After two months of grueling classes, last-minute submission of assignments and projects, surprise quizzes and spine chilling end term exams, we have stepped into our second term. Battered and bruised, the swagger of term one seems subdued but the spirits are still soaring high. Wiser from experience of spending sleepless nights for exam preparation, many (yours truly can be excluded from this elite list) have resolved not to let anything pile up till the D-day. Planning, after all, is an essential part of being a manager-to-be. Execution though can wait till the opportune moment.
From Day One, MANAC gave me the blues. (Those who share the same views can click the ‘like’ option) The blues hung on there till the term end, turning me red from time to time. I often lost my balance, trying to balance assets and liabilities. And I was always at a loss preparing an income statement. In short, I am a CA’s nightmare. Cash flow made my head spin. This lesser mortal far removed from carnal concerns of this material world invariably found himself revolving in the twister of inflows and outflows. ABC was definitely more than these three letters. OMG! Didn't I pay a heavy price?
Having lost all hope in management accounting, I turned my attention to economics. But here too I couldn’t shift from one indifference curve to another. I kept sliding up and down the same utility curve, till the time I realized that I was in a perfectly competitive environment. With help from the learned members of this erudite batch, I somehow managed to bridge the demand-supply gap and reached an equilibrium, only to be destabilized in the run up to the exam. Suddenly, I felt like a giffen good. My marginal productivity of labour played havoc with my confidence. Output never became a function of labour. And I kept hearing hissing sounds till the time exams got over!
Operations management too came out all guns blazing. With a robust design, it ravaged with a six-sigma precision. My mental layout resembled a labyrinth. Just before the exams, I realized that my capacity for retaining what was taught in the class had registered a severe shortfall and it was impossible to augment it in such a short time. How I wish It could be included as a study material showcasing clear case of poor capacity planning.
Dejected, I sought refuge in quants, a subject totally alien to me. On seeing the sign of sigma, I went into a tailspin, cursing myself for quitting a cosy job and running into a roadblock. Within days, I started doing all permutations and combinations of my chances to tide over the testing times. Had it not been for the mathematical constraint of probability lying between 0 and 1, my chances of ending up with a fig leaf would have been a high 100. But thanks to the generosity of our teacher, it stayed at zero.
Fed up with number crunching, I saw marketing, organization behavior and business communication as my forte. But, like other subjects, I soon acknowledged that life’s not easy here too. It didn’t take me long to make a transition into a state of self-actualization. My vision remains as clouded as ever and my goals are still to be defined.
Thank you first term for sowing more seeds of doubt and also giving out some clear answers.
-Prasanna
Prasanna is a student from the current IPMX Class of 2012.
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