End of vacation

Our module three classes start coming Monday. I am looking forward to it but at the same time, I wonder when am I going to vegetate again. Past month or so has been wonderful, doing nothing. Our sections are reorganized and am going to meet 40 new people in our section. All the members of one BCAP group stay in same section and each section has 9 BCAP groups. So, we will meet on an average 6 new BCAP groups in one section.

There were a few things I wanted to do but never did. One of that was in contacting alums and meeting some people in startups exploring internship opportunities. However, I attended an info session at Liberty Mutual. There were a lot of people from DC (Georgetown). Liberty seems to have a good general management rotational program after MBA.
One complaint about the event is the exorbitant parking fee. I hoped Liberty would validate the ticket but they did not.

Finally I applied for transfer of my driving license from another state. Massachusetts is a weird state when it comes to license and auto insurance. We should present at least 4 different IDs. International students, should at least have 1 year of future legal status to apply for license. Oh yeah, transferring license from another state costs more than getting a new license. Traditional companies do not offer auto insurance here. Have to go through agents in person! Good luck if you want to get a quote online!!

Visiting business school

One good approach to select a class to attend is to know the cases that are going to be discussed one day and attend a class that would have lot of students participation.

Before attending Babson, I attended a few classes in other schools. It was very good experience to assess my fit with the rest of the students and get a more realistic expectation of the classroom.

In Babson, we have had some case discussions that were far more involved than the others. All the cases in strategy and some in marketing were good and visitors would have learned a lot from those.

I hate those schools who fix up some uninteresting class to attend. In one of the schools, I was taken to a macro economic class that was boring to death. Likewise I would hate to see some prospective student in our ethics class.

Consulting project and a review of module II

I was not too busy not to write for more than a month. But, I had a plenty to talk about and could not spend enough time on one subject to write about.

I thought module II exams were more demanding and required lot of preparations. Nope. It was the consulting project that we did needed more time. The BCAP (Babson consulting alliance program) has two components, first industry analysis in Fall and a consulting assignment for a sponsoring company.

Our group of seven analyzed enterprise software industry, did a lot of research (thanks to electronic library resources @ Babson) and created a very good report based on our analysis. We also had to present in front of a faculty panel. We exceeded our own expectation. Many in our group did not have IT background and yet they stepped up and contributed very well.

Module II was very interesting. The quantitative aspect of this module threw a few people off in the beginning. We had very good case discussions ranging from Wal Mart to iTunes. At the end, it seemed like all roads pointing to strategy as economics, marketing, data analysis and accounting emphasizing the strategic component in the decision process. Kudos to those who organized this curriculum.

I must mention the interesting thing about Babson, the writing and speech resource center. We got to use these facilities to review our work.

PS: If you are interested to know more about Babson, feel free to contact me at ns dot email at yahoo dot com