A New Quarter...

Spring quarter begins tomorrow. We are done with two (of the six) quarters of our MBA program-time does fly fast in a b-school! A friend dutifully reminded me that I could have been graduating out of the MBA program in a week's time had I chosen to join ISB one year back. But I have no regrets. Its been a great journey so far. Just to look back at the Winter quarter...

• We were introduced to three major areas of business in one quarter-Finance, Operations and Marketing.
• Of these, quite surprisingly for me, the Finance course has been the best introduction ever not least due to Professor Rudi Fahlenbrach who is among the best professors I have ever seen-so much that I, (whose only expectation from an MBA was "Anything but Finance") am now interested in Finance!
• Marketing and Operations have altered many of my perceptions. The way I look at a supermarket now is fundamentally altered. I try to sneak into the back end of the store and see how big of an inventory they maintain. I look at the shelf space each product occupies and try to judge how these vary from one week to another. I look closely at the in-store promotions, display logic and a bunch of other stuff that I was totally oblivious to, earlier.
• We had a case competition, which was literally a 24-hour marathon, exhausting, but very revealing in terms of how to structure a problem, how to think through solutions with teams, how to (how not to) present and so on.
• I had the opportunity to work with the marketing department of a college at OSU which has been a great learning experience so far.
• Girls auctioning dates, talkative folks auctioning a day of silence, private flight ride, homemade German dinner, Indian dinner, you name it-it would be up on Fisher Follies! It was a crazy night with people bidding for huge amounts (I am guessing at least half of those were more the work of alcohol than anything else:) ). A fun night.

The best thing about my MBA experience has been the fact that every day, I do something new, or learn something new. Of course nothing groundbreaking, just simple things like talking to a person from a new country, writing a consulting report, handling a passionate team discussion, learning to wear a tie -it could be anything-the novelty of each experience makes life interesting!