-the-flies-to
Cultural – i-promise-many-many-many-fests-o

The pen is indeed mightier than the sword, and within a matter of hours, some totally crazy comments get splashed all over these manifestos. One guy tried to outsmart the others and used a dark background for his manifesto so that comments wouldn’t be seen – but the public is always smarter. He got a fresh white A4 page stuck right below his manifesto just for comments . A lot of mustaches, spectacles, beards and other unmentionable things sprout from the attached candidate photos. There is an event called the ‘Soap Box’ which is where the candidates get their 3 minutes of fame to talk to the batch about what they plan to do if and when elected – which is followed by a Q&A bashing session. Once the audience has dwindled to a mere handful, and the speakers get done with their manifesthroes, door-to-door, hostel-to-hostel and mess-to-there’s-only-one-mess-in-iimL-caught-you-muhahaha campaigning begins. People were knocking at my door at 2.30 am asking me to vote for them. All I can say is zzzzzz.

Yours truly by the way did not make even the slightest efforts to apply for any of the posts – after all, if everyone starts applying, there wouldn’t be anyone left to vote!

Committee selection rounds are still on, and the level of detail expected by the seniors is mind boggling. There is pretty much no time for anything these days – my to-do list for this week is really quite unforgiving and I’m getting to know why this place is so lovingly called HelL. Here’s a sneak-peek.

QAM Quiz
LAM Quiz
BIO quiz
MANAC quiz
ECO (surprise) quiz
Manfest individual task review
Manfest group task review
Disha CV review with mentors
Disha CV HR form + session
MANAC case summary
ECO report submission
Placecom interview
3.4 task
LAM presentation
COMM Presentation
MANAC 2nd prelim report

One more thing, we have our mid-term exams next week. The exams are going to be subjective papers with a duration of around 2-3 hours, unlike our 20 minute objective/MCQ quizzes. The questions can be direct theory questions (very rare), weird case-study questions which we need to interpret and write about (very common) or even weirder questions like “Who according to you is the best communicator in your class, and why?” (very what-just-happened-here). Some seniors had a paper where they were shown 30 minutes of an English movie and asked to write about it! It’s a complete departure from the usual engineering style exams I’m used to and I hope something good will come off this (read grades).

I really need to pull my socks up and start mugging. But as my schedule above shows, there’s no time this week – which means I’m going to go headfirst into my mid-terms with no clues whatsoever. Competition – - here I come (to take a beating)!

While the insect species here are of a kind that would make any National Geographic photographer proud, having these colorful creatures in my room certainly doesn’t make ME proud. One of my classmates and good friends who used to stay next door here in my hostel found some insect that was so much in love with him that it didn’t leave a single place on his body free from its bites. That guy has now shifted hostels – supposedly to one that is lesser-infested with insects. Personally I think the problem was because of his habit of roaming around in ‘the next best thing to naked’.

Before signing off, it would be incomplete if I failed to mention my 20-20 vision. So strong was it last night that I actually caught a cunning little mouse sneaking into my room!! I was mugging for an economics quiz I might have today morning, and with all the curves and graphs swirling in my head – along came the mouse. It managed to squeeze itself into a gap-less closed door and to get into my cupboard – full of my clothes – formals included. I kept my main door open and somehow managed to scare the little fella away – although I must admit that with the jumps and turns the mouse was demonstrating – I was the one who was more scared.

Anyway, god bless my awesome pair of eyes and awesome spectacles – without which all my clothes would have been destroyed by morning – and it would be my turn to roam around in the ‘next best thing to naked’!

By the way it’s been a month since I started this blog – and I must say I am quite pleased with the reviews I’ve got. There’s been close to 800 visitors since – and I hope this number keeps building!

a) Prof communicates with students at large, e-mailing class presentations or problem sets and the like
b) Students mail across their project reports or assignments
c) Prof replies back with either an OK or a ‘please change this #$%@! (via euphemism) you have written”
d) Student writes to prof requesting clarification of doubts – this is called ultra-ultra desperate CP (Class Participation) – cos it’s actually not even within the confines of the class anymore!

Btw I am in charge of coming up with some new events for my Manfest committee selection task – and that’s what I have been breaking my head with. Why don’t awesome ideas manifest themselves in my head when they are really required?

There’s this case study competition called Prayaas for which 5 of us formed a group. It needed us to come up with innovative solutions for eradicating Child Labour. We had met as a group twice before in the library – very briefly at that – but nothing ever really came out of those discussions. The deadline was 11.59.59 pm today, and we guys had almost forgotten about it. A phone call at 10.50 pm brought us back to reality, and by 11.05 pm we were in the library. 4 laptops. 4 people. Typing away furiously. We somehow put together data that actually turned out to be coherent and relevant. 8 pages in 45 minutes. 100 percent original. Certainly a world record

Yet another of several IIM Lucknow firsts!

Hope me flunking is not a first though – 2 quizzes and a submission are due tomorrow morning. I’m wondering if I can ever live without thinking about a 100 other things to do….

Classes are going on as usual, and I’m sleeping more and more in them. I swear it’s only going to be a matter of time before I am thrown out by the prof. I had 2 quizzes today – one Manac and one BIO. The Manac quiz turned out to be a damp squib (I hope all Manac exams turn out to be the same) – but the BIO quiz more than made up for it. It was a 5 minute quiz, with 10 MCQs. We also had a Comm quiz day before yesterday. It was a case study about Dell computers and how their outsourced customer support division was facing problems due to cultural differences between Indians and Americans. We had to write an audience analysis and suggest what Dell could have done right. I took ages to read the case and by the time I was done thinking there were only 5 minutes left. I can already imagine how low I’d be scoring on that one

Most of my time in the past few days have been taken up by the selection rounds of various committees (which I had listed out in my prev post). I’m in the race for the Manfest, SIGFI, PRISM and Bhavishya core committees. Each of them had a round of interviews first, followed by tasks – both group and individual – which we need to complete in some stipulated time frame. The tasks are all set in such a way that it’ll be extremely productive if you actually make the final cut for a committee. It also tests certain skills that are esential if you want to be in a particular committee. Where that helps is you don’t really need to worry about whether you ‘have’ it in you to be in a particular committee. The tasks of each committee are designed in such a way that both you and the committee members get a good idea of whether you’ll fit in or not.

By the way, Placecom or Placement Committee applications have opened as well – and that is certainly generating a large amount of excitement on campus. The work in placecom will be extremely challenging and demanding – but only the very best of the batch get in. The responsibility is huge – placecommers are the guys who work to get the entire batch placed – and placements are obviously the most important thing to carry away from an MBA. Oops I dint just say that. And my backspace key isn’t working

I’m also going to try to get into 3.4 – which is IIM Lucknow’s music club. I’d gone down to meet my mentor a while ago – and my initial task there is to figure out and be ready to play 2 songs which he’s given me.

I’m probably going to have a surprise Eco quiz tomorrow (wow what a surprise) and need to mug now. Come monday and we’ve got a QAM quiz, a LAM quiz and our final LAM project submissions – which we havent started work on as yet. Add to that 2 committee task group meetings, a case study competition on Child Labor called Prayaas and general random events (meaning a sudden change of your schedule diary from empty to full in 10 minutes – these are very common here @ L ) and I guess my weekend is more or less gone.

I’m hoping against hope that I can somehow catch a late night show of the new Harry Potter movie that is releasing tomorrow. Here’s wishing a cinema hall would open its doors for me – Alohomora!