November 21, 2008
Mid term check-in: Fall B
Fall B kicked in and we are already mid way through it!! Quite a few things happened since I blogged last.
a) First it was the West Coast Forum. About 100 of us took off to sunny San Francisco to explore career opportunities in the Bay Area. We met with a number of Ross alums from almost every big tech company in the Valley. It was fun to meet some of them who graduated more than 15 years ago.
b) I have only three courses this term - Marketing, Management & Organizations (M&O) and Valuations. Marketing is lot of fun. Prof. Nordheim is phenomenal. Every day in class we have two groups discussing the marketing strategies of major firms and brands, and what they could do to position themselves better to customers. We dealt with as varied brands as Victoria Pink and products such as Hershey's chocolates.
In M&O we discussed topics such as: what is it that makes a team amazingly functional or wildly dysfunctional. We also had an insightful discussion last class about "Abiline Paradox" It is about a Texan family that takes a trip out for lunch to a place called Abiline 40 miles away from home without none of them actually wanting to do that. It just happens because no one wanted to voice their opinion of not liking the idea.
c) Our new building is going to be ready by this January and our next term classes are going to be held there. Yay!
d) Recruiting is picking up speed. Company presentations are almost over. I even submitted my application to one of the firms I am interested in. Yes, the economy is doing bad, yes there are fewer jobs but we have a TON of really helpful second years that are helping us in being better prepared for recruiting. It is amazing to see the number of hours these guys spend in mentoring and coaching us. Perhaps this is one other things that makes Ross unique. Every one is keen on helping and make the school an even better place.
e) Finally MAP registration is up. I am pretty stoked up and am anxiously waiting to know of the companies sponsoring MAP this time.
Posted by pavankpm at 09:30 PM | Comments (0)
October 20, 2008
Introduction from Pavan
I am Pavan and I came to Ross from India. I am an engineer and after I graduated from college with majors in Computer Science and Mathematics, my interest in business led me to join Oracle Corporation in its e-business division. For the past four years, I worked at Oracle in managing e-business projects for the airline industry. Though I thoroughly enjoyed my work at Oracle, I realized that I would love to extend my skill set to provide strategic solutions instead of technological solutions to business problems.
Apart from my work at Oracle, over the past few years, I closely worked with two NPO's that are doing pioneering work in supplementing public school education in Bangalore. I developed a strong passion for education development through this work.
My reasons to pursue business education and my decision for choosing Ross stemmed out from both the above interests. I wanted to go to a socially conscious school that would provide me strong general management education and Ross was therefore a natural choice for me.
Time flies so fast - It feels like yesterday I was surfing through the Ross ambassador blogs and figuring out what it is to be like at Ross. And today I am here already at threshold of Fall B.
Fall A has been amazing! I came to Ann Arbor in late July. I took the accounting prep-course early August and took off to Northern Michigan right after that. We were a bunch of 12 who decided to do an alternate-trek instead of M-trek because of budget constraints. We traveled through Grand Haven, Traverse city and Mackinaw Island and had a blast on our trek. All of us are a pretty tight bunch now!
I came back, took the accounting exam and waived the course off to take finance core in advance. The term started off with the six-day foundation session of Ross Leadership Initiative (RLI). RLI has been a huge learning experience. Our section won the "grill to glory" challenge in which we cooked Greek cuisine for about 70 people!
Classes started right after that. I had Strategy, Micro Economics, Statistics and Finance core for Fall A. All my professors were great, but strategy Prof. Aneel Karnani is my personal favorite. I learnt what makes businesses tick, how companies gain competitive advantage and position themselves as market leaders through this course. The case based teaching approach is highly interactive and informative. The corporate strategy faculty at Ross is one of the strongest in the world. So if you are looking at Corporate strategy, Ross should be on your target school list.
Alongside academics, I am involved in quite a few extracurricular activities such as being an advisory board member for RLI, Associate director for west coast forum (a recruiting forum at west coast where 120 of us MBA1s are heading to, this Wednesday), Ross student ambassador (hence this blog) and member of the community consulting club. Ross provides a plethora of opportunities to have students actively engaged in leadership development and action based learning.
Fall A is done with. I am glad that I made it to Ross and am very happy to be able to learn from my super smart classmates. I am eagerly looking forward to a more hectic and nerve-wracking Fall B, not to mention the recruitment!
Through out my discussion, I underplayed recruiting discussions, as I know I will be covering recruiting through the coming weeks pretty strongly. Lets just say for now that companies have been coming in for quite a while and MBA1s are already involved in recruiting heavily. More to come soon.
Posted by pavankpm at October 20, 2008 11:03 AM
Posted by achomist at 05:24 PM | Comments (0)