Wear Sunscreen

Well its time for a video in my blog and I start with what is the best advice that can be given to an incoming batch of students (A lot of it will apply to life in general also).
For people who wanna know more the script is by Mary Schmich and the video is by Baz Luhrmann.



Wiki this

Presidential Elections

After holding office for five years it looks like it is time for Dr.A.P.J. Abdul Kalam to relinquish office. Dr.Kalam is a great leader and used his first citizen role exceptionally to motivate the Indian youth. I have been particularly impressed with some of his speeches in the president's website http://presidentofindia.nic.in/. I was seriously expecting him to get a second term but our political parties have vested interests to take care of and so the nation will soon be getting a new president. A few names are doing the rounds, including the Chief Mentor of my ex-company. But my gut is that political appeasement will be the criteria this time.

Meanwhile at school, we just had our Graduate student body president elections. MG won it in what ppl say was a close race. We had an impressive set of candidates in the fray and I think MG's early initiatives forging a wide ranging partnership between the school and his ex-company did the trick. The scale of the initiative is really great(should run into several millions) ranging from research to ELPs to recruitments. Doing all these before people even got time to settle down is really commendable. But at the same time this raises the bar up for him. He has quite a handful to take care and I wish him good luck there. I thought some of the other candidates were very good too, particualrly AP, VR and PS. ISB will offer more opportunities for all these guys and the so far dormant leaders over the next year. So here is one for all the leaders at ISB. Cheers !

Fun with Statistics - Prof. Stine

What does it take to make a subject like statistics really enjoyable for a literature major. Is it real life examples, actual business situations from fortune majors or HBR cases? You can get more functional answers than these anywhere else. But ask the ISB class of 2008. The one answer would be "witty one-liners". Professor Bob Stine descended from Wharton and spent three weeks with this batch teaching the first half of the statistics course. In this really short time he has created a lifetime impact with his treatment of the subject and his wit. While i enjoy statistics normally, this time I enjoyed the wit more. I made a note of a good number his one-liners in class. here we go

"We are now comparing apples to donuts"

"This thing is spreading like wild flowers"

"Assume we are holding a stock for as long as a day"

"Don't put all your mangoes in one basket"

"I hope we are appropriately dubious about this assumption"

"SAIL is the puke green line on the chart"

"Ok. I'm done JMPing around here"

"'coz I don't have any kind of life here I played with excel solver"

"I'm extrapolating way outside my experience"

"Linear models terribly don't make much sense in global sense, and lot of times they don't make much sense in the local sense too"

"Average is not good. Like the guy who drowned in a river that was on average 4 feet deep"

"Don't call me Bobbie, 'coz I'll think you are my wife"

"People don't take square roots everyday" - Bob quoting his wife

"These are the god-forbidden log-scale values"

"You call demand as D and do you use P for price or something else perverse"

"9 times out of 8 people appreciate the effort you take to present things"

"You are not going to BS your way thru the exams as they are multiple choice"

"Some people remember some things, others remember other things, but I want you to remember something!"

"Normality is more of a prayer than a necessity"

"It's a hammer in search of a nail"

So that ends the fun and after my not so good show in the mid-terms, this blog about Prof. Stine makes me feel lil better. The weekend has officially started and unlike previous weeks we have one day less and one assignment more :-) !!!

Exam Fever

After a really really long time I will be taking up a college exam. The last one was in April 2001 and if I remember right the paper was Bio-medical instrumentation. A little over 6 years later I'm looking at taking up two mid-term papers tomorrow. In these six years while I gained loads of valuable experience my academic strengths have really diminished. So this time around I have carved for myself a really wonderful excuse "I'm so very tired of being the really studious guy, which I have been all my life". When I say this to myself it feels so nice and makes me feel that life is so easy.

I'm sure quite a number of my batchmates will resonate with me. At the sametime I also see folks with 10+ exp prepping like they were in class X and this mid-term is the board exam. I only wish that I don't score more than them and make life complicated. Anyhow the exam fever has really caught up here and I wish the batch of 2008 all the very best for the first set of tests this year.

Miles to go

Five hours of sleep is a premium these days. Assignments and morbid discussions on how the demand curve and supply curves shift totally drain you. In the end you realize that you are just four days away from the mid-term test. In spite of best efforts you are lagging in the pre-reads and now you are playing catch-up. After poring over pages of material and quite a lot of problems you feel that your confidence level has increased marginally. You look up and see it is 2 AM and it is time for the library to close. You come back and slog it out for an hour more resulting in no further increase in confidence levels.
Not surprisingly, it is so easy to fall asleep. You just need to lie on the bed and very soon it is 8 AM and the alarm buzzes to start another day of learning. To top all this salsa lessons start tomorrow and the spanish language classes will also be starting soon. I stopped to think if I'm trying to bite more than I can chew. But then I thought, this is the year for learning and there shall be no stopping me. Once again today I have "miles to go" before I can sleep again.

Study group in action

As I promised last time, this post is about my study group. The ISB folks have put great efforts to create study groups with people from diverse backgrounds. My group has five members and we have just gone through one weekend of assignments. I'm still quite far away from being able to classify them in an enneagram chart but I have got a fair idea of the team's working styles and group dynamics already.

First in the team is AP. He is a commerce graduate from Calcutta and has an equity research background. All through my life numbers have been just measures of quantity. I have been involved in lot of data interpretation when managing projects but this guy has dazzled me by generating mind boggling inferences looking at data. May be it is equity research background but my engineering mind, even though comfortable with numbers, needs helluva lot of training from this guy to get to this level.

Next comes AB. Well..well..He has no connections with the AB's from bollywood. But he easily brings the greatest amount of diversity in the group. A second generation entrepreneur, he started and ran his own polymer based doors business. Even though he cashed in on Mumbai's real-estate boom, this guy felt that in the long run he must trust structured business analysis skills more than gut feel and instinct. He is the practical guy and has an uncanny sense of humor. Girls have already branded him the "whacky" guy of our batch.

Along comes SI. A kind of journalism/writing back ground. He has been content developer for travel related websites. A fantastic team player, an idealist(Capricorn's usually are) and a down to earth demeanour would explain him succinctly. He brings out the most genuine and earthy ideas on to the table and acts a beautiful moderator whenever our marketing plan discussions become really heated.

Then comes SK. This guys comes with loads of business development experience in the financial products space and already has an executive MBA under his belt. A go-getter he is easily the most aggressive member of our team. Has a really sharp wit and the ability to make people listen to him. He played excellent host over the weekend arranging a luncheon for our study group.

Finally yours truly comes as the IT pro next door eager to learn from all these guys. This idea of group work is really fantastic. Taking it a step further, I think ISB can also shuffle study groups after every term. I think this will serve in making people better prepared to work in different teams and will also foster networking within the batch.

Classes begin

The class of 2008 is two days into term 1 and the whole atmosphere in the campus has changed. Four hours of classes per day and almost double of that time spent on pre-reads makes it a 12 hr work schedule every day. Add to it time spent to catch up with batch mates, read the newspaper, hitting the gym etc, one hardly has any time to sleep. I think the art will be to assimilate information fast. One should learn the art of skimming thru information and grasping the gist of it. I have been up until 2 AM the last two days. Not that I cannot sustain this, I feel I shd. improve my productivity so that I can participate in other things also.

Talking about the teaching faculty, succinctly put they are really good. I guess I had no reason to think that they will be ordinary considering the fact they all have associations with the Wharton's and Kellogg's of the world. Class participation(CP) is another new concept that is throwing tantrums during lectures. With CP given 20% weightage in marketing there is a mad rush of people wanting to say something or the other. I'm sure the initial enthu will die down after sometime when the student's mind's reach an equilibrium state. Two more days of classes this week and then my study group will hit on two assignments this weekend. My study group is a really curious mix of ppl. I think I will write my next blog about my study group.