EMBA Odyssey
Around 10+ years into the corporate world, driven by tidal waves all through right from taking career choices to roles choices. I started to get more serious of understanding how businesses operate ? Coming from an engineering background, i was always considered a technical lead and struggled to understand what my sales team were trying to negotiate to make a winning bid. When the organization was in metamorphosis I found we had a lot of challenges on implementing things, same people different problems, putting in the process, streamlining the org structure to name a few. I felt i genuinely need some learning to do it ‘better’.
The thought of MBA triggered, i looked on for few choices — a lot of elite institutes were providing executive courses kind of enthused me. Down the line in end of 2020 and early 2021 amidst COVID lock downs i took serious thoughts on upskilling myself. Online education was at its peak with several platforms to choose from and the convenience of the studying on our own time made it accessible. The School of thoughts on opting for online / offline course was the first problem i tried to solve. I started to weigh the pro’s and con’s. Few of my friends stressed me to take up an online Degree at ease taking into the time constraints and having a 2+ year old kid at home. Even though the online degrees looked promising, but i kind of aligned myself to take up a course which has classroom environment to go meet people and learn from the typical old school types.
Applied for IITM EMBA (Provided by DOMS), Got through after a few rounds of aptitude test and interview which were challenging. The program spanned 8 quarters (2 years) with weekend classes. Why IITM ? — Alternate Weekends, Classroom sessions, Program duration being 2 years, Campus location is a 20 minute drive from home (who wouldn’t fall in love with such a beautiful campus). With my son joining his Kindergarten Schooling, i joined the EMBA Program (after a lot of convincing efforts at home).
The class was a very mixed group with people from diverse backgrounds and experiences ranging from 3–30years. The case discussion session and group presentations were extending our capability to beyond recognition. There were many days where the whole group would argue just to identify the topic, whereas spend last minute efforts in compiling the reports. It was not easy almost all the weekends are consumed with classes, assignments and readings.
Classroom is a game changer — meeting people from different industries, eminent professors whose experience and expertise awes us. But happy that I was able to learn beyond classrooms and connect with interesting people from whom I was able to build myself. The number of books a professor shares as reference is definitely a yardstick for the quality of their lecture sessions.
If you are looking to do an EMBA, take up this questionnaire and see if you are up for it:
- Looking up to learn how businesses operate or In a thought to start your own business ?
- Wanted to understand Marketing/Finance/Operations/Governance ?
- Why my organization not appraising me ? Should I up-skill ?
- Looking up for a career change / trajectory ?
- Ready to allocate 4–6 hours every week apart from classroom hours ?
If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of the above questions, then you can get started in looking for an executive education (Ensure you have more then X years of experience (but I feel X = 5+ is ideal)).
My takeaways from EMBA Journey in the next post.
Until then reminding myself of the favorite poem lines since childhood,
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost
