Quite confused

In the very first week itself am feeling that Term3 is very hectic. Except Enterpreneurship, other 3 subjects look similar to me. Somehow landing up in calculating present values and net present values. Totally lost in the other 3 subjects. I need to figure this out in this week itself to avoid later repercussions :-D. Before we come out of term2 trauma, so many assignments lined up in term3. Thats life at ISB.

Finally marketing results of term1 are out. I didn't score well in marketing, but thats okey. I am pretty sure that I am not taking marketing as my major. I really can't see myself doing some conjoint analysis down the lane in my career. yet to finalise about electives. I should catch hold of some alumns regarding this. Let me see.

PS:I lost my mobile two days back. That was my brother's gift. So sort of feeling senti about that. Anyways no point in thinking about that right now. I could retain my same old number. Thanks to Airtel. :-)

Term3

From tomorrow term3 is going to start. This time we have morning classes . I am habituated to sleep late and get up late from past 7 years. I used to bunk my breakfast just to sleep for some more time in my engineering days. Even my previous company timings were very odd (1 PM to 10 PM). I got used sleeping at 3 or 4 Am in the morning and getting up by 9 or 10 in the morning. I can't blame anyone for this. Its all my mind set. I just have to make my mind to think that I am a early riser. Let me see if I can succeed. But for sure I am gonna miss atleast 1 or 2 classes this term.

In this term we have
1. Enterpreneurship
2. Managerial Accounting and Decision making
3. Operations management and
4. Corporate finance.

I need to decide about my major(s) also. I am not very keen in taking IT&Tech as my major. Being a techie and taking IT major doesn't make any sense.But yet to decide. Thinking about finance and enterpreneurship as of now. Also this is the right time to start preparing resumes and analysing industries. Most of our alumns suggested to do this right from Day 1. Anyways its never too late:-). Okey more later. Adios:-D

Likhthe Jao...Likhthe jao

Today our competitive strategy paper was in this way. I didn’t like the way the paper was set for this exam. As part of the competitive strategy course we studied 10 cases (Cola wars, Nucor Steel, Intel, Jollibee foods, Eli Lilly, Cisco, Dell, Walmart stores, Mckinsey and Johnson & Johnson). It is an open book exam. Basically this exam tested our written skills rather than the strategy concepts I guess. At the same time this is the first open book exam which most of us (or rather everyone) used books extensively.

Instead the paper should have been something like a case followed by few questions about case like key takeaways from the case or something of that sort. Anyways I am just glad that paper got over.

Two more to go for this term2 to get over. ;-)

Economics

Economics is one subject which really fascinated me from term-1. Even the professors for Eco were damn good. Prof. Rakesh Vohra from Kellogg and Prof. Krishna Kumar from Duke are simply superb. They both have their own styles of teaching. As part of the course we have seen the commanding heights documentary. This is the best documentary I have ever seen.

Starting from Micro economics which took us from demand and supply relationship at firm level, industry level ended with Macro Economics which took us till speculative attacks in the economy. Previously I used to read some articles about economy. But apart from the article I read I couldn’t sense more than that like the theory behind that. Now these frameworks helped me a lot in understanding so many concepts. Global economics covered lot of topics like fiscal policy, monetary policy, foreign exchange, PPP, reserves, credibility regime, inflation , deflation, exchange fluctuations, budget deficits and surpluses, reasons for slow down in the economy, productivity shocks, currency appreciations, depreciations etc .

Here is an interesting video talk by prestowitz (president of economic strategy institute) about the impact of the return of India and china.

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/358/

US may have to face some tough times if the growth in India and china continues in the same pace. According to few research papers US is heading towards bankruptcy. But Bush administration still says its budget deficit is just 2.3pc of GDP which is smaller than UK. And another threat to US is baby boomer generation is going to retire and the expenditure on health care goes up. They may have to balance the budget by increasing the taxes.

Here is another video (funny) which is done by columbia MBA students for their skit party. The person singing in the video is pretending to be Glenn Hubbard who was one of the leading candidates to be the Chair of the Federal Reserve, but the job was instead given to Ben Bernanke.

http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/everybreath/

PS: Entire 6 hour documentary of commanding heights can be viewed in the below link.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/story/index.html

QuickTime needs to be installed for this. All Episodes (full 6 hour video) is available online to be watched for free.

Its my turn to get tagged

I have been tagged by my friend Kishore . Now I need to finish these fill up the blanks and tag few people. Here I go:-

I am thinking who the hell has started this. I am thinking the upside of writing this is giving some time to introspect about self

I said Excellence is not a destination, it’s a journey

I want to gift a house to my parents and I want to see them well settled

I wish all my friends get settle in their lives.

I miss all my friends and my doggie.

I hear to my mind and heart

I wonder why some people make silly things into very big issues

I regret few things in life

I am a simple girl

I dance when I am alone and when i have absolutely nothing to do

I sing when am in a peak state of happiness (but make sure no one is around me :-D)

I cry when I feel low to just forget about things and to come to normal state. But I hardly cry. Even if I cry, I cry alone

I am not perfectionist.

I write anything that comes into my mind

I hate cheating someone or getting cheated by someone

I confuse always between left and right

I need a good job after my MBA at ISB

I should work hard to achieve my goals

I finish this post with this line.

I tag
rujuta
Vinay
Prathima
Nikhil
Chaitanya

MBA Jargons

I was just talking to one of my friends, who is working in Chicago. She was saying that she could see lot of change in my language in terms of using jargon. She says MBA is nothing but seeing the simple life in a complex view and making things unnecessarily complex. We had a healthy debate on this for almost 45 minutes. She might be true in saying that MBA’s use jargons a lot but yes, they don’t see simple things in a complex manner. In fact they make your life simple. I just said forget how people are seeing it. Ultimately we need the solution at the end of the day for any problem. Whatever may be the approach, at the end of the day we need an optimal solution. He/she who succeeds in this is the actual winner.

Few jargons:-

Incentive: - This is the most important thing for anyone for doing anything under the sky. Life just moves on with incentives. People may argue that there are many things in the world that just moves without incentive. But if you look at them carefully there will be some incentive. I know by now you might have started thinking about Non-profit organizations. They may not work for profit but yes, there is an incentive for them to work for fame or an incentive of self-satisfaction.

Trade-off:- Everyone might have done some trade-off before choosing anything. May be they might not have used the word trade-off but they might have did this in their day to day life. When we have two choices in our hand how do you think we choose one finally. We may do lot of trade-off between them, try to find out which gives us more incentive to go ahead, do some calculations if any, weigh the pros and cons of both and see the long run profitability and then we finally choose one.

Few more jargons like marginal, strategy, Core competencies, Competitive advantage, Optimize

The list goes on and on. I may come up with few more interesting jargons as I move further in my MBA.

Gone are the Days

Got up at 10:30 Am in the morning. Had a nice Aalu paratha. Then went to a movie. After that lunch in a restaurant with friends. Came back to home. Slept for another two hours. Then again went outside with friends. Had pani puri and chat. Still so much of time left in the day. Nothing much to work. Suddenly one of my friends called me up just to say “Good Morning Anu”. Got up from bed just to realize all that was a DREAM.

Sometimes Dreams will be good only if they remain as dreams. Do you guys think I can enjoy my life if that dream comes true? No way! I will just get bored with that life. May be for 2 days I may enjoy. But definitely not even if it is for one week.

I miss my childhood days. I miss my Engineering days. I miss those days I worked in my previous company. I am sure after one year I will say I miss those days at ISB.

Wondering what happened to me? Guess what!!!!! Today is my birthday. As per the tradition I got dunked last night. I really don't have any idea where I will be celebrating my next birthday. Yup ofcourse time will tell.

Those who wanted to apply to ISB can visit the below link to know more about the schedule and other details:
http://isb.edu/pgp/visit/admissions_important_schedule.asp

There was an interesting article ( "B-School: How different is ISB?" ) about ISB in Rediff. Check out the below link if u guys wanna read.
http://in.rediff.com/getahead/2006/jul/03isb.htm

Another article in rediff, which is an interview with the admission director of ISB:
http://in.rediff.com/money/2006/jul/04inter.htm

PS: Today is my Mom’s birthday too