Aikya meet

Aikya is an informal meet for a study group to interact with a family in hyderabad - the concept of home away from home for students. The couple whom we interacted with called us today for lunch at the sailing club. It was a wonderful place across the Hussain Sagar Lake. Unfortunately we could not go sailing due to heavy winds. Got some gyaan on the different types of boats. The couple themselves own a small boat. Sailing is a pastime here. The lake here is polluted like Bangalore's.

Inspite of an assignment this weekend was lighter. This was our study group's first outing in 3 months and we had good fun. Plan to go sailing next time.

On your mark..get set...term 3

Started off this term celebrating my group mate's birthday. Four subjects (again) this term.

- Corporate Finance by Prof Bhagawan Chowdhry

- Operations Management by Prof Sudhakar Deshmukh and Prof Sridhar Seshadhri

- Entrepreneurship by Prof Venkataraman and Prof Rama Velmuri

- Management Accounting and Decision Making by Prof Khalid Nainar and Prof Sri Sridharan

The first class of Corporate Finance required us to read 6 chapters from a book! Next class requires 3 more chapters of pre read from the book!! That is nine good chapters in three days. We need more? Apart from case preparation for the other three subjects, assignment deadline started as early as today (third day of the term).

Entrepreneurship has very high weightage for CP - 40% marks for CP! Talk in class and thou shall pass. Well not quite - the class was very well under control of the Professor who would not let anyone talk arbit. CP rules were simple: Two points are deducted for disrupting class. Minus one for detracting comments. Points are even deducted for yawning! Thankfully this class is not at 8am. The subject is case based - concepts come out from documented real life company experiences. Incidentally I have a classmate who is a successful pro in this field and surprisingly he was silent today. Later after class he talked about 'MBA grad errors' which I think no one mentioned.

I will write about other subjects as the term goes by.

Term 2 whizz along

Back to the blogosphere. So many things have happened so fast. Term 2 seemed faster than term 1. Every term I seem to be accumulating knowledge. Information would be a wrong word but I can't help realize that unless I apply either to what I did back at my work it is really plain information. To me marketing and magnetism are topics I know. I can talk about one topic as good as the other. THe point is how is marketing going to be more relevant than magnetism.

Subjects learnt in term2:
Decision Modelling and Optimization : Basic Linear programming. Folks with Mechanical Engineering background found topics relatively easy. Those with CS background were comfortable with graph theory. I might say Monte Carlo simulations although they were run by a tool.

Competitive Strategy: Porter is a familiar name. I liked the subject but there were too many frameworks that one need to use when analysing firms which gave a theoretical feel.

Marketing Decision Making: Models, models and more models. This subject was more interesting that Marketing I from previous term. Most of what we learnt in theory were practically applied in the Markstrat game. All the nightouts and strategies we tried was fun and at times testing.

Macroeconomics: Complements the microeconomics course from Term 1. Interesting and byfar the practical subject I've learnt. It gets interesting when it gets to nation's economy, inflation, unemployment.

I'll write about the leadership program, and term3 in my next posts.