First few days @ ISB …

I must say that the last few days are quite happening with something or the other going on in the campus. Right from 12-April to this hour, something or the other goes on in the campus. It could be folks socializing, informal events to formal events. I believe all this is to prepare our batch (Class of 2009) to the roller coaster ride (one of the speakers in the orientation session described this as walking on a high speed conveyer belt with nothing to protect you from falling off side ways. You have to balance yourself and maintain pace with the conveyer). One of my favourite quote/phrase of the orientation week so far is the statement made by Dr. M Rammohan Rao (Dean, ISB). He was referring to the quote by his professor during his Ph.D days. The essence of the statement goes like: If you make a prediction, predict something which is not going to happen when you are around. If the prediction goes wrong, you will not be around to take the beating :). Along with the statement, the manner in which it was told made the entire auditorium burst in to laughter.

Registration was organized extremely well. It did not take more than an hour and half for me to complete the entire registration process. The first Sunday on campus is no holiday. We had presentations and a session on the first model (three legged model… though it is not directly related to our course) of our MBA on a Sunday :(. I guess this is an eye opener for all those who got used to five working days a week. However, I am not sure if anybody realized that all this was happening on a Sunday. That’s what sets the organizers and the speakers here apart.

Section events got kicked off today with treasure hunt. By the end of the day, everybody was wet because they were either sweating in the hot Hyderabadi sun or they were dunked in to the swimming pool. Our team managed to complete treasure hunt in two hours. We are not the winners for sure. I think we fall in the median 80% of the teams :)

Some of the information we came across during the orientation:

1) The next batch going to be 500-550 strong. Construction for the new student village is underway.

2) Avg. GMAT score for the class of 2009 of ISB is close to (if not more than) schools like Harvad, Wharton etc

3) ISB is aiming to be a pioneer in business research in India and APAC. I also believe that the focus is mainly on emerging markets.

One more thing, if you are male IT engineer from Bangalore, you are the most common species here. You are sure to find lot of your comrades here.