Term 2 - Week 3

Term 2 Post Mid Term, Week 3

We are now halfway through the 1st year of this MBA program and some things are becoming clear:

• Most people are in the program for money. Some folks asked a prof. whether a topic would be asked in the exams so that they could conveniently skip it
  
  
• People fight over 2-3 marks so that they can have the best GPA.
• Only a few projects have truly led to learning
• Each prof has his/her own expectations, which must be fulfilled. This is analogous to doing what your manager asks you to do to be successful.
• The next 2.5 years are not going to be easy
• More people will drop out of the program because of its stringent rules and an obstinate inconsiderate dean.
• The committee with the most volunteers is the placement committee :)
• Even at this level, people resort to teaching in exams.
  

Maybe I am naive and my expectations unreal but I was expecting more. I was expecting better interactions in class. Most working managers hardly have time to read up on a topic before coming to class. Hence, discussions in class are kind of limited but really useful at times.

The spirit of camaraderie's is missing.

I have found a few good folks though and I like working with them. I am doing well in class. I expect 3A's, 1C and 1B in Term 1. I can't believe I still care how I am doing academically.

We had our mid terms for Term 2 two weeks ago. They went well.

Term 2 - week 3

Managment Accounting II - Cost Accounting is really going over our heads right now. We really are not able to understand how to use all the information we are getting in this class. I spent most of the day yesterday reading up three chapters of the good about joint costs, split off points, activity based costing and cost allocation. I think I might be able to contribute better in class now.

Did the OM homeworks yesterday. The soap case design in complete. Design for Manufacturing and Assembly has also been compared with Industrial design. I would have posted by homework but our OM prof insists on a hand written assignment.

I still have to study for the QAM quiz tomorrow.

The student council has been dissolved. I think the WMP student council really needs to focus on getting the best instructors to Noida and work on making this program easier for managers. Their current focus on outside speakers and other business school festivals seems dumb to me.

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Term 2 begins

The finals for Term 1 were on October 5,6&7. The MANAC and BIO finals were relatively tough and thorough. The LAM and ECO papers were a joke. The LAM paper was almost exactly the same as the last years paper. The ECO paper required us to 4 out of 6 questions.All these questions were from the back of Michael Baye. The solution of all Michael Baye questions was distributed earlier by the students. There was no learning in these two papers/

Term 2 began. It seems that I will not have 80% attendance in the IT in Management paper. I have to go the US for one week. We have 3 ITM classes that week. Since this is a .5 credit course, there will be a total of 10 classes for ITM before mid term. I am figuring out how to get out of this situation.

The Quantitative Aspects of Mgmt I and MANAC II professors are interesting. The MANAC II prof is really knowledgeable and soft spoken. He tries to answer all questions asked in class, which sometimes slows us down. He has a habit of standing close to the person who asked the question and giving him an answer. He then asks the student "Yes/No" to ensure that he was understood. He also grabs his pants and raises them to the top of his waist as if they would fall down if not raised up. This is funny.

The QAM prof spoke at length about how his IIT, IIM son forced him to leave Mauritius and join IIM Lucknow. He is also a good teacher, thorough. We expect that he is give us a really tough exam.

The dissapointment of this term is that CK Singh will be teaching us OM II. Last week, he spoke how ashamed he felt about the choice of jeans made by his grand daughters. He said that jeans dont require washing for days and that he finds it disgusting. He then blamed Jeans for bringing AIDS and Chickengunia in India! He also told a surdar in our class that the color blue does not look good on him. Finally, he said that we must all wear White at all times because it reflects heat.

He is just absolutely boring and irritating. All of the class feels that attending his classes is a waste of time. They are there only for attendence. We are planning to write to the dean. I wrote up a document that Ashutosh will fair up before we ask everyone to sign it.

CK Singh has given us two dumb homeworks already:
1. Design a soap case
2. Answer Question 2 on page x in Aquilano based on the solved example on page y in Aquilano.

The dinner after Term1 finals was interesting. Bhushan, Anil, Ashish and I went to have a beer and dinner. We finished the ECO paper in 30 minutes. We were allotted three hours for it. We located the cheapest bear in Sector 18 Noida and drank and ate. Bhushan called Nupur to see if she would be interested in joining us, she didn't.. Anyhow, we have a good conversation about relationships and women in India today and why Bhushan and Ashish are still single. :)

We invited the CEO for holland tracktors to meet students of both the batches of IIML NC (noida campus). Only 25 people showed up. THe student body was really irritated at the lack of response. had a small disagreement with Ketaki the night before and decided to stay home on Saturday morning to get this disaggrement to closure.

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Week 5 - post mid term

Busy week. We had our MANAC presentations. Each group of 4 folks were randomly asked to talk about either their individual project or group projects. Each group had 3 minutes. It seemed too little a time to do justice to all the work we had done for our projects over the last three months. Anyhow, we all went through this rigorous viva. Some did ok, some did not even get a chance to speak as their group ran out of time.

We had a guest lecturer from Institute of international law, who spoke to us about Human Rights and international covenants govering human rights and the responsibilities of companies regarding human rights. It was in interesting lecture. This happened during our Legal Aspects of Management class.

Our last behavior in organizations class was interesting. We were shown a video of the "Parable of the Sadhu" and how people with different backgrounds commented on what transpired. I was impressed by the law professor who ran the discussion.

Things continue to be busy as we have two presentations, for Law and Eco, due next Saturday. We havent spent anytime on them yet. Yesterday was spent working on the law presentation. It is too much work - kids, work and mba all together.

Also, finals are next week. Most of us haven't studied for them at all.

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Projects/Presentions Galore

Week 2 after the mid terms is complete and we have too many projects to submit in the month of september:

1. MANAC - Accounting for Joint Ventures

2. BIO - Leadership

3. Eco - Microsoft

4. Law - Contract management and online contracts.

it is going to be a hell of a month. While we have formed decent groups, there is still a lot to be done.

It was fun learning about group behavior and about social loafers. There was a lot people could relate to. However, the eco class was boring as ever. The prof. took forever to discuss procurement strategies

Spot buying/contracts/make it your self. The discussion led no where. I had a great time sketching during this class. I sketched DKD leaning against the podium. The feedback from his microphone was also very irritating.

The Law prof. turned out to be quite a well educated fellow. It was hard to understand him as he kept saying "La" instead of "Law" and introduced himself by saying, "You know me?" and pointed to a slide which listed his educational qualifications. Funny.

The discussions in class and emails are plenty. People are concerned about the class schedule and want to have classes on rotation so that if they have a weekly meeting, they need to be at, they dont miss classes of the same subject every week. Some people are really dissappointed by the pedagogy skills of our OM professor and want to write to the program head about him.

I got the results for my OM finals. I got 14/30. The highest was 27. I am dissappointed, but then again, I am not very good at learning by rote. It is a pity that even at this level, we have to learn by rote.

Week 1 - post Mid Terms

We had a really fun BIO class in which we had to provide feedback (BOOST) to other people in the class. The feedback had to be written properly and you had to write your name so that people could know who was providing feedback to them. I had never provided feedback before and this was a fun exercise. I wrote feedback for Bhushan, Anil, Thakur, Ashish and Nitin V.

I received feedback from Mukesh, Amit T, Anil, Neeraj Sallh and I think thats it.

Post Mid Term exams

IIM,Lucknow,Noida,working manager's program

August 23rd, 2006

 

It has been a while since I've been able to write. I was out on vacation for a week to Palampur and then started preparing for our mid term exams from August 17-19th.

 

Last week was really busy and I had never felt more tired and mentally exhausted. The mid term exams were a killer. MANAC-I took forever to prepare. No one seemed to know the correct answers so we all gave it our individual bests.

 

The Managerial ECO-I paper was really easy. The BIO paper was confusing as ever. The Operations Management paper was painfully dull and learning by rote was too hard.

 

I made a few good friends though. Ashish Baweja was fun to study with. We also had a night out planned with Bhushan and Nitin V at Nitin's place. It turned out to be unproductive as we watched Corporate and gathered inferences towards behavior in organization from scenes in this movie. We also spent time reviewing other girls profiles on orkut.

 

By the end of the mid terms, we were all confused and coined some new terms

1. Personality amortization
2. Credit Salary Debit motivation
3. Therefore, Therefore - as per Dr. CK Singh, our OM professor

There were other terms but I am too tired to remember. Work continues though. We have an big milestone on Friday 8/25 and our MANAC project synopsis is due tomorrow.

Week 3

Week 3: July 20-22, 2006

Prof. Bansal gave us a surprise quiz. I scored 3/5. We also had a OM-1 quiz and couple of homeworks from our BIO prof. Busy week indeed. At the end of week 3 we had a bunch of homeworks for MANAC and OM.

We had a nice freshers party at the skywok at Sab mall. Really nice. Lots of beer and food. We had fun when folks introduced themselves. It was great to just talk about stuff and eat.

We finally got our book for ECO and hopefully, we'll get the OM book next week.

Week 2

Week 2: July 13-15th, 2006

The work has begun. There are two books for each of the 4 subjects in this trimester. I could spend everyday reading and will still not be able to go through all the course material. The eco prof from Ramjas changed the book on us. He wants us to use Michael Baye, we have been given a different book. Discussed Smoky Valley case and had no idea how to proceed.

Lots of questions being asked in class. Some dumber than others. Profs complaining that they cannot proceed due to too many questions. Amit Taneja asked everyone to stop asking questions :) and started a yahoo group poll on it. Results awaited. Funnily enough, not everyone is on Yahoo group yet. The course is gaining momentum. Prof Bansal (MANAC-I) asked everyone to read about income, recognition, etc and read three cases. One each on Microsoft, Irrigation Equipment and Bausch and Lomb. I am feeling really behind already.

Surprise of the week: OM Prof was able to go through his lecture without Amit Taneja having to man the mouse. But still, it laughed my ass off when Bhushan burst out laughing on my illustration of me hanging myself as I could not stand this OM class. I could not stop laughing and eventually had to leave the class.

Disappointment of the week: Our Eco professor's lack of pedagogy skills.

Week 1

Introduction-

It was gratifying to have gotten through the IIML WMP program. I was surprised to hear everyone talk about how they want to spend time on recruitment on the first day of this three year program. Seems like the focus, for some folks, will only be on netting the highest salary or the most monetary gain from this course.

I heard some people complain about how expensive the course was and wanted the teachers to be worth it.

The introduction to the course by IIML faculty was interesting. A lot of time was spent on explaining how 1 hour of class will require 3 hours of preparation, etc. This is kind of in line with my MS from UT. MANAC-I (management accounting) really reminds be of Acoustics I and of Prof D.T. Blackstock. BIO (Behavior in organizations) seems to be a piece of cake as there are no correct answers and I believe that I can write well. I dont know anything about Operations Management and Economics-I.

Surprise of the week: A really informal, free form introduction with all 69 folks in the batch.
Dissapointment of the week - Our OM professor. I cant stand him.