Senthil’s Page
This is not just another bloody WordPress.com weblog!! What were you thinking eh?Archive for Career
Done being a student!
With the end of this month, I would no longer be a student anymore. (Well, lets assume I don’t get crazy enough to go ahead and do my PhD or something like that!). Now you might be curious to know how I feel about the whole thing. Well, I myself cannot figure out how I feel about the whole thing. I mean, I just woke up the day after my last presentation we made for CAPSIM like it was just another day. It didn’t somehow hit me that I can no longer be a student. Strange.
But when I look back at how I felt when I was done with school, I felt the same – Nothing!. But years later, every time I think about school, I always get nostalgic and never fail to smile. ‘School days are the best’, I’d tell myself. And again, I somehow feel this is exactly how I’m going to feel about college years from now, when I hang my laptop on my shoulder, carry files in hand and fake a smile for a foreign client from whom I expect to fetch my company millions in dollars. I just hope those days aren’t any day near. Yearning to go back in time can be killing! Let that feeling take its own sweet time to reach me.
Having said I have done classroom-studying, I’ll never let my need to keep learning leave me ever. What’s there to outside one’s classroom far outnumbers what one learnt in class. And as I prepare myself to jump across frames that will transform me from being a student to an employee (a businessman later in life), there are things to be done, habits to be changed and people to be thanked. Since the list can get long, please bear with me!
I cannot but start thanking some of the most nicest teachers I have studied under in Christ School, Bangalore. Starting with Sr. Sagaya Mary (Taught me maths in Standard Two), Mr. Baby Philip, Mrs. Shashikala, Mrs. Amita Chaturvedi, Mrs. Latha Renji and Mr. Pandey. I guess if not for them, I would be less competent in one way or another. And then I must thank Mrs. Mariyamma, my accounting lecturer in Christ Junior College. My professors at Alliance Business Academy, where I did my BBM, always believed in me and have played a key role in my academic life. I cannot thank Prof. Ray Titus for his wonderful lectures in Services Management and Strategy, that I remember until today. The list is absurdly long when it comes to my Ohio University Christ College MBA professors whom I love and respect. Thanks to Dr. Raghu Iyer, Dr. Amalendu Jyotishi, Dr. Venkatesha Bhagavat, Dr. John Schermerhorn, Dr. Felicia Morgan, Dr. Dinesh Iyer, Dr. Jayanta Sen and Mrs. Gayathri (Placement Officer). I am really going to miss the office staff in Ohio Christ.
I met some of my best friends while being a student. Though I’ve lost contact with a lot of these people, they still mean a lot to me – Fijo Paulson, Dhanush Jose, Derrin Joseph, Asma Rafeeq, Sharan Sridhar, Soumya Madhavan, Ninal Joseph, Nandini Narayan, Jiji John, Sachin R, Ammar Khan, Krishna Murthy, Vinay Chetan, Nimisha Saha, Nayanshi Shaw, Preethi Paul, Shalini Kashinath and Salma Raheem. I am so sure I’ve missed out a lot of names. If you are among them, my apologies. I really wish I could throw you all a party for being such good friends of mine!
As I start my career, in an not-so-awesome fashion in a not-so-good recession ridden economy, I am nervous and excited. Years from now, as I look back to tomorrow, I just hope I can say to myself – ‘I’ve come a long way!’
Love
Sen
Photo Shoot!
As part of placement efforts, our college releases a placement brochure every year. Its like a neatly printed book with each page dedicated for one student, with a nicely taken picture of each student along with his/her academic and work credentials.
Here’s a page from the placement brochure printed last year. Featured is one the brightest minds I’ve met in a long time.
This year is no different. Our college is bringing out a placement brochure this year as well. And on last Wednesday, we had our photo shoot scheduled. With around 100 students to be shot (Photos I mean), it took quite a while before each of us got our chances to be photographed.
When my chance finally came, I was nervous like never before. The room where the camera and lights were set had over 15 people. And when I sat around the round table, the room was uncomfortably silent and to add to my uneasiness were 15 people staring at me. Not able to take all this, it didn’t take me much time before I started to sweat profusely.
The photographer seemed so heartless. In spite of all this, he still wanted me to smile. Now that is too much ask out of me. I took great pains to conceal my nervousness and did my best to smile. The result of which is this -
The placement brochure is going to have this picture of mine on my page along with few other pictures of mine. Will surely post my page here when its ready. Hope recruited don’t frown when they look at me! Wish me luck!
Love
Senthil
MBA Woes!
We are at the fag end of the MBA program and like many, we all are paranoid as well about where we would get to work (or will we ever to work at all, given India’s current macro economic conditions!) after our program. For weeks now, professors have been visiting us, more regularly than ever, to scare us about how we could perish in the job market if we don’t prepare well.
But the faculty here at Ohio University Christ College (my institution) came up with a program called Management Competency Program, or ‘MCP’ as we like to call it. Its a series of activities run everyday for two hours as part of our academic learning. We get our CVs fixed, attend mock interviews, participate in Group Discussions and help each other to prepare us for the forthcoming judgement day – Placement Season! At the core of this ambitious, life-saving, career-structuring, brand-building program is the ideology that students who take this seriously would get a job, and those who don’t will not even be given a chance to sit for placements.
While in spirit it sure does look good as a well thought out process, not many of us have taken it seriously yet. Maybe we are immune to warnings of forthcoming trouble. Like just after every exam, we crib about how we couldn’t answer a simple exam paper and had we only studies for a few good hours, we could have fared better.
Dr. Raghu Iyer, our director must be having nightmares each time he reads an article on MINT about how this year’s job market is horrible. He so neatly prints these articles and strangely picks me every time to read it to the whole class. Maybe he’s sending out a message to me. Lol. Mrs. Gayathri Nandakumar is putting in extra hours and I am sure she’s wondering how she’ll place nuts like us into good organizations. Prof. Amalendu Jyotishi is equally worried. I haven’t checked his blog in a long time now. Maybe he might write a poem about how we are hopeless at times. By the way, I love few of his poems. He’s a genius when it comes to writing good lines.
The situation in college right now is so gloomy. Just like in movies, where thirty minutes before the movie ends everyone is crying their hearts out about how life is treating them so badly(Indian heroes cry so shamelessly at times. People say, if you don’t cry, you are not a man! Wonder where that came from). If a movie was ever made on our MBA Woes, our campus would be the setting, Dr. Raghu and Mrs. Gayathri would be the lead actors and the movie would have 100 villains!
And the movie would be called ‘Dr. Raghu and the 100 thieves!’
Love
Sen
