Decision Time
There are more than many analytical & heuristic models to resolve conflict between mutually exclusive alternatives, and i know some if not all of them. But when it comes to making a decision about the internship that i must undertake, these decision making techniques fail me. As i stated earlier now is the time to decide between two internship offers that i have.
I was dumbfounded on how to make up my mind. I weighed whether i go for the function i want to perform or the domain\industry i want to work in, i weighed the long term implications of being in these vastly different careers if these internships turn into full time jobs, i weighed the probability of my internship turning into a full time position, i weighed the future prospects of these companies, i weighed the full-time 6 figure salary in one to the leisure and work-life balance of the other and i finally weighed the future prospects of the industries in general that i will be part off by taking these internships and i weighed all of these again and still no answer.
I talked to my parents, as it was as if a curtain was lifted off my mind and I used the simplest decision making tool known to man. I listened to my heart and simply decided to take my first steps into working for a top 5 technology consulting firm.
Momentum
Do you believe in that there are good times and bad times, that sometimes things just fall into place and sometimes they unravel uncontrollably into a whole lot of mess and above all that there is a certain momentum to victory and to defeat too.
The past six months have been very hectic for me but i had the most troubling time in the past two months. I have been searching for summer internship. Being an international student in a US MBA program, there are only a few companies that are willing to offer you the job and this is mainly due to problems associated with work authorization. So i gave a couple of interviews on the b-school campus in November and December and got rejected on both the occasions. The mistake was mine. In one case i made a grave mistake of not faking enthusiasm for the job(i was interviewing because this was supposed to be my safety job, my fall back option) and in the other case i was not really prepared. I babbled on in response to questions and simply messed the whole thing up. Soon the winter break began and tension mounted, i began applying frantically to very many companies through their websites but no use, no response from anyone. As the b-school reopened i began applying through campus career services again. For almost a month nothing happened, no interview calls nothing. I was losing my interest in studies, food had lost it’s taste and sleep no longer felt soothing. I seem to have forgotten the simple pleasures of life. The cold mid-west weather did not help things.
Unexpectedly, very close to the end of January i received an email from my college professor regarding a research position in the college, asking me whether i was still interested in the position and if i was, then it was mine. This was the turning point. I took the research position. I then got a call to interview in the company that i can simply call my dream company. I gave 4 consecutive interviews for my dream company on a single day and i got the summer internship with a nice little joining bonus and a sweet pay. I also interviewed in the same week for another company, and this interview also went very well, i was well prepared for it and i was confident that it would go well, not because i was well prepared but because other things were going well. That certain momentum that i spoke about earlier.
I have observed throughout my small life that i have always had these dry and wet spells, when i feel trapped in a dungeon and everything i do only, leads me only deeper into the dungeon and then out of nowhere a thin ray of light appears and i climb up this rope into the light.
P.S. I heard back from the other company i interviewed with and now i am facing the problem of plenty and it is still not a bed of roses.
Case… Case… Case…
… My first case competition is done. It has been a long past 24 hours. We were given a case at 8:00 AM, the case dealt with a small family company in the beer brewing business, they are faced with a shrinking market for Lager in which they are an established regional player and a growing market for light beer in which they have no presence. Now should they go forward with launching the light beer and take the risk of hurting their core brand of Lager in pursuit of higher profits in a growing market segment or stay put and leverage there core brand attributes to increase the slice of pie in a shrinking Lager market.
… There is no right answer, just alternatives that need to be supported with cogent data and arguments.
So we begin, we need to turn in the case on 8:30 AM the next day.
Day 1
8:30 AM to 10:00 AM : Me and my team mates read the case. Highlighters in full swing.
10:00 AM to 12:00 AM : A hotch potch of ideas are thrown around, no patterns emerge, somehow agree on the direction to take in the case… Lunch time…
1:00 PM to 5:00 PM : The brainstorming exercise into the chosen approach begins and quickly devolves, individual differences surface, the financial calculations go haywire and hypothesis that sounded well founded earlier, now under scrutiny of break-even, NPV and EMV analysis seem shaky. It is 5 PM and we are no way near the place where we aught to be.
5:00PM to 7:00 PM: After a cup of coffee and coke we get back to work, two people begin work on the powerpoint slides, one is digging into research papers that could support our hypothesis and I begin work on the financial & sales projections… pie charts, trend lines… the whole package…
7:00PM to 8:30 PM: We begin putting the whole presentation together, the slides, charts and embed the excel sheets showing the forecasts and financials. Things are looking good, then just then we realize that the forecasts are not in line with one of our hypothesis. We work on it, augment the hypothesis and recast the forecast and it just about fits… We call it a day
Day 2
7:30 AM – 8:30 AM: We burn the powerpoint presentation onto the CD and turn it in.
9:00 AM – 9:30 AM: Our case presentations. It goes well, we rush a bit but we feel that we answered the questions well, one of my teammate has a concern that we did not spend much time in the presentation on the financial and forecast number projection and the process used to arrive at them and it might hurt us…. His concern is overshadowed by a self confident feeling of the team… However his concern turns out to be prophetic.
12:45 PM – 1:30 PM : Results are declared, we do not win.
1:45 PM – 2:00 PM : Feedback session for the presentation – I am usually very skeptical about the feedback session, but this was very informative and extremely beneficial. These 15 minutes were the best part of the past 36 hours.
We lost, but it was great fun! I wanted to write more in this post about what we did wrong and what we did well, the feedback we got… but i am tired. The 14 hrs of intense mental workout are making we feel a bit tired and sleepy. I will write about it, some later day.
Back to school
The obsession with getting admission to an MBA, i think left me with very less time to think about the what going back to school will be like. It seemed as if my life would follow a set trajectory, as if my short and long term goals were perfectly aligned with everything i had done till now, and this all was so eloquently stated in my application essays. I had a consistent life story with a clear and elevating goal in which i believed passionately. But as I have come back to school, this master plan about which i thought almost everyday(or every other day) seems to slip my mind so very frequently. It seems counter productive at times that the I am forgetting the reason for which i am getting my MBA, all this happening due to the trials and tribulation of hectic b-school life. Anyways, I keep remembering from time to time and then I am back on course.
Many people say that coming back to school after having worked for a while is hard. I did not think so. Maybe this is because I never lost the habit of academic learning. Being in a ever changing field of IT, i always had to learn new things that came on the technology landscape, but my peers in other fields like marketing, sales and administration have lost this habit of academic learning .
Another aspect that also seems strange now is Grades. Getting an “B” grade in a class seems like a statement by the professor on your intellectual capability, your value. It seems like to you, a judgment on your worth. But it is no such think. It is just a grade like it was back when you first went to school, just a parameter to measure your academic performance, but that realization does not dawn on you ever quickly when you get a grade, at-least it did not dawn onto me till a few beers.
Talking about realizations, you now realize that the salary cheques and no loner coming in. You are spending and no longer earning. You bank balance is shrinking. It’s strange, now that you start thinking about conserving electricity and gas not because of any great sense duty towards the environment, but for the simple purpose of saving money. One more thing that is different is that once you come home from office, you had nothing to do… but when you are in school, the real work starts once you come home… team assignments, case presentations, readings .. blah blah… But it is all good fun… After all you get a long winter break only when you are in school.
Well… My first quarter of MBA is over… the grades were good (not exceptional… have to work on that in next quarter)… Learned a lot…. It was a big change going from writing PL\SQL packages to learning accounting, from creating web portals to understanding principles of demand and supply, from engineer to manager, from company to school….. But it is fun… Try it if you haven’t …
