Reflections from Term 4

We are working on the yearbook. I definitely need to write more on that. Reserve that for the next post as Term 4 is very important considering the fact that the next batch will be here in a month. Term 4 was the one that most of us wanted to be scrapped out of the ISB MBA program and perhaps convert it into a one month internship. This would have helped in getting more finance jobs on campus. The ELP wasn't doing any good at all. And moreover, Term 4 was adding zero value to the MBA.

Government Society and Business - taught by Mudit Kapoor and Shivakumar(one of the few profs in ISB who has a wikipedia page dedicated to him). Anyway, Shiva is one great person who is part of the National Advisory Council and works closely with the Prime Minister and people like Sonia Gandhi. So the insights he brought during the second half of the course were pretty good. He touched upon the realities quite well and gave us the clean picture. Not like the cliched bottom of the pyramid crap. He talked about harsh realities, the way forward for the country and its poor people. The first half of the course was total gas. We talked about taliban, china and just wasted time.

Investment Analysis - the last finance course you are forced to take up. Taken by Tom Nohel. It was his first time on campus and he really didn't know what to do. He was teaching us the same stuff that we had done in corporate finance for almost 5 classes. Then he shifted gears and talked about something that I don't even remember vaguely. That was my interest in the class. I was also sitting in the last row this term. So my enthu to listen to the prof was zero and all of us in the last row had our laptops open. We didn't bother.

Management of Organizations - totally intoxicated with management gas. Taken by Mary Watson, all we did during this course was filling out survey questionnaires for the professor. And this happened in every class. Mega time pass. The only thing I remember about this course is an article about "Selection Bias". The second half was taken by our Negotiation Prof Dishan Kamdar. He was quite good and lenient too. The exam was horrible. All theory and total nonsense.

Strategic Analysis of IT - The only IT course in the core terms handled by Rajiv Banker and Sandra Slaughter. This course was also a bit on the waste course category. We could have still managed without doing this course. Almost half the batch is from the IT industry and all this course talks about is outsourcing, off shoring, in sourcing and multi sourcing. So, for a non IT guy, this course is a nightmare because he'll find that the IT guys have their hands up all the time to talk in class. The in-class quiz is good fun. It accounts for 40% of the grade I guess. This course also had an end-term quiz, but then in our batch, we had to go through the major fiasco of getting the exam postponed and things like that. It was fun.