This week truly deserves more than one post, but then I will try and put it in one to keep some uniformity
There are many events in this week
1. The VCIC First Round
2. The CMA awards
3. The Burns Night
4. International Week, Microfinance Talk and Ohters
VCIC (Venture Capitalist Investment Competition) is a competition held every year among MBAs to actually be the venture capitalist and evaluate investments in any firm. We form teams of five members, and to start off I was very impressed with the entrepreneurship professor bringing a real business even for the internal competition at Cranfield. As a team we did well in terms of preparation and answering questions, but we never know the criteria for winning in such competitions and so unless you win, you never know what you did right.
The CMA awards was an evening at London, where last years award winners were honoured, we had a presentation from an alumni who is the CEO of ARMs holdings, it was a nice place to meet people who did the MBA 25 or 30 years before us in Cranfield, and then you get a feeling that you belong to a nice place. The ceremony itself was arranged well, in the Royal Institution of London, an impressive place with lots of history.
Burns Night is an event organised by Cranfield to welcome London Business School every year for some sports and a night of dinner, a primarily student organised event, where we get to play and also mix with some like minded people from the other side.
Cranfield Rugby team really took this seriously, to the extent that they had Saracen to support them, which is a big achievement in itself, we did put up a great show in many games, but LBS won most of the games, the dinner was good and I met a few interesting people, with whom I believe I will continue to have some contact.
The Big story about burns night is that we won in Table Tennis !!! I cant moderate my emotions here, because I was the captain of the team, even though the team itself was a great team. In some ways the feeling is of completing a good job because personally I was not the best player, but I am happy that the coordination and efforts paid off. I am seeing the cup in front of me now and I think this is the first time in my life that I have been a winning sports captain, all through my life, I have been exceptional in games, but never a captain, a happy change and a huge reward to the hard working team.
On other events, it was the international week at Cranfield, personally the Indian day is tomorrow, so its all been observing others to me. There have been some good stalls from whom I learnt about some countries. There was a talk about micro finance with particular relevance to India, and I was pleasantly suprised that an ex Cranfield Professor is a board member in Basix. He talked about the evils of microfinance in particular, which is an interesting inside perspective. I got some insights, and I enjoyed talking to him after the conference, the one thing he said which I do not probably agree is that the social problems of India is related to the poverty, and without solving them solving poverty is not possible, which I think is not my view I think there is a solution to poverty (with many bright people in India) and there is vested interest not allowing them to progress.
The rest of the week has been normal, and term two is going a bit tighter in terms of schedule than term 1. All results available till now indicate that I am about the 75th percentile in terms of scores and I am really happy about that, given the fact that I am not putting in a lot of efforts into learning as an activity.
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