Life as an MBA

It has been close to a month since I started my MBA and I don't know how to even begin explaining what has been going through my mind. I have met 141 new faces, tried hard to remember 141 new names, colleges, countries, experience and tried hard to summarize my whacky journey until now in the least boring way. The last part is easily the most difficult. 

I haven't explored the town too much and with strong reasons - I am a slow coach, and the pace of the MBA is insanely fast. My only city exploration happens during weekend runs, which are also becoming scarcer. Anyways, saving the dark side, black rings, dozing off tiringly on the sofa (or the classes), I just wanted to give a hint of how a typical day looks like:

7:00 am Wake up early and drink a heavily caffeine loaded drink to start the day

8:00 am Put my happy face on & walk to the college; If I am lucky and my wife is sleeping, I steal her bike to avoid walking due to laziness.

8:50 am Queue up for the first dose of cafeteria coffee and chat with my newly founded MBA family

9:00 am Classes start on the dot, and the Professors start to tell us tales from the City. PV, FV, NPV, Annuity, Risk, Return, Beta and Alpha crowd our brains fighting to find a way to stay there. (there will be cold-calling, the energized classmates firing answers, blinking eyes and grappling senses trying to keep up and the occasional time when you think - "hah, finally we are discussing something I know")

12:30 pm The first couple of weeks were spent trying to go around judging the buttery (never knew this English word meant dining halls)

Last week, this was spent meeting team mates on discussing the Cambridge Venture Project / AT Kearney Case Competition / CV or Covering Letter reviews or Catch-up on the Pre-reading.

2:00 pm Unless you had a 5 course meal, our attentiveness hits a peak (or mine atleast). We've been studying Statistics in the afternoons - Yipee :)

In 7 weeks we went from Simple excel formula to Histograms, Poisson/ Normal distributions, Multi-variate regressions, Correlations, Confidence Intervals, Hypothesis Tests and Significance levels. Life is good.

5:30 pm Check the calendar to see if the gang is going to a Pub nearby or wait there is a recruiter visiting us at 6.

Finance, Consulting and Industry Leadership programs are the first wave of companies to hit campus, wanting to steal the cream of the lot. I decide if the company visiting is one I am interested in applying to or more importantly, if will take any interest in my profile.


Typical release time from the building and its interesting color patterns is 8 to 9pm. Ofcourse there are those who stay back in the Library afterwards or the ones who go partying and come in next day with Red Bull in hand. And let's not forget the Formal Halls and the Cambridge Union Ball that a lot of the MBA class is going to tonight. But all that for another time!

Now off to meet a few friends and an alumni and hear some stories. Hope to update this space soon! 

From Mashmallows to MBA

As I sit on the edge on my bed eagerly waiting to see what lies ahead in my 2^nd week at Cambridge, I cannot stop but reminisce how I got here. I have to confess that it was not an entirely rational approach that got me here. As a marketer, I believe emotions play a bigger role in choices, although my Economics professor Dr. Jochen Runde will suggest all choices are assumed to be rational.

Having worked for a little over than 8 years across 2 industries, 2 countries and 2 companies, I decided that I need an MBA to both accelerate my career and gain an international network. I was firm that I want to stay out of a job for less than a year, due to the high opportunity cost on a 2 year MBA and because I had a clear career goal. This immediately trickled down my search to a few big schools in the world. I ruled out an MBA in India (Indian School of Business) as I already had the benefit of a good Indian brand name through my under-graduate degree. So my choices brewed down to INSEAD, Cambridge, Oxford, IMD and the Kellogg 1 year MBA program. I ensured that I chose the best of schools, so there would be no dilemma if there is the off chance of getting admitted in multiple schools.

I clearly remember my first visit to Judge Business School in October 2012 and being pleasantly confused by the creativity in the architecture of the school’s building. The ice-breaking session organized by adcom was no less on this measure and required us to convert a few spaghetti sticks into the next Al Burj. The challenge was that our building equipment was limited to a few pieces of sticky tape, a small piece of thread, a group that full of new faces and the structure had to balance a big marshmallow. We worked as a team to resist the urge to eat the marshmallow and be done with and ended up building the tallest structure. But most importantly, I was impressed by how the school communicated the essence of an MBA and the type of students it expected to recruit, in a simple and fun way.

Believe it or not, I got admitted into almost 3 schools on that list and now it was a tough choice to select between the best. Traditionally there is a lot of comparisons made between Oxford and Cambridge and most of you know the differences (and similarities too). I did not hit the submit button for Oxford mainly because I thought Cambridge was better suited for my career goals in Consulting and/or Industry. But, why did I choose Cambridge over some of the others?

Maybe it was because Cambridge offered the best combination of affordability, selectivity and diversity. Or it was the old and beautiful buildings steeped in history and creativity. It could be the fact that the degree was from a university with an over the top brand recall. Or it may have been the location advantage of proximity to London and no requirement to wade through visa processes and immigration departments of other countries. It could also be because I lived in Oxford for 3 years and it would be only logical to close the loop in my Oxbridge living experience. Or maybe it was just because I like Marshmallows :)

Whatever the reason, I am positive that I am in the best university in the world and amongst 141 of the world’s best emerging leaders! 

PS: This is a blog post that I wrote for the Cambridge official blog and so wanted to post it here too (despite some of the ideas being a repetition). I know you are probably looking to hear about what has happened in the first week of my MBA. I will follow up with another post on that soon. :)

My Kellogg Interview Experience

Although I did not end up choosing Kellogg, I did spend a humongous amount of time preparing and submitting my application. Infact, given the larger consumer appeal of the US MBA, especially to many Indian applicants, I receive many e-mails from my under-grad MBA apping club about my Kellogg experience. So, in an attempt to answer some of those questions, I am re-posting a blog entry that I wrote for Clear admit.

Kellogg MBA Admissions Interview Questions: Round 2 / Alumnus / Off-campus

I had an interview scheduled with an alum in a coffee shop and got there well in advance. My interviewer came on time and after a few pleasantries we started off. He explained the format of interview (blind), anticipated duration (45mts), Q&A time (10mts) and had a copy of my CV although he had not looked through it. He jotted down notes as he spoke to me. The questions were pretty standard, but it became very very conversational, casual and zero stress. It was interesting in that he was a client of my current company and so I had some specific challenges that he posed.

- Elevator pitch: Take me through your resume (He interrupted me after 1 minute and asked me to elaborate a few points that interested him)

- Why change in industries between Job 2 & 3

- Specific questions about my consulting background and some challenges based on working with my company

- Why MBA?

- Why Kellogg?

- Why 1Y (this got answered in the process of answering the prior qns. He stopped to offer some advice based on his experience here)

- Which other schools did you apply for?

- An example of how I manage a global team

- An example of a successful & challenging consulting engagement – He probed with: 1) What did you do specifically?

- What was a difficult decision you made as a team leader that impacted your team? (I took some time to think about this as it was not something I prepared for)

- What clubs will I participate on campus?

- What is the single most weakest point in my application (I had prepared for this, but he delved deep into this point and so important what you choose to answer. I think I came out strong but we will see.)

- Being a member of a demographically over-represented group, he asked how will my application stand out of my peers?

He then asked me about any questions I had. We discussed for a while and he wished be the best in my application process. Overall this was an anticipated Kellogg interview with no surprises. I think it is great that Kellogg adds this additional dimension to evaluate all applicants and add a personality to each essay they read. Hopefully I land in Evanston with my performance and wish all R2/R3 applicants all the best.

Dominic Barton, McKinsey's CEO, speaking at Berkeley Haas

A very interesting and visionary speech by the Mckinsey CEO. I started watching at 1:30pm after a post-lunch slump and was 99.9% attentive (in true Dettol Style), 10 minutes into the talk. 

The Road to Cambridge!

Reverse chronological order for some reason appeals to the human mind, atleast for some like me, with our memory seemingly having a limited retention capability. So, I will start my application process monologue with this blog post I write on Clear admit and referred a lot of Round 3, 4 and 5 applicants when they requested for some tips. Hopefully, I will follow-up with information on my other applications, why I chose to apply to the schools I applied to and how I attempted the GMAT (I carefully chose attempted instead of "aced", "cracked" or any such eulogies). So, here it goes:

Cambridge / Judge MBA Admissions Interview Questions: Round 2 / Faculty / On-campus

Of adcoms & applicants!

Have you got within 200 yards of Lake Geneva and not walked towards it to take a stroll by it or a photograph, out of sheer over-confidence? 

This is precisely what I did, when I traveled to Lausanne to interview at IMD. I promised myself that I am going to return to do my MBA and so did not click a single picture or go near the shores of the lake although I could see it from the school, the bus, the tram and on the train from Geneva to Lausanne.

As much as choosing and applying to the right college is an arduous and time consuming task to the applicant, there is an equally exhausting & exasperating task on the other side for adcoms. This multiplies when the school decides to assemble a class that is 1/10th or 1/15th the size of a Top business school. I got admitted into one of them - Cambridge, which made me think it is going to be easy and not that bad after all. My opinion has changed after my 5 months of waiting for IMD. 

Being a demographically over-represented lot in the applicant pool, Indians have a tough time applying to B-schools. This, especially, when you are not a gifted GMAT cracker, like me. Fortunately, my story did help me standout of the applicant pool and I was interviewed by IMD on the 26th of March. It was quite an interesting process with a personal interview, case study presentation and group case assessment. The first two parts went well for me, although the third was a bit tricky due to the way the professor ran it, disallowing extensive participation, despite having done very strong analysis. Long-story short, IMD put me on a hold list. 

While time froze as I was waiting for IMD - I paid my acceptance fee for Cambridge (April), got admitted into Kellogg (Mid-May), decided to drop Kellogg (end May) and paid my 2nd installment to Cambridge (mid-June). However my status in IMD did not budge. While the wait is usually very painful for the applicants, I can now imagine the difficulty that adcom have to go through to ensure they have unique candidates in the cohort - especially when there are 90 (like IMD) or 150 (like Cambridge) across 50+ countries. So it was with a heavy heart that I finally mustered my strength to write the below e-mail, today:

Hi xxx, 

Thanks for your mail. I have accepted my offer from Cambridge and you can now remove me off the wait list for IMD as I cannot wait any longer. 

I wish you the best in assembling your class for 2014. :)

Cheers,

Vignesh

My solace lies in the fact that I decided to reject 2 schools (Kellogg & IMD) and accept Cambridge, A school that gives me the best of both selectivity and location (by being in the UK). 

Now all I need is to be offered a job in Nestle HQ to see Lake Geneva :)

Being Controversial!

You must wonder, how busy can an MBA prospect, who knows he is going to quit his job, be? I can tell you the last few weeks were nerve wrecking, not because of my job but because of one big decision I had to confront. 

In a way, I liked the experience. Like any 30 year old I've been pushed into a few life changing decisions - my marriage, moving to the UK and maybe even going to do under-graduation in an unknown land. I do dread these big moments but, in retrospect, appreciate that it is a reminder that "I am the master of my fate". 

Exactly a month ago, I got admitted into Kellogg School of Managment in the US, while already having admission to Cambridge University's Judge School of Business. Now you might think whoa, this is awesome. But just after the inebriation dies down, you realize you are torn between 2 big names with relative strengths and competitive advantages. Add to this the fact that there are other parameters to consider including career goals, likes, wants, needs, resources, flexibility, location, visa, finance, jobs, risk-return and personal commitments. 

Given my consulting experience, I am good at recommending options, while here I was having to decide & act in the midst of sleepless nights and bi-polar emotions. After many calls with alumni, adcom, friends, relatives and creating many excels with decision trees, ROIs, opportunity costs etc. there was still a lot of inertia around my indecision. While I reminisced and kept toying with my thoughts a couple of powerful quotes gave me direction: "Between Oxbridge and Kellogg, you cannot go wrong"  and "You are unique, The school is unique". 

I decided that I cannot change the name of my blog from BostontoCambridge to something else and confident that I can "make this work for me". So, once again, Cambridge MBA - here I come! :)

PS: I will make another post on the criteria I used to decide/short-list schools as it is something that any MBA hopeful will be curious about!

Life is like that!

Just when I thought life was taking its course, I got offered a spot in Kellogg School of Business. Almost everyone advises me to take the effort to move stateside!

Oh good confusions are over-rated! I will hibernate now and try convincing the wife that this is good and convincing myself to take the poison pill to kill UK residency and the red  pill to become a Kelloggian.

PS: Wait is there a green pill option still? IMD are you listening!

What's your story?

Why MBA? Why quit a comfy job in an un-predictable economy, spend as much as a mini-mortgage on tuition, regress to a student life and change just about everything around and including me?

The idea of an internationally recognized degree from a top 20 university in the world, was seeded a long-time back and never died really although I took a long-winded path to get here. But somehow many of my decisions were linked to the fact that I would re-visit the MBA at a later point in life, when appropriate. I started running, moved to a different country, worked in 3 industries and a year back, on my 29th Birthday, came to the realization that this is it.

So, the MBA is really a step in changing my life. I knew and worked towards this change and infact told anyone that if I don't change my personality and lifestyle, I think my MBA journey would be incomplete. Hence, the name of my blog !

My essay writing experience taught me the importance of telling a great story. This blog will be my attempt to tell my stories (of all types) as a student in Cambridge University's Judge Business School. What's yours?