All things must come to an end ...

Nope! This certainly isn’t a prank on the lines of Kiruba’s post. All things must come to an end and so does the first year of our PGP course. Four more relatively chill and less-complicated exams to go in a span of 3 days, and our first year is, for all practical reasons, done. First year has traveled at the speed of rockets, and I definitely stand a different person from what I was earlier. It remains to be seen whether the change has been for good or for bad.

So, how different an IIM has really been?

1. More than 50% of my class wears spectacles. Even I’ve started wearing one after coming here. Oh! Not those funky ones. I’m speaking about plain little power glasses. Would be interesting to see our batch photo – with all those spectacle heads.
2. Only about 20% of our batch doesn’t booze. Direct contrast to what I’ve seen till now – 20% of our engineering friends were boozers.
3. On the attitude front, students of all colleges are the same – from use of expletives to gossips to water-fights to birthday bumps.
4. 96-98% of students have cell-phones.
5. 100% have computers – well, it’s an academic requirement. :)
6. Being a student of co-education schools and colleges this is the worst sex ratio (close to 10%) I’ve ever seen. Rings any bells about the glass ceilings? One of our professors spoke about the heavy mathematical content in CAT that’s the cause for this. His argument was that other B-schools have a better ratio.
7. Eating-out for say 1000 Rs. doesn’t warrant an occasion. It’s lifestyle.

Some of my expectations have been met and some haven’t. Foremost, I think I had a decent amount of ‘fire in the belly’ before coming here, and that has, unfortunately, been cooled down. I used to have a decent amount of time to introspect myself and be focused. But this year, life has been a rat race - either for the exams or for some quiz (which were far too many), or some assignment or some project. Running after something has been the order of every day. Ofcourse, we did have a decent amount of breaks, but there is always the tour plan or the eating-out plan or the movie or the section A vs. B game or the similar-something that was in the waiting list. Earlier, there was time for me in myself. :) In other words, I suspect there is this ‘herd mentality’ that most of us fit into. In the Engineering College, because of the very less emphasis laid on studies and competition and academic obligations, students had a chance to pursue their own interests. I never did study electronics despite being an electronics student. My passion was in the computers – from 3D animation to Linux to night-outs with C to games. Some of my friends were entirely focused on GRE or MBA, and some on nothing! But due to trying to jam activities into the 24 hours, lot of us have here end up doing similar set of activities. It’s probably because of this reason that I find myself in admiration of only very few – there are very few ‘odd’ ones compared to Engineering. A note here: I definitely am not trying to find out which of these is better. It’s just a part of my introspection.

Second, I expected a competitive atmosphere, and the fact that despite a not-so-bad effort I stand somewhere near the 50% of the batch stands testimonial to that. Professors-wise, some have been really good and some really bad. I got to mention here that I’m of those people who hate classrooms. I’ve never really made ‘use’ of the classrooms. I’ve never taken notes unless I was forced to. All my knowledge - whatever little I’ve got – definitely came from self study. Plus, I’ve always had a feeling that I could learn more if I put in the same time with books instead of listening to someone. With this as background comparison, there have definitely been some professors who made me *think*, and that’s terrific. Infact I’ve taken two of the HR courses just for the professors, despite having zilch or probably negative inclination towards HR. Needless to mention about dropped courses! You might probably get a different/bettter picture if you speak to people who've made use of classes. Infact, I'd love to listen to them myself.

What's up next?

It must be interesting to witness the second year. We had almost 96 credits in the first year (32 credits per term), but I’ve just chosen 52 credits in the second year, with just 6 credits in the final term. With the load becoming almost half, I hope to see interesting changes.

For now though, hot-hot (weather and otherwise) Delhi beckons. It would be a challenge to lead a normal life after 2 years of working as software engineer and one year at IIMI. Wake up at 7 am, bath at 8 am, office at 9/10 am, back at 6 pm, doing nothing from then on and sleep at 11 pm, with properly scheduled food breaks, everything working as picture-perfect clockwork? Sounds almost surreal!