The End of An Era

My two years at Bee-School is coming to an end. There were times when I hated this place, the people around me and just wanted this phase of my life to come to an end. But now when the end is near I don’t actually want to leave this place. Why? I am pretty sure that this place has not grown on me. But the sense of comfort, the idle life of second year, the familiarity factor, the knowledge that once you are out of this place you will be back to the big, bad world, you will be accountable, you will have to deliver results from day 1 makes something inside me feel that I don’t want to leave this place.

As I am writing this, placement is still one and half months away.

As usual, I become introspective at these times. I have read in the writings of many people who have been to the hallowed portals of business education like Harvard, Stanford that these two years were one the most ‘exhausting’ and ‘fulfilling’ years of their life. Well, I can’t say so. As far as education or knowledge is concerned, there is a certain unanimity in the batch that we don’t have much to boast on that front.

Neither did I make great friends at this place, in the sense I made in my undergrad days. Yes, I made some good friends. Even managed to have one crush. And then again what a coincidence. But are they friends for life? I don’t know. From my past experiences I have seen that you tend to lose touch with physical distance and more so with time.

But yes I have grown as a person in this place. This place has boosted my self-confidence in more than one ways. It has brought about a sense of independence, self-reliance in me, which 8 years of staying away from home – parents, sibling – couldn’t bring.

It was quite an emotional roller coaster. I felt at the top of the world at times. A feeling of elation I don’t know when did I last experience. And there were times when I have felt like crap, dirt, despondent, an underdog of the batch.

But the place I will miss the most will be The Library. I still remember the day when I first ventured into our library. It was my third or fourth day in the institute and I was just browsing through the shelves and on seeing all those copies of HBR dated back well into the early 1970s, impressed me. I never had the good fortune to peep into the finest libraries of the land – Nehru Memorial Library, National Library or any of the IIM/IIT libraries – but I still feel that our B-school has quite a decent library. So many good books to read from which I discovered in the 2nd year that I regretted not having discovered them in my first year. As with my previous employer’s library – where I hardly issued any technical books (read Java, Struts, .Net and what not) in my entire 3 year – I rarely issued any hardcore management books or the books specific to the various specializations viz. marketing, finance, ops. I discovered Satyajit Ray and Hemmingway, read the collection of Indira Gandhi’s letters, and of course the usual fare on American CEOs and their wall-street pantomimes.

But all said and done, this place as more than anything taught me to focus i.e. to cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter. As far as the biggest legacy of an MBA education is concerned i.e. the art of gassing/bullshitting your way out of any crisis, well I was never very good at this particular art and I doubt things have changed much.