Its done

The final exams for term-9 were held from the 16-18th of April 2009. It's done! It's over. We have our weekends back.

The last three years were very intense for me. I got promoted twice, had one kid and wrapped up my MBA. We moved house from Delhi to Gurgaon and traveled to multiple places. See http://yogitravels.blogspot.com/

So here are my parting thoughts at the end of this 3 year part time MBA program at IIM Lucknow.

In spite of the early disappointments and the general feeling of being stripped of time, these three years have been great. I have learnt a lot in my MBA program. I have made new friends and gained appreciation for economics, finance, HR that I never had before. I know how to read income statements, value options, manage forex exposures and understand when someone is trying to bullshit me. I know how corporate valuations work or don't work :). I know how to create my own financial models, run marketing surveys and use quant tools to analyze the data effectively.

I have more confidence in approaching business problems and in investing my money for my own financial sanity and independence. Clearly, these are invaluable things to know.

I have a lot of respect for some of my professors at this school:

1. Prof. Manoj Anand - for being patient and getting the class to learn cost accounting and financial management II and getting us to read and understand the footnotes in Brealey and Myers Principles of Corporate Finance.
2. Prof. S.C. Bansal - for getting us all to embrace learning and get off our corporate high horses as managers
3. Prof. Punam Sehgal - for helping us understand organization behavior and look inside us for our intrinsic motivators (I would have never used these works 3 years ago).
   
4. Prof. Tharuvai Srinivasan - for being a whiff of fresh air after multiple mediocre professors taught us in term 7 and 8. He got us to learn International Finance and got us to attempt questions that we would not have even understood at the beginning of the program.
   
5. Prof. J.K Das, Prof. Amit Mookerjee - for having faith in the first few batches of the working manager's program and for innovating in a government of India organization. There was no reason for them to do so. There were no incentives for them to champion this program. But, they decided to do it anyway. Thank you.
   
6. Prof. S. Dash - for forcing us to spend the time creating our questionnaire and analyzing data using reasonably advanced quant techniques so that we understood real world issues with market research. I'll post my MR project for you all to see with this post.
   
7. Prof. N.K Gupta - It is scary what true quant mastery means. This is personified by Prof. Gupta. He showed us multiple times that we knew nothing well enough to answer him. His question papers were hard and educational. He taught us Quant I, Quant III
8. Prof. Sushil Kumar - Learning about Carbon markets and the environment was so much fun. It was great to see someone as polished and thoughtful as Prof. Kumar teaching at IIM Lucknow's Noida Campus. This course was really useful and interesting for me.
   

There were some absolutely redundant courses that really made me hate my time in class. I think it was both the professors as well as the course content that made these extremely theoretical and boring and reminded my why I hated my college education in India at the university of Pune. It was all learning by rote, courses were taught by very mediocre professors who were really not into the subject they were teaching. So.. I list these course and shy away from listed the profs:

1. Operations Management I and II: Horribly taught. Had nothing to do with today's operations management. The course needs to be rubished or re-invented by some one who cares for this subject.
2. Information Technology concepts: What! after 5 years at Adobe and 3 years at Dolby and 4 years of engineering I was being taught what is a database and what is an ERP and that to at just a definition level. God save the students to have to deal with this compulsory course. 
3. Management information systems: we read a horrible book for this course and this course was a NOP (all Electronics engineers should get this).
   
4. Advanced data analysis - Poorly taught. Had to re-learn every thing from Prof. Satyabushan Dash in Term 8.
   
5. There weren't enough electives to choose from and some of the electives were useless. For example: 

• Customer relationship management: horrible cases, old cases, irrelevant definitions and theory
• New venture planning: we provided a lot of feedback on how to improve the course. hopefully some of this will be taken up soon
• Business to Business marketing: Gosh.. this course was so horribly taught and structured that it made me weep. I still did very well in this course because there was nothing to learn. The prof was self involved and eventually decided that he'll never teach with course again. Yay!
  

So, what is the net net summary?

I learnt a lot. I learnt how to manage my time. I learnt how much time I really have. I know enough to read an economist's report and understand our national budget. I know more about people and their expectations from higher education. Enough said.

I highly recommend it.