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If you ask me about my first week at a B-school (specifically, SCMHRD), you are likely to get the same answer if you ask a juvenile delinquent who is serving his sentence in a prison...

Typically, we would wake up at 5:30 am, drag ourselves to the gym / aerobics, come back to steal a few winks of sleep, get late in the process, fight as to who gets to use the bathroom first, grab some breakfast, rush to attend the 9:00 am lecture (and more importantly, the attendance), bore ourselves to death for 10 hours!

The most frequently used words are - assignments, presentations, class participation, credits - none of which I particularly like!!! Here they call it a "learning institute" and teachers are there to facilitate learning, and not merely teach. I love the concept, but the implementation is taking a toll on me. Apparently, you have to come prepared for a lecture even BEFORE the topic has been discussed in class. Now, I come from a typical graduate college (a great college), where the concept of "preparation" (before or after) a lecture simply did not exist. I mugged up notes and xeroxes one week before the exams and that was enough to fetch me a University rank... and suddenly at the ripe old age of 23, I am expected to study!!!

Our Director is not particularly fond of the concept of "having fun", so he plans every minute of our day to ensure that we are loaded with projects and surprise tests just in case we dared to venture out of the concentration camp into the free world that eludes us!

We have 18 subjects (Vedanta, Spanish, Excel VBA - you name it, we got it!) and the fun part is every Saturday we have 2-3 FCQs (Frequently Conducted Quizzes), but the beauty of it is that we are not told which subjects we will be tested on! So we spend sleepless Friday nights wondering what to study, taking what we call "calculated risks", which invariably do not work out and we invariably end up being unpleasantly surprised! But what it does in the process is stimulate our creativity and immune us to failure! Three months into my MBA, and it seems I have already mastered the glorious art of "faffing"!! We don't have any weekly offs, and we no longer look forward to weekends: everyday is a Sunday for us!

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* Contributed by -
Simanti Talukdar,
MBA 1st Year,
SCMHRD, Pune.