Breeding Lucidity: April 2010

Tonight (7th April) we had to attend an interaction session. The shortlisted candidates for the Fellow programme were on campus. Most of them will be attending interviews tomorrow. We were to answer any last minute questions they had. I had missed my interaction in 2008. I was staying at my aunt's place and I heard about the interaction in the Woods. The creepily named place is the area behind the MDC. We did not want to trouble my relatives since we had no clue about Bangalore. My friends will vouch for the fact that I haven't learnt much of the Bangalorean ways yet! Anyway, I have attended the two sessions that have happened after I joined the programme. I will always remember the first one for one particular guy whose questions ranged from the use of his motorcycle on campus to avenues of fun! I can name at least a few professors who would have exclaimed 'Blasphemy' if they had been around. My guess is that he did drop in a few similar statements for I haven't seen him since. This year I spoke to just two students. None of them were curious about when the campus would finally get a swimming pool. Incidentally, one person who had asked this question last year is now my junior. Hmm.

One of the things I realised when I was standing there, amidst the aspiring candidates, is that no matter how much people would tell me about a new endeavour I am about to embark on I am the kind of person who would love to experience it herself. In that sense, I really do not think that I missed out on the interaction. The only 'gyaan' I was able to give tonight was that the programme is not a cakewalk. It is challenging and unless one can keep his/her motivation levels high enough and consistently for five years, it will be excruciating! I am guessing a day before the interview, everyone is confident about their motivation levels. Everyone I've spoken to have earnestly nodded their heads whenever they heard those key words - self-motivated, disciplined, focused. To be honest, I did not know what else to tell them. My two years here so far has been an extremely surprising ride. One week into the programme, I realised that we were not really going to follow the PGP route for the first two years as was mentioned on the website. Relative grading was as new to me as was the concept of RGgiri! I was unaware of the 2.5 CGPA cut-off for year 1 and the 2.75 cut-off for years 1 and 2 combined. And well, there was no disco ball in L^2 as I had imagined! Slowly they unravelled themselves, rules and regulations introduced themselves to me and most importantly the course work started dictating my life. There have been times when I talked to my non-IIMB friends in my term papers-assignments-reviews

-submissions-laden lingo. Especially for our batch, which was stuck in the middle of an FPM review and restructuring of the programme, things were uncertain and difficult. But we all huddled into the second year. It was another ride with more courses from our area of specialisation and thankfully a bit more predictable, at least in terms of the requirements, than year 1. In all this, I have bugged seniors with myriad questions. Asked them to handhold me through some difficult bits of the coursework and have bugged them incessantly with questions regarding softwares and databases. But if there is anything that I have enjoyed more than anything else, it has been unwrapping the FPM package. There have been times when I have asked, like Travis, "Why does it always rain on me?". I have whined and cribbed to the extent that I suspect that my friends will disown me soon if I don't keep a check on it from now on.

In spite of all that, I can say that going through it is the best way to realise your own strategy. I have had people ask me about how to study for certain subjects, strategies to deal with the grading systems of certain professors etc. Here is my confession. I have never studied 'smart'. I have always been the kid who would go through as much as was possible and leave the rest to her memory of what was taught in class. I have never made question papers of probable questions. I've never counted the number of times a question had appeared in the previous years' question papers and mugged them (this was possibly my biggest mistake in QMII). Never have I been able to 'select' questions and study just them. So do not ask me which strategy is best. For the only answer I can give you is to experience a slice of it yourself and make one that fits you best. If one can accept that people have different skill sets and capabilities (of course one does since that's what we all claim in our interviews and SOPs!), maybe it is time one accepts that there are different strategies too! Paraphrasing the Hong Kong Tourism slogan "Live it, learn it, love it!"