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So you must be wondering why has this blog not been updated for so long... Was the 4th term so hectic that it didn’t give me any time at all? Well, on the contrary, the only reason I can think of for not writing for so long is... Laziness! Period.

The first term of the second year was everything I wanted it to be... the most chill term of my existence at IIM-A so far. I had only heard about what tuchchadom is and when it was time to experience it, I can tell you there was no greater bliss than this. The thing is that if you isolate the term from the first year completely and look at it independently, it's still not so chill. You are actually still supposed to study, prepare for classes, give exams, etc. However, with the academic hell that we have gone through in the first year, this study now seemed like peanuts. We were told that the first year at IIM-A will turn you into steel whereafter nothing ever in life could faze you. After successfully undergoing that transition for one long year, now the time was ours! Here came the second year with all its glory and enticement to enjoy life for one full year as much as we could, before we got back to the drudgery of everyday professional office life.

So why exactly is second year so chill compared to the first year, and why does tuchchadom imply freedom from all academic worries and the time to unwind and pursue all you wanted to? (Apart from the muggu junta, who will mug even when the heavens are falling!) And what exactly we did then in the 4th term? Let me answer all these one by one.

First, the academic part. In IIMs, there is no specialization. We are not MBA Finance / Marketing or whatever after we pass out. We are given general management diplomas. There’s a plethora of subjects on offer in the second year in varied fields and we are free to chose subjects from whichever field we want to. We just have to stick to the minimum credit requirements in each term, which mostly translates that people usually take 15 credits (subjects) in the entire year. The break up amongst the three terms is usually either 6, 5, 4 or 5, 6, 4. In my case, it was the later, I took 5 courses in the 4th term. Out of which, one was an offsite course called Shodh Yatra, which essentially was a trek to Sikkim and about which I will talk in my next blog entry. So that leaves 4 courses. Out of that, one course was called Managing Negotiations and it lasted for just 8 days and had no exams! So that left 3 courses. These were Infrastructure Development & Financing, Strategy Formulation & Implementation, and Consumer Behavior.

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* Contributed by -
Vinamra Srivastava (Campus Associate),
PGP - 2,
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.