Summer ‘09 in Columbus
This past summer was perhaps the longest period of doing nothing in my life. So here is how i spent my summer in Columbus, before joining D. So i graduated on 14th of June. The first week of doing nothing was fun, going to sleep at 4 AM, waking up at 1 PM, watching movies the whole day(well what ever remained for the day). On the first couple of weekends managed to squeeze in bd’s and oh yes, a five guys opened up near my apartment. The five guys fever lasted for a couple of weeks, when was then surpassed by MadMex. In the meanwhile, i thought i might as well do something productive and paid the annual membership for PMI and start preparing for CAPM (Certiified Associate in Project Management) certification. This i thought would keep me occupied for at least a month. It is not that CAPM certification will add anything exceptional to my resume by i thought it would compliment my Lean Six Sigma Certification well and would be inline with my aim of appearing for PMP(Project Management Professional) certification in mid 2010.
So, began July. Early in July my roommate and me made road trips to Atlanta and Pittsburgh, where we are going to be posted in our jobs. We finalized our apartments and signed out leases. It was fun driving across US, a total of 1,700 miles in a span of 5 days. It was spring time, the weather was great, but it rained for a few hours during our travel as we passed through Virginia(oh, beautiful Virginia). It was at this time as i drove on the freeway that i began to think, that it is this, this infrastructure, this intricate lattice work of roads, a seamless movement of men, machines and goods that India needs. It is the proverbial sustainable competitive advantage. But it is not easy or quick. It takes time, money and that all important political will and commitment to achieve the foundation that US built through the 1900s. Enough said about that. By the way, the aim of the road trip was to finalize the apartment to stay in and so i did. My apartment is right in downtown Pittsburgh. It has a beautiful view of the city from the 10th floor, it is a bit pricey 
, but it is close to office and near anything that matters in Pittsburgh, so i guess it is worth it.
So, began August. I gave my PMI CAPM certification exam and passed with flying colors(pardon the self adulation). I made some new friends in Columbus, got hooked to Counter Strike, tried out hookah at the local Egyptian restaurant and visited a couple of local clubs. All in all, August was fun.
And so it ends, a three month vacation between my MBA and first post MBA job. This was perhaps the largest vacation since the 3 month vacation between BE and Infy. Now that it is over, time to change gear, real life beckons!
Stuck !!!
It is 3:55 AM EST and i am stuck at Newark on my way home back to Mumbai after a long 1 1/2 year away. It has been the most wretched half a day. What began with four hour delay at Columbus airport has now been surpassed by a 12 hour wait at Newark en route Mumbai. Well it is at times like these when we have time to think, you know really think – as there are limited number of things that you can do at the airport to pass time. People watching is fun but its charm wears off quickly especially as your frustration level with each passing minute rises
Isn’t it ironic that when we are physically stuck our mind races
Plan the life. Live the plan
Pardon my grammar(was never my strong point) with regards to the title of this post. All i was trying to do, was to make a feeble attempt at mimicking the quote “Plan the work. Work the plan”.
I had always used the outlook calendar regularly for planning meeting at my previous job, but now that I was back to school for my MBA, I has discontinued this practice. This was mainly due to the acrimonious relationship between the outlook calender and vCalendar(used by my college to send event dates) and also due to the fact that most of the meeting requests now came through ’simple emails’ and not as ‘meeting requests’. This made recording the time of meeting in outlook calendar a troublesome task. Sometime early this year in late January, i made conflicting meeting commitments and then did not even go to a single one as it just slipped my mind in absence of reminder in outlook. This was the trigger for change.
I upgraded my outlook from 2003 to 2007 and this solved the problem that i was having with vCalendar and I also started taking the pains of entering the meeting timings and agenda from ’simple emails’ into my outlook calendar(essentially having the same effect as accepting a ‘meeting request’). In outlook 2007, you have the facility to have various categories and each of these categories has a different color. You can assign categories to emails, meetings and practically every possible item in outlook. This way i was able to get my meetings streamlined and events prioritized and segmented. Next, I extended this procedure to include other time sensitive recurring events like paying rent, electric bill, gas bill, telephone bill and Internet bill. Then, at the very start of the winter quarter in January, I chalked out the entire quarters’ timetable, with exam dates, assignment due dates, lecture dates and times. I also included reminder of 2 days for midterms, 4 days for finals and case reports. Though it looks very time consuming to put all this stuff in the outlook calendar, it really is not. Using ‘recurring event’ feature in outlook you can easily key in the class time table for the entire quarter or semester.
Having seen the results of this in terms of forward and current visibility of my own schedule which allowed me to better plan my activities better, I started scheduling everything thing in my outlook calendar. From studying for financial management to buying groceries and from following up with a contact i made in a consulting firm to doing my laundry. I am now hopelessly dependent on outlook, but it has significantly improved my life. I had always planned my life, but this level of scheduling just made living the plan easier. Being inherently lazy, easy in my mind is always better.
P.S. This post sounds like an advertisement for Microsoft… but it is not…
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.
