So I appeared for the last exam of my MBA, yesterday. And now I have 2 weeks to spare before I enter the corporate world. So while I do that, I would like to look back at these 2 years, to simply go through what I have learnt. Here is a short list of the many, many lessons MBA has taught me.
1. You need to work with people you don't like: In the first week of MBA, our seniors divided us into teams, or committees, based on our talents and skills. We were teamed up with people we barely knew, and as we realized over time, people we barely liked. And we had to work with them, organize events with them. This was difficult at times, of course, but it was probably the biggest lesson I have learnt over these 2 years. You can't always choose who you work with, let alone like them. And you have to make things work. Isn't that what professionalism is all about?
2. The art of giving interviews: When I was looking for an internship in my first year, I had to appear for around 10 to 12 interviews. I had zero experience in giving interviews prior to this. Needless to say, I wasn't very good at it. It was heartbreaking, each time they announced the name of the person who was selected, and each time it was someone else. But guess what, each time I looked back at my interview, pondered over what went wrong, and worked on it. By the time I got selected as an intern, I had developed the ability to give a good interview, and for this, I have no one to thank but myself.
3. No one will hear you unless you raise your voice: I have always been an introvert, I have never had a habit of raising my voice, or complaining a lot about (or making an effort to change) things around me, whether it was in school, in college or at home. But soon after joining an MBA institute, I understood that this doesn't work in real life. And I learnt this the hard way. After many, many times of being ignored or my opinions being disregarded, I learnt to go against my instincts, and raise my voice, if I wanted my opinions to matter.
4. Smart work: This is more of a life hack. The last 2 years taught me that hard work, single-handedly, doesn't always get you what you want. Sometimes you just need short cuts and smart tricks to achieve success. However, this does NOT mean cheating, fraud or anything along these lines. There is a fine line between the two. You need to pair your hard work with smart work, if you wish to be successful. It could mean offering to give good rating to a restaurant chain on an online platform, in return for their help in organizing an event in our college, but it doesn't mean bribing the restaurant owner with funds collected by the students.
5. Marks do not matter, neither does percentile: In an MBA institute, studying is equivalent to participating in classroom discussions, giving good presentations, going through real life success and failure cases of business organizations, and reading newspapers (or news apps in our smartphones). And this is how it should be. This is all you need to do to get respectable marks in exams. Even so, no one really cares about marks. Organizations coming to campus to recruit students do look at the knowledge of their subjects, but what they consider more is their general knowledge, business acumen, confidence, communication/presentation skills and whether or not they form a good cultural fit for the organization. Organizations rarely look at your marks in your CV. Moreover, the 90+ percentile you would have scored to get admission into a B-School, simply converts into a useless number once you join the B-school. This is something you should leave behind, since the only thing that does matter is your hard (and smart) work.
I understand that an MBA teaches you much more than simply team work, smart work, or the art of giving interviews. I also understand that these lessons can be learnt in life without having an MBA, and eventually, I would have learnt them anyway. But this post is simply my way of sharing my own experience.
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