How to Survive a B-School Like a Boss
Now, I am not an expert in bomb-making or “B-School-graduating” but I have a first-hand experience in one of these two, which in turn, makes me as suitable as anyone to introspect the last two years of my life and spread the pollens of my wisdom in the surrounding environment. The “target audience” for these pollens will be no one, in particular; not because no one reads my articles (*knocks on wood) but because I majored in marketing and have no idea about such terms. The only concrete answer, I, as a management student, can give for any question posed to me is “it depends”. So now that my technical knowledge is dealt with and kept aside, I’ll proceed on to some deeper stuff.
In this article, I will make an attempt to describe elements in a Full-Time MBA course that make the two years (or one, if you’re in that institute) worthwhile and memorable. These words of wisdom are, both, a farewell to my life as an MBA student and a guide to survive in a B-school (in style). The list is not exhaustive but covers several major aspects for a management graduate. Nevertheless, the reader is advised to “Dikhawe pe mat jao, apni akal lagao“.
Skills Needed:
1. For academics: Gas, Gyaan, Funda, Bakar, BC and you get my drift.
2. For everything else: Willingness
Ingredients:
Friends — This is an absolute essential to survive an MBA course although, it also holds true for your life. You need them because they share your pain and room. You need them because they make you laugh and prepare your resume for the umpteenth time. You need them because they give you parties and fractures on your hipbone on your birthday. You need them because who else will post that you’re gay (no offense) by hacking into your Facebook account. You need them because where else would you use those cuss words you have learnt in your life, which you were too sissy to speak in the school.
“Journey is the reward, Chumma Adichupoli (Malayalam for “Have a Blast”), No Issues!, Chilling (Time) Killing (Time), THE Purpose of Life, Fin is Sin”
Who needs a Zen Master in life when you have friends who dole out such gems on a daily basis.
P.S. — Whoever says you don’t make friends in MBA is an agent of Digvijaya Singh trying to sabotage the essence of life.
What follows, now, are some sure-fire tips to fill the MBA course with goodness, “Cheese Burst” style:
1. Parties, Lots of Them:
If you’re in a B-school and you’ve not passed out even once or haven’t carried your passed out friend to his/her room and took his photo for next day’s shaming, then you’re doing it wrong.
Fresher (Formal & Informal), Seniors’ Farewell (Formal & Informal), Birthday, Internship, Placement, Your Farewell (Formal & Informal), Just-For-The-Heck-Of-It and Because-It’s-A-Dry-Day are the types of parties you will definitely encounter in an MBA.
2. Counter-Strike:
What are you going to do when you’re fully prepared for the next day’s exam at 10 PM or what are you going to do when you don’t know if there are exams starting tomorrow? Two words: Play CS (or are they three?)
From our dinner-to-breakfast gaming nights, the major learning I have got is that the joy of killing the guy with the highest kills with a headshot is almost orgasmic and having the least kills in a game is the biggest inspiration in life.
(You can skip this part where I pay tribute to my (mACHETE’s) fellow comrades (Forgive me, if I forgot someone):
111, 1589, aam aadmi, Annihilator, Angelina Jolie, Death, Doctor, Dard-e-dil, Fernando Galicha, F_devil, Fcuk_U, Goku, Lord, MaKaVe, Katrina Kaif, Strider, Tochan, Twangwang, Undead, YoYo)
3. Performance Enhancing/Recreational “Drugs”:
This amazing stuff can be, both, intoxicating and a time-killer. They flow smoothly into your mind and sometimes belly to provide you with some unforgettable experiences. They include:
Books (Fiction, Non-Fiction), Girlfriend/Boyfriend (preferably, in the same college), C2H5OH (4%, 8% or 45% ), Cannabinoid (Gaseous or Liquid State) or whatever rocks your boat.
4. Mafia:
“A group gets together. A God is chosen. Figurative Night and Day are played out by the group. The God assigns few people as Mafia who kill someone from the group in the Night, few as Healer who, during the Day, can save someone from dying, few as Detective who can suspect a person at Night to reveal the findings to the larger group in the Day and a majority as commoners or villagers.”
Sounds drab? Just play it once with a big group and you’ll be bunking lectures to find out who is the mafia. This, actually, is a party game which we have played all the time, since, we think our MBA is one extended party.
5. MBA Jack is not a Dull Boy:
Bring so many young (at least, at heart) people and a playground together and you get a way to utilize that pent-up adrenaline. Football, Cricket, Table Tennis, Badminton, Chess and sometimes Holi are few ways to enjoy some free/exam time. Although, the biggest challenge one has to overcome is to wake everyone up at 7 AM and make them come to the playground since all of them are still in the initial stages of their sleep cycles.
The love for sports also manifests itself into EPL/IPL rivalries. Deriding people for their association to any particular team (e.g. ManU picking on Liverpool, Chelsea picking on ManU and everyone picking on Arsenal) is a common sight in a B-school.
6. Torrents:
Since, P2P file-sharing software used to work in our classes only, this was a huge push for us to attend them. Although, most classes in an MBA course are interesting (If one has good teachers), the actual purpose of attending a class is a thread that runs through everyone, without exception, which is, who is the mother, who killed Joffrey, did Sherlock really die or something on the similar lines.
In my honest opinion, the love of catching the movie you missed, the TV series that is trending and the hot girl whose picture you’ve set as your wallpaper is bigger than the knowledge of Acid Test Ratio, Marketing Myopia and the Six Sigmas (sic).
7. Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid:
Move over Mr. C.K. Prahlad, this theory refers to the invaluable pleasure you derive from aiming to be one of the guys who are at the bottom of the class in terms of CGPA. We’re the people who make the upper crest look upper crest. On our shoulders, we share the burden of making the bottom part of a bell curve on which the Ghanta (no pun intended) is banged.
Once you have figured out that your lifelong dream of making it to the top of your class is as real as Rakhi Sawant winning an Oscar & Nobel Peace prize in the same year, you don’t have to do anything but feed the engines of leisure with marathons of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Sherlock, House of Cards and the likes.
Although, I am being unapologetically sexist but I have got no empirical evidence to prove the hypothesis that women belong to this strata of an MBA society. (See what I did there. This is called Gas.)
Here, I complete my quest for the true pleasures in the past two years that we’ll, without a doubt, remember and cherish in our future lives. Just like, I never dreamt in my life that I will be graduating as an MBA from such an awesome institute, who knows, I will be making bombs, five years from now.
References:
[1] Friends et al., Journal of Learning by Doing, Vol. 1, DMS, IIT, 2012–14
