3 coffee, 2 sandwich and 5 quarter life crises

When you have a 10 day break between the trimester exams, one the best thing to do was to get around with a bunch of friends and chat. On the evening of a rainy day in Mumbai, 5 of us got together outside Dhiraj and talked for over an hour and half, between coffee and sandwiches, on the state of our lives right now, when we are doing II year MBA from a relatively well known institute. The five of us were SS, RS, RK, RM and me.

The discussion started off, when RM said that if we had a few minutes of clearer thinking during the two hours of CAT that we wrote close to 2 years ago; we would have been at one of the IIMs.

True. No denying of this. Life is Unfair - the earlier we start accepting this simple fact the better we are.

Then it turned on to the institute that we have landed ourselves in. If IIPM calls itself the largest b-school on earth, ours can surely stake claim to be the densest one. Most B-schools in Mumbai, barring NITIE have a concern over space, typical of the city in which they are located. But I m sure none of them can claim to have produced more MBAs per square feet of the land that they own than ours.

Education is the starting point of strengthening a nation. The better skilled the students going out of a system are that much better off the nation is going to be. So any anomaly in the system of education will get magnified down the line in the careers of the students. This is all the more true in the case of professional degrees like engineering and management.

This makes it very important to keep the 5 lettered word called G-R-E-E-D away from an educational institute. But we have found only that in ours and more of that as we have moved from the first to the second year. There is no problem with an educational institution making profit, but making profit without providing value for the money you charge is unpardonable.

The discussion moved on the line saying that in the first year of our course we could have competed with any guy from a top b-school. But as we have moved along the course, they have received considerable value added day- by-day and the gulf has widened that it might not be possible now.

It was sad to hear that a lot of guys had come into the institute with fire in their bellies, but as they progressed the fire had been doused and they have settled for a life of mediocrity.

As the number of students admitted into the institute has gone up, the institute has consciously chosen people with prior work experience, to leverage on their work ex during the most important placements. The going might be easy when the economy is booming and the industry is plagued by a serious talent crunch.

Despite all the negative tone of the discussion, a few of them, SS and RM in particular wanted to do something to stem the situation. All of us were left gasping as to what to do and where to start, if we needed to do something to the institute before it became our alma mater.

I m sure that despite all this, we might in the next twenty years see a few solid entrepreneurs and a number of high profile corporate performers from the batch of 2008.