Yeah!!!!

This is going to be long....so bear with me. and i offer a compensation to you....a huge bar of chocolate for the ladies........and a mug of beer for the gentlemen. :)

Now ive been wanting to go for management for a long time, is something thats a given. why did it come to me? well, to be honest, when i first entered class 11th, and during one of those substitute classes where a teacher would come and not teach, coz the regular teacher was absent and someone was required to take her place. so now this teacher of ours, she was talking about the CAT exam and about the iims. and as we starry eyed kids listened to her, she told about how tough the exam was and the interveiw and all, and i was like i will give this exam. it might seem silly, but at that time i had already decided on pursuing my engineering, had started my jee preparation ( i didnt work hard enough to crack it, is a thing ill always lament, though i made it through REE), and so i thought CAT would be the next thing after engineering. And there it lay. However, there was nothing i knew really about the MBA. i just knew CAT then.

As time progressed, i managed to secure a place at roorkee, and well it was a disappointment that i was not doing electronics engineering there. and so the days passed with me studying chemical engineering, somehow not really liking it. i finished the degree with a not so great grade, got the job and all. In between, i had gone through the usual stage of deciding what to do, weighin the GRE, ( i actually took a summer project to impress a professor who could give me reccos for my MS application, and actually started studying for GRE, before leaving it :DD), then leaving it for CAT preparation in final year, and then finally deciding to forego MBA till after a couple of years of my job.

Anyways so here i was into my job, with usual gammut of working, then cribbing, lying useless at times ( i once compared myself to the peon in our site office and how we was doing more work than me) and planning for my mba. Of course by this time i had finally started understanding what management would mean. But then wherever i read, whatever i heard, the main talk was on Finance and Consulting as the two "hot" things to pursue. The million dollar dreams being dished out by the IIMs generally seemed to be about I-banking or consulting and the likes. or atleast that is what i saw/heard/read.

As for me, i was unclear about what i wanted to do. I-banking? Share markets? Consulting? Marketing? what. and i was never able to decide. i always thought i would leave it to after i actually made it to a b-school, after i had been exposed to all they had to offer to me. And when someone asked me, i had a ready answer " I have my options open".:DD

Now its been three years out of college. and past two years have been spent chasing this MBA dream, without too much of a success, except of course for GMAT. and now i have finally belatedly started the process of applying to foreign B-Schools too. and that has perhaps instigated in me this process of thinking. One thing i find good about this process,which perhaps is very different from the CAT, that the process actually makes you think about a lot of things. and some thinking never did anyone any harm. :P

And so out of this thought process has finally arisen something. Something like a spark, how long its lasts is something time will tell, but lets see. Perhaps its got to do with the industry that i am in, or whatever, but one thing i know for sure is i am not going to be driven to Finance. I somehow have a feeling i can never enjoy the job. I might do really well, but somehow it doesnt attract me. And add to that, the stories about zero personal life ( i am always very particular on that,) and i guess that is not something i want to do.

No wait, why i am first writing about what i dont want to do? why not write what i want to do? simple, because perhaps its easy to discard things you think you wont like quickly. :)).
Having said that, i have been analysing myself off late. and something tells me i am the kind of person, who likes to be in the thick of things. Who likes to take the decisions, the strategies and would like to direct the actual work that generates the value. I am the kind of person who wants to be part of the action, not advising on the action (Consulting) or handling the fruits of the action ( money). Of course thats a very very laymannish description of what a consult guy or a finance guy would do, and i am not belittling their activities, they do a lot of whole lot of important stuff, but still its not the real thing, is what i feel.

Right now i am in an engineering and construction firm, and after an initial year of execution of projects, which i admit i had not liked back then, i have been in marketing for projects. and i yearn to go back into execution. because thats the real business we do. I am not too much into generation of business as into doing of the business, is what i am beginning to feel. that is what attracts me. it might be a case of the other fruit always being sweeter ( i did detest execution in the beginning, but then i had been thrust into a project in the middle when it was only going downhill, and the activities given to me were not good enough, as i see when i compare them to what my juniors get in new projects when they join), but something tells me.

And all this thinking has made me realise, its general management and operations is what i am looking for. That is where i wish to go. A position which asks me to manage people, manage resources, handle day-day to day problems in an organisation as it strives to achieve the goal. And someday down the line, i wish to digress into the social sector.

So thats what ive been thinking of late. and that is how my search for US Bschools is progressing. for once finally i am a little clear on what i wish to do. Again i still do not have a definite career path. but where in what direction it is heading seems to be clearing. There are still a lot of uncertainities there. but still something looks to be happening.

So thats about it. And now that the long thought process is over. you can raise you heads, relax your eyes, stretch your muscles, shake your head, wonder at the accomplishment of having read such a huge piece, and go over for that bar of chocolate for the ladies and that mug of beer for the gentlemen respectively. On the house absolutely. Kiska house?? arre tera aur kya nahin to mera kya.......huh.

Chaos