My Story - ISB and beyond !!!This blog has now moved to http://ramsabode.wordpress.com | ||||
|
Links
Alma Mater:
About Life@ISB:
Carnatic Music - My Favorites:
Violin Mridangam Ghatam Khanjira Other Sites/Blogs I visit:
Class of 2006 Class of 2007 |
Yesterday night, our batch threw a big farewell party for all alumni who were there on campus. They have been extremely helpful and this is the least we could probably do as a mark of appreciation from our side. They were offered free beer. I came back from the party at 3AM after dancing for some time and playing table tennis in the TT room near the dance floor (which was the mirror pool in our student village) for the rest of the time. The alumni also gave lots of presentations yesterday about how to survive on campus, how to manage acads along with socializing, how to take forward clubs like the sports club etc.. There was a presentation by Tarandeep Singh Ahuja, last year's topper and as expected he said that we have to study very very hard to survive here. Someone from the audience asked - "If all this is what we have to do to survive, what do we do to excel?" There was also a presentation by Siddharth Sinha about the general life @ ISB. It was a very humorous one and Siddharth got a standing ovation for 2 minutes from our class when he finished. I think he is joining as a COO in some company .... some are telling that he is joining Apollo Hospitals .... I am not sure. There was also a presentation on stress management earlier in the evening by a psychiatrist which increased my stress levels and just fell short of psyching me out. On the acad front, we had a listening session on Thursday and a group dynamics session yesterday. The group dynamics session was video-taped and played back so that we could observe how we went about the given task and learn from whatever mistakes we committed. It was a good fun-filled learning experience. Classes start from Monday and from what I hear, we have to read more than 350 pages of our course material + prescribed textbooks before we land in the class. We also need to discuss some case studies and be prepared before we face the prof. I have started feeling the heat and its going to be really tough. Feeling really sleepy after the late night stint yesterday ....... was thinking of reading the course materials but will have to postpone that ..... will upload the photos promised later ...... zzzzzz zzz zzz zzz
posted by Ram at 10:15 PM 0 comments  
Dunking is one of the traditions started by the founding batch (or the batch next to it .... I am not sure) and is religiously followed every year. The birthday boy or girl is dunked into the campus swimming pool. It usually happens that one or two more innocent souls also get dunked in the enthusiasm, although they may not be having their birthday on that day. Went to a dunking ceremony 3 days back. Two birthday boys got dunked. Someone called out another name from behind the pool ..... maybe he was looking for that guy ... when the attention of all present there turned towards the guy in question and he was also dunked. I am not revealing the name for fear of getting myself dunked. Couldn't post yesterday due to some problem with this website. We had an interesting "group activities" session yesterday. Had different tasks given which were to be achieved in teams. Was a good learning experience. Had a lot of fun too. Saw two more movies on DVD yesterday (old ones) - "My Cousin Vinny" and "Mousehunt". Went to Hyderabad in the night to celebrate the birthday of a friend. This was the first time I ventured out of campus since arriving here. Felt good to see the entrance gate after such a long time. Seven of us went to this place called "Ohri's" in Banjara Hills. Had good north Indian dinner. Don't know when I will get the next chance to go to the city, with a really tight schedule expected from next week onwards when Term1 begins. The batch size this year seems to be around 347. The intial target was 320 which makes the number 27 more than expected. ISB says that the number is 19 more than expected due to a sudden increase in the number of waitlisted people accepting offers, contrary to trends seen in previous years. Term 1 classes start next week and going by what seniors say, its going to be really tough. So most of us are trying to have whatever fun we can, this week. Going to put my clothes for washing in the laundromat. Will be back soon with some photos of this beautiful campus. posted by Ram at 9:30 AM 0 comments
We had a session on Leadership Development Programme taken by Prof. Rajeshwar Upadhyaya yesterday. He was simply awesome. He was one guy who knew how to control arbit questions in the class and answer only the meaningful ones. We will be seeing more of him in the next two weeks. We also had intoductory sessions on the PGP program and the academic services today. Seniors are here on campus and there are lots of "gyaan" sessions arranged in the auditorium that go upto even midnight. Today we also had some distinguished speakers from the corporate sector come together for a panel discussion on career perspectives. It was a good session. We have a welcome dinner being given by ISB to the Class of 2006 tonight and I will be leaving for the same in a few minutes. Feeling too hungry even after having a sumptuous lunch in the afternoon. Maybe because I played a lot of table tennis in the breaks I got between the sessions today. posted by Ram at 7:50 PM 0 comments
Feels really good ....... after all the wait, I am finally a part of ISB's Class of 2006 !!! Apologies (to anyone reading this blog) - I had promised to update this fairly regularly but its a long time since I wrote anything. I will partly blame this on the fact that I got my laptop only a few days back due to some warranty related issues on IBM's side. I started from New Delhi on the 14th of April by AP Express and reached Secunderabad on 15th night. We had called up ISB people from the train itself and asked them to arrange some transport for us from the Secunderabad station to ISB, if possible, as there were around 10-12 of us in the train, some with their families, with loads of luggage and as we all were new to Hyderabad/Secunderabad. We found the ISB admin staff very responsive and they agreed to send one of the ISB Swaraj Mazda vehicles to pick us. The ISB campus is quite far off from the Secunderabad railway station. We reached ISB at around 10:30PM and were given our accomodation details at the entry point itself. Registration for all people taking pre-terms was scheduled on the 16th. I will come to what pre-terms are in a minute. The registration process was fairly quick and all formalities except for the bank loan agreement got over within 20 minutes. For some it took more time. I am funding my entire course through a bank loan and hence had to do oblige the bank with my autograph on a lot of papers. Pre-terms started on 18th. Pre-terms are optional and include basics of subjects like Accounting, Quantitative methods and Business Statistics. People can pick and choose what course they want to attend and have to pay the pre-term fee accordingly. I chose to attend Accounting and Business statistics and now regret that I chose to attend stats. The accounting prof (Prof. Mubeen Rafat) was really good. I really enjoyed attending her classes. The stats prof was way too boring and sleep inducing. In my personal opinion, its better to study basic stats yourself even if you have had a previous exposure to it only in your school days and have forgotten everything. I didn't choose the quant pre-term as I thought I could manage to cover it myself and was also encouraged by prospects of saving some money for other things. Our seniors are there on campus and they do rock !!!! They are willing to help all the newcomers in their queries. ISB's PGP program being a one year course, seniors are not there in the campus to guide us through the year but I have heard that the Alumni network is really great and the response time is also really good. Ever since we have come, there have been a lot of parties. There were two parties - yestarday and the day before that and we had lot of fun. There was music, dance and beer. I don't drink and hence was content to shake my leg a bit and watch the proceedings from the sidelines. Day before yesterday's party went till around 3AM. I came back really early from yesterday's party as I decided to watch the "Catch Me If You Can" DVD that I got issued from the ISB library. I watched " The Gods Must Be Crazy - II" day before yesterday and really enjoyed the comedy. We had our orientation sessions yesterday. ISB's dean (Prof. M.R.Rao), deputy dean (Prof. Ajit Rangnekar), associate dean for the PGP program (Prof.Savita Mahajan) and the Director of Admissions (V.K. Menon) addressed us. Mr. V.K. Menon shared the batch profile and there a lot of people around with absolutely stunning curricular and extra-curricular achievements. Our batch has been divided into sections and each section further into study groups. There are 6 people in my group, including myself and all are from either IT or engineering background. It would have been really helpful to have at least one Chartered Accountant(CA) as in many of the other groups. CAs and people from finance background are always in great demand as they have already studied a lot of finance/accounting stuff. Our first term will start from next week onwards and we will have profs from ISB, Wharton & Kellogg teaching us. Going by what seniors say, the faculty who come to teach at ISB are the best in the world and its a real enriching experience learning from them. I am looking forward to it. Its going to get really tough for us from next week onwards with loads of assignments and lots of reading to be done. I have heard that Term 1 is especially very difficult as many people come back to studies after a long time and its really difficult adjusting to the really tight schedule all of a sudden. In fact, many people have taken pre-terms just to get used to sitting in the class for a long time and doing assignments, before the actual slogging begins. We have this week left to enjoy ourselves. There are many sessions scheduled for us this week also but we still have ample time left for other activities. There will be a "Talent Nite" this weekend. Its a show put up entirely by our class. I am looking forward to contributing something to the music show that some of us are trying to put together. posted by Ram at 10:30 AM 0 comments
Here are some good ISB related blogs (click on the name to go to the respective blogs): 1) Raja Banerjee's blog 2) Ramki's blog 3) Sumit Dhar's blog 4) Sujayath's blog 5) The collaborative blog Lots of info there in these blogs. Raja Banerjee, whose blog is the first in the list above, helped the batch that will join this year a lot during admission times, despite his busy schedule at ISB. I would really like to thank him, Vineet Jain, Dharma Teja, Padmanabhan and so many other people in the Class of 2005 who patiently answered our queries in the isb-pgp yahoogroup. More in my next post. posted by Ram at 3:08 PM 0 comments
In case you are applying for ISB in the coming years and want to have all your questions answered, then do subscribe to the Yahoo Group "isb-pgp@yahoogroups.com". You have current students, alumni and prospective students all together in one forum there. If you want to read about the graduation of the Class of 2005 then do click here. So what am I doing these days ??? Documenting all the stuff that I was doing at office (that is not yet documented), transfering all the work that I was doing to people identified for taking them up etc .... etc... Members of my group gave me a farewell party today ..... this is supposed to be my last week in office. I was supposed to give them a party but when they saw my financial condition, they themselves volunteered to give me a farewell lunch instead :-) . We went to this place called Superstars in Noida's Atta market and had lot of fun. I am really sad that I am leaving this place ..... when I joined here about 4 years ago, straight after my bachelors in engineering, I never thought that I would be leaving this place. Joining Motorola's semiconductor division was a dream come true and I had thought I would retire from here. Then the MBA bug bit my best friend (and he bit me) and here I am on my way to ISB. No salary for the next one year, studies in streams totally unfamiliar to me, heavy loan whose pre-EMIs have to be paid now and EMIs later ..... yeh sab kya ho gaya yaar life mein ??? posted by Ram at 7:00 PM 1 comments
Here is the latest addition to the world of blogging .... my name is R. Ramkumar but all my friends call me Ram. I am planning to join the one year post graduate program in management at the Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad. Course starts on 16th April 2005 and I am busy wrapping up everything at work. I have read blogs of some students of the previous batches and had this sudden craze to create my own blog. So here I am ... boring the hell out of you. I intend to pen down my experiences over the next one year at ISB in this blog of mine and hope it will help someone who wants to get into ISB in the coming years. I will try my best to post as frequently as possible and hope I am able to stand up to my words. Time to go to sleep now .... from what I have heard, I may never get to sleep this early at ISB, at least for the first few terms. So am planning to sleep as much as I can, before I reach there.
posted by Ram at 11:26 PM 0 comments
|
About Me
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
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
December 2005
January 2006
February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
General links I visit:
|
||
| Thanks for visiting my blog !!! | ||||
|
You are in Ram's abode Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own. | ||||
