IIMB i/v update

So,

20th Feb saw me going to the IIMB campus in Bangalore. I should mention that the campus which i had always dreamed about attending right from my 2nd year at college more than lived upto my imagaination. Covered well by trees and made of exquisite stone, it looked as majestic as it looked old.

The GD went quite well. The topic was “did the media have a class dimension to it during the mumbai 26/11 attacks as they focused more on the Taj than they did on the common man’s CST? ” It was good overall with everyone getting a chance to speak but I felt the group went out of relevance a couple of times by talking about the mangalore pub incident when it was totally not needed.

The interview was pretty normal. No mechanical Engg. questions thankfully and pretty much focussed on my work ex which made it very easy for me. The best part of the interview that I liked was when the prof told me why I wanted an MBA now when all I had to do was to work for a couple of years more and my company would sponser me for HBS. I almost spilled the beans about H-bomb

Met my friend A from IIMB.  She said things were really grim wtih the placement scene right now and the IIMs are not insulated either. Here is wishing that she nets a great job. I am sure she will.

Meanwhile, have submitted my financial aid documents to HBS. so keeping fingers crossed for that.  Plan for next week is to complete registering for finance and accounting courses and look through the HBS health services form that I am to complete.

HBS interview update

Baring the london weather, I landed up at Berkeley Square house at 1.30 for my interiview at 2 PM.

The ad-com member who ushered me inside was very professional and began by thanking me for coming all the way from India.  The interivew as a whole was very conversational and according to me, went quite well.

Some questions-

1. What were the notions that were dispelled (taken from my essay)

2. Why HBS? How will you contribute at HSB? Which clubs? what after HBS?

3. How do you go about handling teams? How has ur style evolved through the years?

4. Describe the profile of an Ideal classmate that you would like to meet at HBS?

5. Describe India in general and Chennai in particular to a foreigner.

6. Is there anything that you would like me to ask you?

and a few more that i cant remember now.

Keeping fingers crossed. Lets see what happens.

The Angst, The fury and The helplessness

Have decided to take a detour from my normal MBA rants which seem so useless now in the grand scheme of things. India in general and Mumbai in particular is not new to terrorism. We have seen it happen in our trains, parliament, streets, malls and what not. This time however, it is different.

By entering the Taj, one of the principal landmarks of Mumbai and keeping people including foreigners hostage so brazenly for 2 whole days, the perpetrators have proved 3 things in the most disturbing manner-

1. You could be in a train, you could be working in an office building, you could be having dinner in a 5 star restaurant or you could be out in the street catching up with friends. In all of these cases, you can be attacked by a group of crazy jihadis in full view of the public.

2. Our politicians are a bunch of useless people who have no idea how to combat terror and could not care less as long as they get votes and can squander public wealth.

3. The common man has no security , can rely on no bigger god to bail him out and worst, he has no means of protecting himself. Caught between terrorists aiming for glory and the Government just mouthing big words, he lives in fear.

As I can do nothing else but get angry and feel helpless alternatively, my heart cries out for justice and peace. Is that too much to demand? In today’s world, I think yes.

PS: My flight to London is from Mumbai. Honestly, I dont care anymore. If I cannot make it to an HBS interview because of a cancelled flight, so be it. It would be a small sacrifice to pay for the lives of the hundreds in Mumbai.

ISB pictures

These are the pictures that I took of the campus when I went for the i/v. Could not go upto the student village. So these pics are of the main block. It consists of their library, Prof’s rooms and some conf. rooms.

Invited to Interview at HBS!!

The feeling is something that I cannot even describe right now. I knew that with my background and experience, its not totally impossible but the fact that they took only 750 candidates is really promising. I have heard that Harvard is really serious about an applicant if they call him/her for an interview.

In terms of achievement and feeling, it even beats IIT.

I thought that I will choose a personal interview as I am not altogether confident of my telephonic skills. As there are no centers in India, looks like I am going to London!!! This call makes my interview conversion for R1 100% 

Will update rest later. Btw,  the letter as I got it pasted below-

Dear L…,

Warm greetings from Harvard Business School!

After careful consideration of your application materials, we are

delighted to inform you that you have been selected for an interview

with a member of our MBA Admissions Board. We look forward to the

opportunity to get to know you better through our interview process.

We use an online scheduling system to manage our interview process.

Since we know that many of our interviewees expect to travel to either

our campus in Boston or one of our global hub cities for their

interview, we are sending this message in advance so that you are

aware of where our Admissions Board members will be traveling and

when. We hope this advance notice is helpful to you as you plan for

your interview.

 

 

 

Interviewed at ISB!

Had my interview for ISB today. very short notice. got the holy mail just 3 days ago. hardly had any time to prepare. Anyways, went well overall or so I think

Questions-

1. The average no. of years of experience in ISB is 5. Arent you a little early for an MBA program

2. Walk us through your career since graduation

3. Discuss a difficult time you had at work with a team and how did you resolve it? (did not sound very convinced with my response in this )

4. What do you do apart from work (Spoke about blogging and reading)

5. What is the name of your blog? what do you generally right about? (had a brainwave yesterday to take print out of a few of my blog entries. promptly handed it over to them )

6. You have written about a marketing project that you have done. can you elaborate? (they asked me to use the board for this)

went on for about half an hour and then ended. no questions on why mba or why isb or anything like that. bit strange!!

Anyways, overall feeling was good as i came out of it. lets see how it pens out. Fingers crossed for Nov. 20!!!