Things you learn at IIM!

Well I believe zillions of articles would have floated by now about how an mba changes your perspective about the work you do and life in general , in both good and bad ways. I am not claiming here that mine would be any different..no that’s not the intention. What I am trying to mention here is that even though you know about an environment as dynamic as in my college, no matter how descriptive people have been in giving their experience about the place; I am amazed to see how similar all those experiences look at the surface, yet how radically different they become the moment you scratch that surface! I always knew what kind of high performance, pressure-intensive atmosphere I was going to step into well before I actually came here..but like everyone else, I thought that I would sail along!

Guess what…it was really hard to do so. Once you are in a place where every single person has been a champion in his/her respective field, where you are just another awesome person who became a part of the “cream” of the nation, you start feeling the pressure mounting up. There comes the true test of you mental strength and maturity. In my opinion, the best way to handle such intense situations is to isolate yourself from the situation and think from a neutral perspective…as if you are an outsider watching an intense movie. Sounds so simple ..no? Trust me it’s the last thing that you would be doing in most of the situations! It’s so easy to think rationally when you are talking about the situation, but it takes every single bit of your strength to pull your socks and face the situation like it is ideally supposed to be. But no matter how perfectly or imperfectly I am handling the things right now, I am pretty sure about one thing – once I am out of here, I would become a stronger and more courageous person than I ever could become without coming here. I know it sounds like another of those generic iim grad statements, but then, here the journey is equally important as the destination, and i would have several different pit stops from the entire iim family.