Welcome F12! A sneak peek for what is to come! ;)

Only a weekend left for the juniors to start their 2 yrs of "Mind-blowing experience" and yes MBA too.. so i thought i could give them a trip down the memory lane of how it was for us, just almost exactly an year back.

It felt like only yesterday, when I had landed in the Chennai airport and when me, mom and dad took the taxi to LIBA, I was still sleeping on my moms shoulder having a one eye view of the greenry around me ( I think I saw small hills too, don’t remember for sure, or maybe I was dreaming).







It was around 11am that we had landed and I wasn’t used to being awake on this hour of the day, so it was still early morning for me. Ohh and it was raining, so please don't forget to carry umbrellas with you fellas!

When we reached the Loyola campus, I remember that we had entered through the front gate and saw the magnificent church in front of us. She looked like a queen, standing in front of us. It was spectacular sight!






Then we exited and took the taxi to the back gate ( that’s where you need to go to access LIBA- tell the taxi driver to take you to Mahalingpuram – Loyola college backside, near Brownstone apartments). As we entered the Loyola campus and drove towards the girls hostel, I could see a few other parents and fellow batch mates standing here and there, looking as confused as we were about to be! We were after all the first inhabitants of the girls hostel.

So after a lot of scuffle and shuffle and with the help of Sudhakar sir (god knows what would LIBA do without him!) and a few other super seniors we finally managed to get settled. Me and my parents went shopping to T-Nagar for the essentials like bedding ( mattress, pillow etc), book racks, chittar puttar to eat and whatever our little hearts desired. After all, I for the first time felt that my parents were going to abandom me into an unknown land, where no one spoke any of the languages I knew (except English, but you get the point right? :P )
After a good meal with my roommate, her family and mine, we finally started to unpack and get to know the other “inmates”. I still remember how Ramya had given me a toothbrush coz I had forgotten to get one :P ( Thanks Ramya! :D )


(This would be my room! :) )


So as the night passed by chit chatting and learning the first few tamil words ( my first tamil word was terunayii! And something else that I cant mention here, but trust me I used those two words like bread and butter.. only to be later told by some sweet friends of mine, not to use them- they are BAD WORDS! And I was ohkk… wasn’t that the point of using them?) anyways, confused by the ways of living here and language ofcourse, I somehow managed to get a hold of it ;)

So then comes the first big day of my MBA life! Wohooo..! weren’t we excited! Actually to be frank, after an year now, I don’t exactly remember what happened on the first day but I do remember what happened in the first few weeks! It kinda was the best first few weeks I could have, in a way.



Sight on a regular LIBA day! 

Well the first thing that I got upset about was that all my new friends that I had made were in section A and I was the only one in section B. To add some spice to my childish behaviour, my entire class sat-  boys on one side and girls on the other. – I was like OMG!! (Janice style- youtube Janice –FRIENDS-OMG, for demo). Come on, after having studied in the ohh so (in?)famous DPS R.K. Puram and 4 years in Mumbai, its normal for you to react in an OMG’ish manner on such a demarcation of gender. But as they say, don’t judge a book by its cover, now when I think of that day, I believe I couldn’t be more silly to have thought that my class was shy! Its one of the most hilarious, fun loving and helpful bunch of people I have ever met and I am sure I can without a doubt, extent the same feeling for my section A friends!

Trust me, if there would be one advice that I had to give you, it would be “ just because they don’t speak as much as you do, or vise versa, trust me, every one in your class or batch is a genius in his or her own way- Hats off to the LIBA selection process ( so to give credit), which not only takes academic and professional achievements into perspective, but also how one is as a person!

Yea coming back to the week, well I and most of us spent it discovering the ways and norms of life inside LIBA and more than that life OUTSIDE LIBA ;) (If you know what I mean.. hehehe)

Beaches, restaurants, pubs, crazy car rides, movies.. name it and we had almost done it in the first month itself. Thanks to some great company (Herbie gets special mention here.. after all, if it hadn’t been him, I don’t think I would have even thought of liking Chennai. He gave us a perfect start! Thanks buddy! :) )








And studies, well I will leave that to you to discover and figure out ;) But one tip for non commerce people- PLEASE PAY ATTENTION IN BFA CLASS!! Trust me, this is not the class you would want to be sleeping ! Rest I leave it upto you! You look like a smart bunch ;)

Chalo, I need to get back to completing my internship report

All the best to F12! Hope you have a great start.

Cheers!
IrutsaK

Again from the CenterStage (Junie Blogger)

PAID HOLIDAY OF MBA- 'INTERNSHIP' - Excuse me!- I beg to differ.

We are extremely important to the organization. Read why!!

Have you ever had those moments where you are doing something and pop! There is a thought in your head, completely unrelated to the work you are doing or at least useless..?

Well that happens a lot with me, especially when I am in class and the prof is teaching, pop goes the thought in my head and I am like, why don’t the professors have a fashion session, you know, everyone should know what would make them look good. I mean what is the point of wearing your pants up till the chest, or rather looking like ‘Supandi’?( character from Tinkle comics).

Something like that happened to me today while I was just trying to wreck my head into the excel sheet that I had been working on for a week now, trying to crack some figures that I could present to the management. I thought, where did the word – Internship come from? :P 

Yeah yeah.. I know. Very silly question.. but I kinda have a lot of these silly questions! ( ask my classmates, who have a facepalm reaction when I raise my hand in class :) )

So yea coming back to the internship bit, I think it’s called “Internship” coz it’s  about entering into a big (maybe) organization which can be related to “ Battleship Galactica!” organizational structure. :P

OK yeah.. That was utter crap, but on a serious note, now that most of my batch mates are interning in various organizations across the country, I would like to question how important is it to have an internship? I mean being a member of the placement committee, I know one fact for sure that every member of the committee works his/her asses off to get everyone placed. But then is these two months in the organization really worth the students time and energy or can we make do without it? 

From what I get to see of the Fb statuses and just talking to people in general, its like many of them enter the company with such high expectations – “ I am specializing in HR, and the project given to me would help me apply my HR skills, I am specializing in marketing and I will get to experience marketing, sales, branding, falana dimkana and end up being the best intern there ever was.. blaah blaah blaah” 

But in reality do these expectations really get fulfilled? – Maybe Yes , Maybe No. 

But incase it’s a NO, then why so? 

Is it because of the fact that, we the students of LIBA are not well educated ( in terms of MBA knowledge) or is it because the companies take us for granted – that once we come in, we will be used to do not so menial but not so mba’ish jobs and then serve the company with all our hard work and perseverance, just to prove at the end of the day – that YESSS! I can follow orders! Wohooo! :D :/

Look, first things first- there is no doubt that we are taught well. So cross that option of not being educated enough, out. So am I saying that the companies that come to campus ( and mind it when I say campus, I mean most of the MBA campuses, not just LIBA) are hiring us to do clerical jobs?

No not really. Maybe a few. 

I believe that companies who come into the campus do look for MBA’s as interns, but for them MBA intern mean a totally different thing. They want someone to collect data (majorly), data that would cost them money, if outsourced. So they pay 50% or less of the actual cost of outsourcing as the stipend, get the job done ( Yeah they know they job will be done, coz there is the guarantee of the college brand name->good brands= good hardworking students), or coz they want someone to agree with them that what their analysis of a certain decision has been, is correct. You know, we would act like human calculators, collecting, analysing data and then coming up with conclusions that would either starkly be in agreement with them, or the other way round ( and in case u are in the middle- then it’s a sure shot indication of the fact that a) you not getting a PPO- if they provide any b) you don’t know what the ****  about what is going on )

And in case you thought that we were the first one doing what we are doing, and that ohh we are so important to the company then-  no you are wrong for the first part, and right for the second. 

More or less every project given to us, has already been carried out or is being carried out. So we are there to help them, but we definitely are not the first ones to start a brand new trend or invention.

So though I am not specializing in HR, given the opportunity, will I change how things work?

The answer would be – NO.

Why would I, when I am getting the job done in half the price with a person who guarantees me over 100% perseverance compared to the outsourced men?

 I would be nothing but silly to not hire interns- MBA interns.

Then I believe we as students should lower our expectations of an internship. Should we??

With that thought running in my head, and the excel sheet waiting for me to get back to flirt with it,

I shall say tududulzz! 

Yours curiously,

Irutsak

(The 'Anon' Junie Blogger :P )