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Class of 2006 Class of 2007 |
Life has suddenly become too hectic. End-term exams are staring me in the face. There is a lot to study because of the heavy backlog I accumulated. We have classes this entire week too and then exams next monday. Assignments continue to take a heavy toll. Most of my time this weekend has again been spent on assignments. Classes take out a big chunk of the day's time. I usually go to bed early (not beyond 11PM generally) and hence am real short of time. Would have to somehow make myself stretch into the night and fight sleep off. My eyelids start closing by themselves, around 11PM. There are around 91 students here who have come with their families. Despite the really tough schedule and the need to take some time out daily for their family, they have been doing pretty well till now in terms of studying what is taught and what is going to be taught (in the next class). I really admire these people. posted by Ram at 11:45 AM 1 comments  
Emerging out of the pool after getting dunked ... hey its not me ....... 
posted by Ram at 1:30 AM 0 comments
After basketball, football and volleyball, its cricket's turn this weekend. The first of the two indoor mini test matches today was won by Section B (against Section A). The match between my section (D) and Section C is going to start in a few minutes. A new Tamil movie (Sachin) was screened at one of the student villages yesterday night. The amazing part is that there are lot of guys who do not know Tamil but still come to watch the movies. We all had real fun. Results for the post of Vice-Presidents of the different student councils were declared today. The new VP of the Academic Affairs Council was dunked within 30 minutes of the announcement of results. Term 1 exams are getting closer. There is a lot to study. Wish me luck !!! I need lots of it to get through. posted by Ram at 9:00 PM 0 comments
I got dunked in the pool today ( @ 12:05AM) .... no it was not my birthday. I went in on popular demand. Everyone standing there either got dunked or went in by himself. We have a photo session tomorrow for the recruiter's handbook. Have to wear business suit and neck tie. Feeling real sleepy ... this is the third straight day I am up, awake after 2AM. Credit goes to assignments and dunking. Our study group finally managed to submit the marketing case study at 4:30AM yesterday, a clear 3.5 hours ahead of the deadline. posted by Ram at 2:15 AM 0 comments
To read the newspaper articles about this and the profile of Class of 2006, please click here. You will also find old press releases/reports at the same link. posted by Ram at 8:40 PM 0 comments
Slept at 4:30AM today morning after discussing a marketing case study with my group. This is the longest I have stretched into the night (or should I say early morning) after coming to ISB. Looks like there are many more sleepless nights in store for me. One of my study-group-mates had her birthday yesterday and we dunked her at 4AM after the case study discussion. There was a lot of similarity between the managerial economics and marketing management classes yesterday. A lot of stuff that we learnt in economics was being applied while making decisions in marketing. Further, during the course of a discussion on game theory in yesterday's economics class, a student said "player A will annihilate player B". The economics prof kept pulling his leg on his annihilation strategy throughout the class. Then in the next class, the marketing prof told us in the middle of a discussion on product pricing strategies not to use strong terms like destroy competition etc. Immediately the entire class burst out laughing recalling the incident during the economics lecture and the prof was brainy enough to find out that someone in the class had used such words before in some other class. We have to submit the case study tomorrow morning. There is a lot of work left. Looks like we will have to again stretch into the wee hours of the morning tomorrow. Feeling really sleepy .......... z zz zzz zzzz zzzzz ...... posted by Ram at 7:30 AM 0 comments
Here is a photo of Amit cutting the birthday cake at 12:15AM after getting dunked 3 times in the pool. Will post the dunking photos in case I am able to lay my hands on them. posted by Ram at 12:23 PM 0 comments
This is another busy weekend .. an economics assignment, a marketing case study and a lengthy accountancy assignment. Luckily we don't have to submit the accountancy assignment on Monday. The GSB president (about whose election I mentioned in the previous mail) got dunked yesterday. I wasn't there at that time around the pool. Heard that there were around 30-40 guys who either got dunked or voluntarily dunked themselves into the pool along with him. We also dunked Amit yesterday night .... yes you guessed right !! He is the guy who gets dunked on birthdays of most people in the campus. Yesterday he got dunked on his own birthday, 3 times in my presence just past midnight and then (as heard from other sources) about 5-6 times at 1AM in the morning. We also cut a cake. Will try to post a few photographs if all goes well. posted by Ram at 9:30 PM 2 comments
Election for the post of President, Graduate Students' Body was held yesterday and the results came in just now. Happy to see that the candidate I voted for won. Kind of always happens that whatever I study doesn’t come in the exam but whoever I vote for wins the elections !!! posted by Ram at 2:30 PM 0 comments
Came back just now after giving my first exam at ISB - the statistics mid-term. Will come to know how (bad) it went when I get my grades/marks .... till then "no comments". There were many sleep-deprived individuals whom I met after the exam. I am happy that I had a good night's sleep yesterday (despite not having completed many things relevant to the exam). Will have to try my level best to stay awake late nights and study ..... keep trying without success and cannot keep my eyes open after about 11 - 11:30PM, unless I am chatting with friends or roaming around aimlessly. Prof Waterman took over from where Prof Stine had left and took his first class of statistics yesterday. He is a "no non-sense" type of guy ... very punctual, sticks to the subject, no jokes .... teaches really well. As is the case with the marketing profs, Prof Waterman also has a style very different from his predecessor. Some of us are thinking of going to Hyderabad today ... don't know if the plan would materialize though. posted by Ram at 2:00 PM 0 comments
(An "outlier" is a statistical term which refers to an observation that deviates so much from the other observations in a distribution of data ....... ) Marks/grade obtained by my study group in the first marketing case study - a perfect example of an "outlier". Our marks are so different from the rest of the study groups here. It seems we have broken all records . We seem to have been left behind by almost all the groups in our batch !!! Feeling sad and disappointed :-( There is a statistics exam this Friday and I am at least happy that I now know what an outlier is (from practical experience). Moving on ..... Prof. Asim Ansari will teach us the rest of the marketing course for the first term and we had our first class with him today. He takes over the reins from Prof. Scott Ward. I found a lot of differences in their teaching styles. Prof Ward had a style of his own which is difficult to describe. He would take up case studies to illustrate the concepts and it was a different kind of learning experience. Two words I would associate with Prof Ansari based on the first class he took for us today would be "subtle humor". As a part of the exercises we did in class today, we had a questionnaire (for something called conjoint analysis) where we had to imagine that we were in the market for relationships. We had to rank "prospective candidates" with whom we would like to bond based on certain criteria. It was really interesting to hear the doubts some people had and the clarifications the professor gave for the same. posted by Ram at 11:30 PM 0 comments
Before you start drawing conclusions from the title .... no .... no ..... I am not going anywhere. Two of the profs who taught us this term - Prof. Scott Ward and Prof. Robert Stine (both from Wharton) are leaving. They taught us half of their courses and the other halves would be taught by two other profs. We had a small farewell party for the profs yesterday in one of the student villages. Had great fun. These profs are really humorous and they taught us superbly. I have already written about Prof Scott Ward in one of my previous posts. Prof Stine taught us statistics in such a way that we thoroughly enjoyed the subject. In my humble opinion, when you teach statistics, it is really difficult to make the entire class feel interested and listen to you for a full 2 hours without getting bored, especially when students are from really diverse backgrounds and many may not even have read statistics earlier. Prof Stine truly succeeded in this regard. It really saddens us that they are leaving and makes us think whether we will be able to get such teachers for the rest of the courses. But then every single prof who comes here is really great !!! Thats what we heard from our alums and thats what we feel when we see the faculty line-up for the rest of the core terms. They are probably the best you can learn from. For example, I feel probably no one else would be able to teach us "Marketing" better than Prof. Scott Ward and then I see that there is Prof. Jagmohan Raju coming here next term. prof Raju is supposed to be an excellent teacher too. Both of them are "marketing gurus". posted by Ram at 10:17 AM 0 comments
There was a question about the ISB faculty in the isb-pgp yahoo group today. My response was: "Faculty here are probably the best you can get in the world. Many of them come from Wharton, Kellogg, LBS etc and sitting at one place you get the best in the concerned subjects to come and teach you. We, the current students, are clearly seeing this advantage in our first Term here. ISB's visiting faculty are just too good. They stay for the entire duration of the course they teach and are very accessible." To know more about the faculty here, please click here . This page, I think, gives a detailed list of faculty that taught the last batch. There are some more from Wharton and Kellogg that are teaching us this term and they are not there in the list. On to other news .... there was a volleyball match here yesterday and Section B defeated Section A. I think the scoreline was 21-19, 21-14. This week is supposed to be a tough one with one of the mid-term exams on Friday and lots of assignments over the coming weekend. posted by Ram at 11:05 AM 0 comments
Rajnikanth's latest tamil movie "Chandramukhi" was screened (by a student) here in one of the student villages yesterday night. About 15-20 enthu people, including me, turned up to watch the movie. There were supposed to be many more in the audience but I think the upcoming statistics mid-term exam and the assignments to be submitted tomorrow kept them away. The good part about most of Rajnikanth's movies is that you can enjoy them whether you understand Tamil or not ;-) . We had a really great time and, as always, enjoyed the stunts, the dance sequences and the english dialogues spoken by the Tamil superstar. The junta went hysterical at one of his dialogues in which he mentioned the word "psychosis" in his usual accent. Long live Rajnikanth !!! The whole student community is either busy doing assignments or reading statistics. There is a mid-term exam this Friday. I haven't started reading Statistics yet and have a lot of work to be done. I think the whole of today will be spent in completing the economics assignment and the marketing case study. Was planning to go to the city today in the evening but looks like I will have to drop the plan considering the crisis situation I am in, w.r.t studies. posted by Ram at 11:40 AM 0 comments
The football match between Sections C & D ended in a 1-1 draw :-( . Section B beat section A 5-1 in another match. Most of the players got dunked after the matches got over, as a token of appreciation for the efforts they put in. There is a volleyball match on Sunday between Sections A & B. posted by Ram at 9:15 PM 1 comments
Its weekend and we again have assignments to complete. The load is supposed to be less as compared to last week as we need not submit the marketing assignment for grading this time. Thinking of going to the city tomorrow. Have seen the ISB gate only once since I arrived here. We have a football match today between the sections. My section (D) again plays section C and as usual I will be there to cheer my mates. I think my section is the best when it comes to cheering from the sidelines. Revenge is the word in everyone's minds. We narrowly lost the basketball match last week. There are also volleyball matches planned ... I think it will be on next weekend's agenda. The stats and marketing profs joined us yesterday at the dinner table. They are so humorous and witty. Usually myself and Amit (the guy who gets dunked everytime) keep laughing after cracking some joke or the other. So what else would you expect when four like minded individuals meet? We were all laughing for the entire 30 odd minutes we spent eating. The profs found it really difficult to understand cricket & Indian politics. They said they tried to read about politics from the daily newspapers but there were too many initials in the names and it was really difficult to remember who is who. Wondering whether they read some local south indian newspaper !!! We were busy explaining things like "why the batsman is not given out LBW everytime the ball hits him on the pads?", "what is a lakh and what is a crore?", "which is bigger - Tata or Reliance" etc.. The profs are trying to follow the ads on TV. They especially liked the Tata Indica ad where the guy in question gets punched whenever he says something or even remains silent. Met a guy today who told that he had not been sleeping before 4AM daily. Looks like we are all turning into owls. I start sleeping whenever I open any textbook and so am usually down by 10:30PM, unless of course when I am roaming around, chatting with friends or playing TT. posted by Ram at 9:05 AM 0 comments
We have name cards here indicating our seat in the class. Yesterday, somehow the name cards got shuffled (accidentally, as claimed) and the seating arrangement was the exact mirror image of the usual one. It was real fun watching people getting into the class, seeing someone else sitting in their seat and getting thoroughly confused. Luckily I went slightly earlier when there weren't many people and so had to suffer lesser embarassment. It was more fun watching the people who entered right on time when the class began. The class was almost full by then and they really didn't know what had happened. One guy in fact turned towards the door thinking he had entered the wrong class !!! Question: What do students use to get out of their rooms here more often - the doors or the windows? Answer: The windows !!! The windows here are in fact like sliding glass doors. They are almost equivalent to the doors in height and students here find it easier to come in and go out through the window. So does that mean that anybody can enter into your room ? Of course not .... you can open the windows only from inside the room when they get locked. posted by Ram at 8:23 AM 0 comments
Our professors are really humorous, especially the ones for stats and marketing. Their instant wit rocks !!!! Heard this yesterday from a friend of mine in the other section: The stats prof (Robert Stine) was showing some data which didn't seem to follow any pattern. The distribution seemed to grow denser from left to right. One of the students asked Prof.Stine - "How would you name this distribution?". Prof Stine says - well you can call it the increasing density distribution. But I would say that "the plot thickens". While working in office, we used to anxiously wait for the weekends to come so that we could relax, spend time with the family and if time permits, chill out with friends. In ISB, it seems as though we do not want the weekends to come. Looks like students wait for the weekdays to come so that there are no more lengthy assignments to do. I have now got used to the locations of the different student villages, the class rooms, the recreation centre etc.. It was initially difficult for me to find my way through to any classroom and then find the way back to my student village. Had to completely trust the signs in the corridor of the acad centre to reach anywhere.
posted by Ram at 11:35 PM 0 comments
My study group finished the first serious assignment of Term1 just a few minutes back. It was a marketing case study. Hope the solutions proposed don't come as a shock to the professor ... will have to wait and watch his reactions in the class tomorrow. Hope he doesn't read it before he comes (or read our solutions aloud in the class). We decided not to use the product on which our assignment was based, for the rest of our lives. Its another thing that we tried our level best to create a really good (read funny) marketing plan for it. Feeling a bit relaxed. One more assignment to be completed before 8AM tomorrow. Had thought of spending this weekend studying at least some portion of what was taught last week. Assignments ate away all the time. Looks like the backlog will keep increasing. Have to go now .... one more assignment deserves yours truly's attention. I better complete it fast and catch some sleep. Wish me luck !!! posted by Ram at 12:00 AM 0 comments
All students in the campus are busy with the assignments. But this didn't prevent us from having a basketball match between two of the sections. As you would expect, my section lost, though by a very small margin of 2 points. Of course, I was not playing. But I did cheer from the sidelines in the latter half and it was real fun. Our group is busy discussing the marketing case and its already 1:15AM. I am feeling damn sleepy. Looks like I am going to wake up really late "today" as our discussion on the case doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. There is another big economics assignment waiting for us in case we manage to complete the marketing one. Okay ppl ... time to go now .... my group has started cursing me as they suddenly discovered that I was missing from the discussion. Will go back before I get beaten up. posted by Ram at 1:15 AM 0 comments
First week of classes got over yesterday. I have a huge backlog and we all have assignments to complete and submit before Monday, 8AM. Yesterday, there was a party at one of our student villages. Looks like there will be a party every Thursday night. All profs teaching us are really good. Two of them - Prof. Scott Ward (Marketing) & Prof. Robert Stine (Business Statistics) are very humorous. Their classes are very interesting. posted by Ram at 9:46 AM 0 comments
We had our first class of Term 1 yesterday- "managerial economics" taken by Prof. Amit Bubna of ISB. Prof Amit looks really young. You could easily mistake him for one of the students. He connected well with us. We then had a "marketing management" class taken by Prof. Scott Ward. He was just too good. He is from Wharton and has received the "Excellence in Teaching" award 7 times from Wharton's MBA students. To read more about him click here. One of our batchmates got engaged and he was dunked yesterday. Needless to say Amit was also dunked along with him. Earlier Amit used to come with his mobile phone, wallet, wristwatch etc and had trouble handing all his stuff over to a bystander. These days he comes empty handed (read prepared) for getting dunked. If you are wondering what's all this dunking and Amit about, please read my earlier posts. My section has classes from 2:30PM to 7PM, Monday to Thursday every week. From what we have heard from our alums, we will get so many assignments that we won't have any free time in the weekends. The alums who were here on campus have all gone back. A special THANKS to all of them for helping us settle here and for giving us all the GYAAN. posted by Ram at 9:23 AM 0 comments
Yesterday we had the "Talent Nite" where the stundents of Class of 2006 and their families showcased their talent on stage. We had songs sung by the music group, traditional kuchipudi dance recital, salsa, tango, bhangra, kids fashion show, lifestyle show (fashion show put up by the Class of 2006), skits, monoacting, poetry, exhibition of photographs ..... and the list goes on and on. So much of talent around in the campus !!! The kids stole the show with their attire. (For people who might be wondering where did kids come from : there are married students in ISB who come along with their wife and kids and they form an integral part of the ISB family).
Well talent nite is now over and today is Labour Day .... and synonymously all the slogging has started. There are some 350 odd pages to be read before the first class for two of the subjects and there is also a marketing case to be prepared. So everyone is slogging it out either individually or in groups. The ride starts tomorrow and looks like its going to be real tough. On a happier note .... yesterday we had one more dunking session in which 12-13 people got dunked. Only one of them was the birthday boy. Rest were just picked up and thrown into the pool by the crowd. My close friend Amit gets dunked everytime anyone has a birthday. I was not disclosing his name in one of my previous posts but it became difficult to refer to him everytime; so decided to come out with his name. Amit got dunked yesterday too. We are thinking of dunking him everyday now and he is busy making escape plans. Eyes are almost closing, sleep is taking over me and I am struggling to stay awake. I have to read another 270 pages before I go to class tomorrow. Luckily my classes are there in the afternoon this term. So I will get some time to study tomorrow morning also. Thats it then for today. posted by Ram at 10:00 PM 0 comments
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Name: RamView My Profile Orkut me !! Previous Posts
Please access http://ramsabode.wordpress.comMigrating to wordpress Bangalore Gayana Samaja concerts Sikkil Gurucharan @ Bangalore Gayana Samaja Kyun kiya tumne aisa .. kyun Concerts this weekend in Bangalore I, the tagged one A trip to Srirangapatnam/Mysore - Part 3 A trip to Srirangapatnam/Mysore - Part 2 A trip to Srirangapatnam/Mysore - Part 1 Archives
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