ISBPPTSWAP

Do you know what's the lates buzzword on campus. Its not Consulting or I-Banking or Business Development or Leadership. Its ISBPPTSWAP.

Its the in-thing these days. Perhaps the only word that every ISB Student would hate to talk about this month. Well, why hate - because of the 50+ emails that he/she would get with that word on the subject line. The rest would love to talk about this new word or rather concept because of the privilege it has given them to rightfully SPAM the whole student community.

So, whats this all about. I am sure you would have guessed this.

Its nothing great. I did tell you in my last post that the PPTs have started. Companies have started parading campus. Everyday we have almost 4 PPTs. People get allocated to attend PPTs. Your study group is supposed to attend 25 PPTs until the placement season. Why this exercise? Well, you know this batch from my last posts. Twenty of them turned up when the CEO of Godrej was here to talk to them, and then they crib that FMCG companies dont come to campus. The father of Pentium - Vinod Dham was here today and there were again 20-25 students. Rest were staff and the exchange students. Well, I do want to write about Vinod Dham's talk later, but thats the situation of the people here. They think they are god's gift to the industry and hence keep themsleves away from the so called lesser mortals also known as CEOs. Well, they'll come and attend if that helps them add a bullet point on their resume. Anyway, every community has to have some strange examples like this.

So, coming back to our agenda. People generally dont want to attend the PPTs they are assigned to. They want to listen to only those companies that promise big and are in the top 10 in their industry. Hence, the other companies who also do extremely well will have to struggle to get noticed. Thats the reason why they have a mandatory attendance policy for all the PPTs. The people who created a rule also created a policy to have a workaround. A person who does not want to attend a PPT can ask someone else to proxy for him. The guy who does a proxy does not benefit much because his count doesnt go down by 25. The only way out for him is tit for tat. Taking undue benefit of this rule, people send emails to the whole batch asking for people to swap. In fact, I have noticed that there are some people who havent attended a single PPT that has been assigned to them. Every other day, they send an email asking to swap.

It was thought of as a big menace in the beginning. Like the technology adoption cycle, it took a lot of people a lot of time to get to use this new method. Some people were really conscious of writing a SPAM email to the entire community. It just took few people to adopt and cross the chasm. From then on, its been a mass adoption. The rate has been increasing exponentially. Repercussions - Email Server got clogged with all these unwanted messages, imagine 40 people writing to 418 students and then thanking them back for replying to swap. It just went berserk.

ok, thats about it from me now. I am off to hot Madras for the next three days. I have an interesting post due - about the PPT from an oil major who came to campus today. Keep watching.