'Manage it' - the most commonly used word in a B-school or at least in my B-School. You have a problem? 'Manage it'. Yes, true in a way, that is what you are here for - to learn to manage your life and work. Does that even remotely mean that the people who don't have an MBA degree don't know how to manage their life? Nonsense.
The first thing you would notice when you join a B-School is probably the good cultural mix of people who are all different in their own ways. And of course, they have all earned a position in this college. It is indeed fun being with people from all across India and even from abroad; you get to know a lot about the various places and their cultures. The Club activities that extend till the wee hours of the morning and the 8.30am classes, the rush to mess, and missing the breakfast on most of the days, are all some of the memories that you would definitely take away. The night life, the fun with friends are all memorable and especially your birthday 'treatment' at 12am in the night is as awesome as it could ever get. My birthday bash was huge where I ended up cutting 4 Birthday cakes with 4 sets of people - the intensity of the 'treatment' ranged between the one were my friends were decent enough to cover only my face with cake to the one where I was completely drenched in foam and detergent water. It was different in another special way too; the lovely bunch of red roses and a cake from my husband, who made an online delivery to my B-School made sure that it was the first gift I received on my Birthday. That day, I was a bit late to class the next day and by the time I reached, our MAC sir had already started the class, but as I entered my class my classmates started screaming that it was my birthday. Our sir wished me and the whole class started singing 'Happy Birthday'. It was again a wonderful experience and I was overwhelmed. Yes, it's great to be back in college :).
The club activities and the sessions do enough to keep you awake all nights (and most people do compensate for it by sleeping in class), but my only point of contention is on the learning aspect. Subject learning is more like the make-do tents that you make to just get through the night. In most cases, we just do something to satisfy the faculty and to impress upon him the image that we have done something. This in turn could translate into good class participation scores. But what about the learning part? I doubt if this is what I actually wanted from a B-School. The opportunities are immense, but you need to be on your toes all the time. That, probably is the reason why I feel I am not learning anything as far as the course is concerned. The subjects in my current term mock at me and I realize there is hardly any time to pick up the nuances of what has been taught in class.
One very simple question - in our quarterly system at our B-School, in every term we have a minimum of 6 subjects and we hardly get 2 months to complete the course which includes 3 quizzes per subject, 1 project per subject and group assignments, tasks and finally the end-term exams for all the subjects. Also, within this short span of 2 months per term, we are supposed to slay a wide variety of subjects from Business Law to Statistics to Corporate Finance to Micro Economics to MIS. I wonder, all the faculty who teach us are experts only in their own areas, but how can they expect a person who is very new to the field to be an expert in all these subjects within a span of 2 months. Also, if we are not supposed to be an expert in all these subjects, then what exactly is the point of teaching us all this? The least they can do is give us some more time to get ourselves accustomed to the concepts in these subjects. When we convey this to anyone, pat comes the answer - Manage it. It seems no one cares, the only reason why the B-School tends to change its pedagogy is to grab the attention of the B-School fraternity and the ranking institutes and make them think that it is innovative in its approach to teaching. Who cares whether it is for the good of the poor students who spend one hell of a time running from one bank to the other looking for educational loans to pay a huge sum as fees. At least take into account the aspirations of these students who enter this new world of opportunities hoping to make the most of it in terms of picking up the right skills to take them higher up the corporate ladder.
It seems the college only intents to teach one thing - 'Manage It'. Don't you think you can probably learn more about managing things just by organizing a birthday party and making it happen at a very short notice than by attending this 'Manage It' B-School for 2 years? Think about it, are you here just for a degree or for the immense learning opportunities that the MBA could offer you?