A Beautiful Mind

I will be leaving for my interview at ISB tomorrow morning. I have decided to visit ISB on the day before my interview day so that I can take a look at the campus again and just talk to some current students there. And of course, I am going to hyderabad one day in advance so as to avoid any last moment calamities. I am also eager to meet some of my friends there.

Wish me luck pls

I just now (12:15 pm IST) received a call for an interview at ISB. I am so relieved. I had 101 things going on in my mind about my application. After I saw many people getting interview calls from ISB (it started way back in the first week of this month) I was getting nervous after all these weeks.

Now, I have to start preparing for the interview which is next week (actually next weekend ). I had plans for this entire week and the next weekend for my other application(s) but now my contingency/backup plans will come in place. This is the benefit of talking to current and former b-school students. They can help you in planning your application cycle and tell you in advance about the roadblocks that you may get.

From all this episode, I can surely say that there is no particular order in which ISB is inviting people and when they say that calls are going to come till first week of Nov, you can indeed expect a call till then.

Wish me luck guys, I need to prepare a lot now.

The last few 8-10 days have been very much hectic. The work load has been tremendous and on top of it, I had to write my essays for Fuqua. The deadline (November 12) is coming. I just sent the details of my recommenders for Fuqua. Considering the time constraints, I feel like I am already a part of a b-school.

On the work side, I had a major production release last week. This was an important release as this project is an extremely important project in terms of the complexity, the size and the importance to the company. Our clients (the front office traders – yeah the real investment bankers) are happy and have started using the system. They have successfully executed trades and we are receiving good feedback. Yes, my baby is generating money

I also had some good experiences in this one and hopefully I should be able to put in a few points or examples in the next draft of my essays for Fuqua. However, I doubt I will have much time to work on my essays in this month. Primarily because the release last week marked the completion of the first phase of our project.

From next week the Phase 2 will start formally. And this week, apart from doing the usual post release work, we have informally started the Phase 2. This phase is going to be very very critical as we have a limited amount of time and lots of work. Sounds very much usual stuff???

Actually it is not. This time this project is critical because it is already running in production and our work is to upgrade it in stages. If it would have been a new project from scratch (like the previous phase was) it would have been easier. But now the complexity is up. When I joined Lehman Brothers (Yeah – I work for Lehman Bros in India which is now called NOMURA India), I was given some historical facts of the importance of our work. One such fact was about the Opportunity Loss of  USD 150m+ that Lehman had to incur, due to a system failure for about 1 hour during trading hours in NY. Just imagine the impact !!! And my current project is generating more revenue with every passing day. Even a single change in this project can have a huge impact. My team and I are both pretty much excited to work on this one but the only issues is the time. I may have to put my essays on the back-burner for some time

However, I made some progress ont the essays on this weekend. I have almost completed my essays for Fuqua and the next draft will be the last one. I will finalize the Fuqua essays after that. Once that is done, I just intend to chase down my recommenders to make sure that they fill in the evaluation on time. I do not think they will delay it but I would love it if they finish it 2-3 days before the deadline. I still have 20-22 days for the final Fuqua deadline but I would prefer to complete my application by November 8.

Let us see how it goes. Pls wish me luck.

FUN. My last weekend was an extended weekend (Friday to Sunday … ) and as usual … I had plans to work on my essays and then visit a primary hindi school to continue working on my responsibility towards society. As it happens always, my plans didn’t materialize and had to be changed… albeit only half 

My best friend came home during his break from his MBA at MICA. He was here for only a few days and so we decided to chill-out in our best way. Take another road trip. But since we had only two days to spare we took a road trip to Kashid (http://picasaweb.google.com/sunil.chanchlani/KashidOctober2009#) this time. Kashid is a small beach town almost half way between the popular tourist destinations Alibaug and Murud.

Thats me with the Murud fort in the back ground.

I called in two more friends of mine and so we were now four. We left on thursday night and reached Kashid in 4 hours flat after making a small dinner stop in between. I must say that it was another wonderful trip to this beach as the beach was clean with very few people, the water was clear and the best part was our trip was our time spent on the beach early Friday morning. There was so much of Fog that it was almost impossible to view anything beyond 5 meters. Yes the Fog was so dense. And we went in the water in this Fog, something that will shock my mom if I tell her . We all had fun in this first-time-in-my-life experience and believe me you need to be there in such a foggy situation to experience it. But, do not try this if you are not a regular to beaches or are alone.

The small harbor

And later during the day, we went to Murud to discover a new spot. Yes it felt like we discoverd that new spot as none of the tourist guides had ever told us about it and no one except the four of us was present there. It was actually a small fishing harbor. It was so small and deserted (and peaceful) that it appeared to be a deserted one. But we were wrong. Some time later a few fishermen came in with their catch of the day. Although it was smelling very badly, it was amazing to see the live fish. I also tried my hands at pulling a small boat back into the harbor

Luckily we left early on Friday as later there were reports of a small storm along the Konkan coast line ( this includes Kashid) and of roads getting flooded due to this.

The next day (Saturday) I had to go to a primary hindi school in Kalyan (our neighbouring city) to spend some time with the kids and distribute some stationary as part of our drive at Umang Foundationto help deserving students. Some of my colleagues from my office came all the way from Mumbai (yes … my office is around 60Km away from my home) and the stationary was already there ( thanks to our plan that was executed efficiently) at the school when we reached at 10:00 am in the morning. We usually distribute stationary kits containing four to six notebooks, pencils, erasers, sharpeners and scales and we prepare these kits manually to save packaging costs. We prepared the kits in one of the store rooms at the school and I must mention how enthusiastic everyone was while preparing these. We were 12 members and we prepared the required 500+ kits in two hours flat

Later we had an amazing time while distributing the kits to these students and after this distribution was over, we all members had sessions with the kids in the class. We had sessions with kids from class 1 to class 7 and I was really impressed by the enthusiasm with which these kids were eager to study.

A Student at the school.

We had question and answer sessions with them and for each correct answer we were distributing pencils and notebooks. Man … the kids were so quick in answering the questions that I felt like everyone must be a topper in his/her own right. From answering 2+5+7 to naming all the months in a year and answering all the multiplication tables from 2 to 9 the kids in class 1 and 2 were awesome. I am saying this primarily because these kids are from a Hindi medium school. Answering my questions English shows their enthusiasm to learn this language.
 
May be it was the desire to study and excel or the upcoming exams before Diwali or the competition to win maximum number of pencils and notebooks that was driving the best out of them, all in all they were really good and we had a lot of fun while we spent our entire day with them. We have another visit planned next month after Diwali  at another school near Nerul and I we all (at Umang) are equally excited.
 
BTW … I still had the Sunday and I managed to make some progress on my essays. I didn’t write a new draft but I did indeed received some feedback from one of my reviewers and I made some changes to existing draft to apply the recommended changes.  The long weekend was indeed FUN.

I just received a mail from the adcom at Fuqua (Duke) with the subject “A Message from The Duke MBA”.  It caught my attention immediately and when I opened it, I had a smile.

Duke University (and Fuqua School of Business) has gone one step further to help its future MBA students in reducing their financial difficulties in the current market scenario. It has announced a new program named “The Duke MBA Application Fee Reduction Program” under which applicants who will be visiting the campus or attending an MBA information session by Duke, to understand the school better will have to pay only $50 instead of the regular $200 as an application fee. This sounds a good way to help the prospective students who the are really serious about Fuqua.

Now I am delighted by the efforts Duke is putting into this but at the same time I am also a little disappointed by this news. This is because I do not see any upcoming Duke MBA information sessions in India. Duke will visit India at many places but it will do so via the QS World MBA Fair or The MBA Tour. From the given information, it appears that this scheme is only available for applicants who are about to attend the information hosted specifically by Duke. So this program does not apply to me for now, I guess.

However, I attended the Fuqua information session in Mumbai on August 15, 2009 and I will be applying at Duke (Fuqua)  in R1. It would have been great to have my application expenses reduced but anyway, I am also happy for many other applicants who will benefit from this initiative. I am extremely happy to see the initiatives Duke (Fuqua) is taking to help the applicants.

Afer receiving feedback on my UNC-KF essays from a current business school student, I updated my essays today. Writing essays for b schools is like distilling whisky. Just as a whisky gets better and better with age (and of-course with regular tasting ), every update to my essays is making them better and better. This was my third draft of UNC-KF essays and now I have sent this for review to two of my reviewers. I am really really thankful to my reviewers for taking out a lot of time to review my essays. A party for each one of them once I am done with everything.

Moreover, it is time for me to move on to my essays for Fuqua and Ross. Ross essays are untouched since last long weekend and Fuqua essays have just started. I like the Fuqua question more and so will mostly progress with those. There are limits on the number of pages and no word limits. This makes my job of expressing myself easier. I can write non stop without worrying about the number of words. Otherwise I keep on thinking about the numbers every-time I complete a paragraph.

Hope to make a good progress with these soon.