Really late on writing this post. The only major event that happened during this week was our Macclesfield visit. We visited an English relative (yeah, a maternal uncle of my wife who is british) for Christmas. Was blown over by their hospitality and the beauty of English countryside covered in snow.
We went to a Church Mass, that too a Christmas Mass, which was a first in life for me. Felt very good, in fact I liked the calm songs and the speeches in between, with valuable messages given in simple words. I just had a small glitch in one of the procedures, which I could not do properly :( ended up irritating the lady who was volunteering. I was carrying a cold throughout the journey and the trip, I ended up with a load of gifts from their house and a lot of memories. We had some good walk around the countrysides, which will stay in my memory. Uncle also gave me some tips for successful career and life, which were invaluable.
Other than that, there was no major event in the week. Just kept moving ahead with my freelancing venture :), I think this holidays is going to be productive to say the least. I am enjoying it. Another lazy week ahead (in fact well into it) and another before the school springs to life again.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Exam Week
Habits Die hard... in spite of my Statistics exam being open book, I did not carry the notes, just plain and not-so-smart overconfidence, and I got stuck in the mid of the exam remembering a few formulae.
Well, you can catch my mood now, actually the mood during the few hours after exam.
This week as you can make out by now, we had exams and I did well in every exam other than statistics, I will still pass the statistics paper, but would have been happier if I had done well. Exams got over, I got some freelancing work on peopleperhour.com and got stuck in traffic in a snowy evening. That is the summary for this week.
Otherwise this week was not so eventful, I got a small start to a probable project and will work on it. Holidays have begun and so I think the coming weeks would be more fun, at least now we have all sad people around me with so many flight cancellations and friends who planned to travel to India having their plans go for a toss.
I got China as the travel destination, for the IBE, but still have to wait for my field trip to be confirmed. We had a small party after the term Friday night. The traffic jam was interesting, as this was the first time (and probably last) I got stuck in a traffic with snow falling all over the place, we had some funny discussions and spent the three hours sitting there in the car.
Well, you can catch my mood now, actually the mood during the few hours after exam.
This week as you can make out by now, we had exams and I did well in every exam other than statistics, I will still pass the statistics paper, but would have been happier if I had done well. Exams got over, I got some freelancing work on peopleperhour.com and got stuck in traffic in a snowy evening. That is the summary for this week.
Otherwise this week was not so eventful, I got a small start to a probable project and will work on it. Holidays have begun and so I think the coming weeks would be more fun, at least now we have all sad people around me with so many flight cancellations and friends who planned to travel to India having their plans go for a toss.
I got China as the travel destination, for the IBE, but still have to wait for my field trip to be confirmed. We had a small party after the term Friday night. The traffic jam was interesting, as this was the first time (and probably last) I got stuck in a traffic with snow falling all over the place, we had some funny discussions and spent the three hours sitting there in the car.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Week Before Exams - Revisions, Submissions and Recollections
Finally, the term 1 of our course is over. This week was primarily a revision week in terms of academic activity. This means that the lecturers review the entire learning and explain the important points that students should remember from their teaching.
In terms of non-academic activity, I got a small start to a proposed project on "Peace Index". More importantly we started a small initiative called MBA Oath in Cranfield, and even though the schools expectation is to get about 10 people to sign the oath, we took the initiative to take it beyond that and get over 30% of the cohort to sign it. At 30% level, Cranfield gets to be recognized as a chapter school in the project and I think personally this will be a significant achievement for NetImpact Club this year (incidentally I am leading the NetImpact effort in Cranfield). We formed a leadership team for this effort and I am quite happy about the progress so far.
As a team we completed the Operations Presentation and Report, OB Report and the Statistics Project and overall we are very happy about the output, we also got some of the results for our group projects and we were at about average, I am not very unhappy but some members of my team were unhappy, but the common lesson from all the projects till now is that we just missed the question, and kept on answering (or responding to) what we thought was the question, this is a significant learning that we need to carry forward.
During the OB session I got 9 positive feedback from members, I am very happy about this because it was time constrained and only 5 of the 9 was compulsory :).
I also attended a "Graduation day" event conducted by the Executive MBA batch and learnt a few things from experienced entrepreneurs and CEOs about leadership. The common theme for me was Leadership is all about forming a strategy, finding the right people to execute the strategy and motivating them, executing the strategy. Looking inward, I am probably walking my hard journey in the second point (people). Having my business model as a framework to understand these concepts is helping me a lot.
I found a lot of interesting articles on entrepreneurship and one article (from twitter) (http://www.businessinsider.com/the-25-best-startup-fail-stories-of-all-time-2010-10#) gave a lot of insights into typical failures in entrepreneurship. Since most of them are narrated by the founder or co-founder themselves, I think this is a very interesting and thought provoking topic.
I also read the book "Outliers", a very interesting observation into success and how people succeed. Another interesting observation from the book is that the author argues that 10000 hours of effort into anything makes you an expert in it. I somehow agree with him that 10000 hours of proper (with an expert, and a structure) training makes you an expert, but I have personal examples of 10000 wasted hours :) .
Everyone around me is focussed on exams (except a very few). I think examination is just a test of your understanding and if you havent understood the course, you ought to fail, but I think overall I have learnt a lot from this course and as far as using these concepts to decision making is concerned I would do a decent job if not a perfect job at it. This approach makes me take exams in a cool manner. I just dont want to take it too easily.
Many times during the table tennis play sessions, I lost my temper and I think this is a bad trend, I need to take some actions to stop this outburst as for any onlooker it looks as if I cannot keep cool, whereas it is just a venting exercise from my side. I need to work on other means of venting out feelings in any team setting (informal, formal, sport anything).
A major development in my foreseeable future happened during this week, the UK abolished Tier 1 as a category of visa and have also planned to scrap the post study work visa system. This way my chances of staying on in the UK after the education are getting slimmer and slimmer. Even though I am not very keen on staying here for a long time, it would have been a better scenario if the option were to be available and then not take it rather than the chance itself being denied.
Personally, my home loan got repaid this week, a major change in my expense pattern - I dont have to pay mortgage and I also have enough cash now to repay all my educational loan commitments in the bank. This feels good, even though I have decided to sell off the house that I owned (the only real estate that I bought), I am not too worried as we have another "home" in Trivandrum.
Overall a week of mixed feelings, some good news, some bad news, let me hope that the next week is good (after all exams have to be good :) )
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The last lecture week of Term 1
Finally, term 1 lectures were all done, we have completed 1/4th of the course, its a mixed feeling, as if we have just completed 1/4th of all the transition that was supposed to happen :)
In terms of events, the table tennis tournament should be the first one. Day 1 had some players irritated because we did not have a fixed schedule, but overall even day 1 was a neat success because we had most of the people attending the matches and we had some solid results. Day 2 was even better, finally Manish and Tatiana won the events in their categories. As an organiser of the tournament I am happy that it went so well. Personally I won against the Champion (Manish), but lost two matches consecutively to Kinjal and Prabhav, both the players played well, but overall I think I got too defensive in the first match and did the exact opposite (kept attacking) in the next match. The lesson from this is that being natural in a pressure situation (not really easy) is worth more than technical skill (the game playing ability, because Manish lost to me because of the same reason that I would quote for the loss against Kinjal)
I contacted Manchester Business School for two purposes this week, the first being for the proposed Table tennis tournament with them and secondly for cooperation in the Net Impact club. I am happy that both are going along nicely and I will extend this cooperation to other schools too.
On the lectures side, I learnt my Belbin scores, and unlike many other results, I could relate to this reult much more, or in a sense I agreed with most of the inferences. I turned out to be a Plant, Resource Investigator and Shaper in that order, naturally finisher, implementer etc turned out to be least preferred, I think that is a big learning I need to carry to my next step in career.
We had a feedback session in our team about what had changed in you till today in the MBA and my frank opinion was to appreciate other's intelligence more (Over the years my arrogance in not appreciating someone else's intelligence has been growing and now it has started to decrease). Second most important realisation is that the more you are lacking in something you see the lacking in others (the more lazy you are you see everyone else as lazy), and the more you posses something (knowledge) you start seeing it everywhere else. This is a big realisation for me, because at any given point of time, what I see everywhere else is probably what I possess at that point and this realisation can be used effectively as a self-monitoring tool.
The first learning can be succinctly put as
The more stupidity you find in yourself, the more you listen and the more intelligent you become
The more intelligent you think you are, the less you listen and the more stupid you become
I also think back to my own "purpose" of this MBA, the statement I used to think back again and again. The purpose of this MBA is to become a better student of life, i.e. life is always teaching you lessons, I had been a good student and used to learn a lot, but this learning capability has decreased in the past few years and I want to regain that ability to learn from each day. I think one step in the right direction has already been achieved, provided I use these two thoughts in my life.
I also learnt a few things about my dream organisation, there were positive and negative feedback about the idea, some of them were (not just identified during this week)
1. You need to deliver the end to end piece of identifying the problem till suggesting them a solution (Finding the problem to putting them in touch with a solution)
2. You need to also have solutions for other major problems that the parents might have (may be like the student not studying well)
3. You need to contact employers who might be needing a specific skill and provide them an opportunity to recruit from your place.
4. You need to be flexible with your business model and allow others to change it constantly, keep evolving.
I think this list will in itself keep growing
On a personal note, I did many things for the first time in my life this week, walking in an inch (or may be more) thick snow, walking in a snowfall, witnessing a heavy snowfall all happened during this week. I tried to get a job during Christmas break, which may or may not materialise. I kept talking with Arun, regarding the contacts for business and developing our idea.
Exams are nearing, and finally I need to study for some time, I have been largely neglecting studies till today :). There were two marks given out during the week and I got an average of 66 in them, which I am quite happy with.
In terms of events, the table tennis tournament should be the first one. Day 1 had some players irritated because we did not have a fixed schedule, but overall even day 1 was a neat success because we had most of the people attending the matches and we had some solid results. Day 2 was even better, finally Manish and Tatiana won the events in their categories. As an organiser of the tournament I am happy that it went so well. Personally I won against the Champion (Manish), but lost two matches consecutively to Kinjal and Prabhav, both the players played well, but overall I think I got too defensive in the first match and did the exact opposite (kept attacking) in the next match. The lesson from this is that being natural in a pressure situation (not really easy) is worth more than technical skill (the game playing ability, because Manish lost to me because of the same reason that I would quote for the loss against Kinjal)
I contacted Manchester Business School for two purposes this week, the first being for the proposed Table tennis tournament with them and secondly for cooperation in the Net Impact club. I am happy that both are going along nicely and I will extend this cooperation to other schools too.
On the lectures side, I learnt my Belbin scores, and unlike many other results, I could relate to this reult much more, or in a sense I agreed with most of the inferences. I turned out to be a Plant, Resource Investigator and Shaper in that order, naturally finisher, implementer etc turned out to be least preferred, I think that is a big learning I need to carry to my next step in career.
We had a feedback session in our team about what had changed in you till today in the MBA and my frank opinion was to appreciate other's intelligence more (Over the years my arrogance in not appreciating someone else's intelligence has been growing and now it has started to decrease). Second most important realisation is that the more you are lacking in something you see the lacking in others (the more lazy you are you see everyone else as lazy), and the more you posses something (knowledge) you start seeing it everywhere else. This is a big realisation for me, because at any given point of time, what I see everywhere else is probably what I possess at that point and this realisation can be used effectively as a self-monitoring tool.
The first learning can be succinctly put as
The more stupidity you find in yourself, the more you listen and the more intelligent you become
The more intelligent you think you are, the less you listen and the more stupid you become
I also think back to my own "purpose" of this MBA, the statement I used to think back again and again. The purpose of this MBA is to become a better student of life, i.e. life is always teaching you lessons, I had been a good student and used to learn a lot, but this learning capability has decreased in the past few years and I want to regain that ability to learn from each day. I think one step in the right direction has already been achieved, provided I use these two thoughts in my life.
I also learnt a few things about my dream organisation, there were positive and negative feedback about the idea, some of them were (not just identified during this week)
1. You need to deliver the end to end piece of identifying the problem till suggesting them a solution (Finding the problem to putting them in touch with a solution)
2. You need to also have solutions for other major problems that the parents might have (may be like the student not studying well)
3. You need to contact employers who might be needing a specific skill and provide them an opportunity to recruit from your place.
4. You need to be flexible with your business model and allow others to change it constantly, keep evolving.
I think this list will in itself keep growing
On a personal note, I did many things for the first time in my life this week, walking in an inch (or may be more) thick snow, walking in a snowfall, witnessing a heavy snowfall all happened during this week. I tried to get a job during Christmas break, which may or may not materialise. I kept talking with Arun, regarding the contacts for business and developing our idea.
Exams are nearing, and finally I need to study for some time, I have been largely neglecting studies till today :). There were two marks given out during the week and I got an average of 66 in them, which I am quite happy with.
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