Sunday, January 22, 2006

Back!

Finally I mustered enough interest and energy to start writing this post. I know what everyone thought! MBA finally caught up with him! Well, to be honest, term 2 was tough (and really bad) for me. However, that isn't quite the reason I stopped posting to this blog. In fact, my last post came right at the peak of term 2 mania and we have had holidays of almost 40 days (wahoo)! I did not post all during the winter break because I didn't feel any more like writing some stuff and sending it into a black hole (even if this black hole was the internet, hardly black enough).

Well anyway, to wrap up term 2, don't wanna think about it. The worst term, the worst courses, couple of bad course structures, we are slowly on our way to being MBA. I am quarter of an MBA, and that my friends, is probably the best thing about term 2.

So I did a lot of thinking during the holidays, about work, about school, subjects, blog, activities, life etc. etc. I didn't know where my blog was going. Heck I didn't know where everything else was going! I fell sick, but am recovering now. One thing I need to say is this. YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO FALL SICK! I don't know about post MBA jobs, but during MBA, if you fall sick, you can say goodbye to that term. It's of course, not the end of the world, but it's mighty annoying and makes you feel stupid. Good thing these MBAs are modeled after 'Whose line is it anyway', 'The show where
everything's made up and the points don't matter' (or so I hope!).

So the next best thing I have to do in this quarter MBA plan is to look for internship. I deliberately omitted the article before internship in the last sentence, coz. we had an extended, all-nighter debate over whether it's 'an internship' or 'the internship'. After a lot of debate that didn't lead us anywhere, we just avoid the topic now and have decided to get (uhha-uhha) internship and then start using the appropriate article next year.

There is lots to write, internship interviews have started, lot of bankers are disappointed coz. almost all the banking interviews are over and few offers were doled out. Other interviews will go on until end-Feb or so. Hopefully, there will be more companies next term and more interviews in March and April. We are told the recruitments are up significantly from last year, so hopefully, it will be good.

Since I am writing after so long, I need to cover a lot of ground (not to mention, read and prepare assignments for tomorrow's classes), so I am kinda all over the place in this post. Term 3 has 3 courses, Decision Modeling, Managerial Accounting and Operations Management. This term looks a million times more interesting than last term for us general managers. These are subjects that we can put to use tomorrow in our jobs.

Other than these 3 core, I have taken one other Fuqua course called the 'Global Academic Travel Experience - Cuba' (GATE - Cuba). There are a bunch of GATE courses, like India, SE Asia, China, S. America etc. The GATE courses are where we study about the country or region in class and in the end, go to that region to meet the businesses, government officials and people. I took Cuba as I was kind of fascinated by the culture, loved Cuban music and wanted to learn about a communist economy. We'll see where I go with it.

Finally, I have also taken a course outside Fuqua, in Duke. The course is called Music 55, Introduction to music theory. Here, I am learning to write music notations (I can do some basic reading) and also learn the structure and history of music. I am auditing the couse, which means it will appear in my transcript but no grades! I don't have to take any exam, no homework, no assignments, quiz, nothing. One can do as much or as little as he or she wants when auditing. Since I am taking it out of interest, it's not really made up but points still don't matter. Good fun.

OK, so that was a brief on things happening on this side of the world. I do have to get back to my case reading and also prepare for one interview that I have in the coming week. As I mentioned in an earlier post, there are very few companies who make an impression on you (or maybe it's just me) when you are here, and this is one of those companies. So catch you all later.