Early Observations

So, how have the first few days at the ISB been? Well, it depends...

Any attempt to describe the first few days in ISB ends up like a Navjot Sidhu speech – lots of words come out all at once but make no sense whatsoever (words which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive, if you like).

So I will now attempt to be more management like and express some random thoughts from the ISB life in an orderly fashion using bullet points.

1) The most difficult thing in ISB, one suspects, is not microeconomics or corporate finance, but the mere task of figuring out directions in this place. Everything looks similar, everything is circular, and everything is abbreviated (AC8LT, AC2MLT, H2SO4 etc etc) and that is not an easy combination. We were initially surprised to see so many alums around the campus even so many days after their graduation, but later realised it was only because they hadn’t found their way out yet*. There is also this story of the CO2010 student who deferred his admission because by the time he found the right classroom it was April 2011...

2) Just like Apple doesn't need any specific feature for its products to sell and apple loyalists will buy whatever they offer anyway (their latest product, iRandomThing, has sold over 2 million units already), you don't actually need the core terms to begin or assignments to be given out to be busy at the ISB. The default mode of life here is 'hectic'. The core terms haven't begun yet, but we are already averaging not more than 5 hours of sleep (perhaps this number will increase once the core terms start, and we begin sleeping in lectures).

The (not at all) funny part is we have no idea what kept us busy. We have hardly done anything aside from spend hours working out how to embarrass ourselves on stage for the talent night, attend random orientation lectures and zombie our way through some pre-terms. I suppose it has got something to do with the partying - which, we have realised, is not an 'elective' course, and requires compulsory attendance.

3) In the ISB campus, snakes seem to occupy the same mind space and ‘positioning’ as God – everyone talks about them, everyone believes in them, but there is no official evidence of anyone having encountered one yet, bar stories involving friends’ friends. It may be safe to assume that some students may even start praying to them in fear and apprehension should they spot one...

4) Unconfirmed reports suggest that Microsoft’s office next to the ISB campus exists solely to handle the load on Outlook brought about by the million mails each student sends every hour. No day at the ISB is complete without at least 5 mails each announcing an informal meeting of a club, the formal meeting of another, scheduling a party celebrating someone’s new hairdo, cheering the birthday of a peacock in the campus, cancelling the earlier mentioned informal meeting of a club and so on. The most common form of spamming, of course, is the ‘please don’t spam’ mails that now outnumber everything else.

5) The early orientation lectures introduced close to 14 professional clubs. But going by the number of random club meetings that have been organised in the last two weeks, I have counted close to 112 professional clubs (or rather unprofessional ones, judging by the manner in which the affairs in most of these meetings were conducted). The consulting club is, by far, the most popular. At any given point of time there are at least five parallel consulting club meetings going on in different places in the campus (or more likely, five parallel consulting club meetings going in the exact same place, within one big formal meeting). A few reliable estimates suggest that the number of people from this class applying to McKinsey is likely to exceed the number of students in the batch itself (which is a mathematical improbability, but there are a sufficient number of consulting aspirants here who will volunteer to show you, by aid of a few graphs and charts, exactly how this can be done.)

That’s about as much as I can squeeze in now without defaulting on some submission deadlines...

*I jest, of course. The alums have been hugely helpful and have made our transition into this space easy. A huge round of applause for all of you guys. Now, coming to the topic of getting us jobs...

Sreeram Ramachandran, Class of 2011