Next shock for me was the diversity. One can find freshers, like me, studying alongside with people born in a completely different decade. No doubt there are engineers, but there are students from fields as distinct as philosophy and English and physics. You finally get what “Unity in Diversity” actually feels like.
Mass bunks is an alien concept here. My three weeks Dussehra holidays turned to a 3-day weekend. Earlier, I would miss classes at my will and now missing a class would earn me a grade drop. Sleeping in classes to desperate class participation, craving for that 6lpa package to getting a stipend of almost double the amount for an internship, from the flexible schedule to “sacrosanct” deadlines, a B-School definitely has its own eccentricities and charms.
Nevertheless, after a year at XLRI, the experiences I have had here are nothing compared to my undergrads. Amongst a lot of things that surprised me here was that we have a committee for everything under the sun. The water cooler next to your room doesn’t work? Oh wait, there’s a committee for that. You hate the mess food, there’s a committee for that. You want the basketball court to be cleaned. There’s a committee for that too. This is something we didn’t have in our undergrads.
Don’t even get me started on the e-mails. The number of e-mails I got in a single day in the first year, I don’t think even my personal email id gets those many spams a day. Just a week back, we got a mail informing us that there would be some difficulties in water availability due to some work going on around the area. In my undergrad, we got this news once we had lathered ourselves with soap and the water randomly decided not to show up that day. Luxury much? I think so, yes.
Starting from the completely different teaching methodology to a batch that feels like home and sticks together, a b-school gives the perfect glimpse of what stays in store when I finally come out of the sheltered cocoon to the big corporate world. Now, I can proudly tell my friends, “Hey, I sit in an AC classroom, when was the last time you did that, huh?”
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