The Alumni Interview

My Alumni interview was scheduled at 8:00 on a Sunday morning. Since this was my first visit to IIMB, I was naturally a bit nervous. My interview was to be held in a classroom numbered P-12, so when inside the campus I started to look around for management geeks for directions and none were to be found at that time. Finally I spotted a lone ranger jogging and he directed me to a very lonely looking road, away from what looked like the main entrance of the building. Reluctantly I decided to follow the guy's directions. Half a kilometer drive down the road led me to a building where a crowd was gathered. The crowd indeed looked like the one assembled for the interviews. I spotted a parking lot nearby and headed towards it, only to be alerted by the shrill shout of a security guard, The lot was meant for the professors and obviously I didn't look like one. So I had to again drive back to the entrance of the building and then had to trudge back to the spot where the interview was to take place. Though with the presence of signboards, finding the class room was not very difficult.
There were three people who had been called in for the same time slot that of 8 to 9 , so effectively each of us were to have a 20 minute slot. My interview was taken by a guy who was in his early 40's and a lady in her late 30's (Though was not able to catch their names nor their companies). I guess they were from the first batch of PGSEMr's. The interview began with them declaring that they were behind schedule and could give me only 10 minutes. The first question they asked was to tell something about myself. Then some follow up questions like why I wanted to move into management considering that I'm a technical guy etc etc. Then they started the often heard thing about PGSEM that it is a difficult course and requires very good time management etc. Finally, as they had promised they wrapped it up in 10 minutes. Seeing the intensity of the interview, I came to the conclusion that this leg of interview doesn't carry too much of a weightage and everything rested in the hands of the faculty.
The interview went off very smoothly and perhaps lulled me into a sense of false security which got scattered into pieces during the faculty interview. :)

PGSEM Test

The first round of elimination for the PGSEM course is based on either of the three things, one is the CAT score, the other is the GMAT score and finally a PGSEM test which is conducted in February. I decided to take up the test as I had missed the CAT application deadline. I also had heard that the test is much easier in terms of the difficulty level compared to an exam like CAT.
My preparation was mainly confined to around 7 weekends before the test. The PGSEM test is basically based on the CAT format so the preparation has to be on the lines of CAT. I had attempted CAT in 2005, so I had a couple of books with me which I had not touched much at that time. One of the books was MBA Entrance study guide by career launcher and the other one was a book on Quantitative aptitude by TIME. I found the book by TIME pretty useful, especially the Test papers with solved solutions.
The test was held in Christ college, which was a slight disappointment for me as I wanted it to be in IIMB, mainly because Aamir Khan was shooting there at that time. Anyways putting aside the disappointments the test turned out to be pretty easy one. The first part had 90 questions with 30 each for Quant, DI and Verbal, I attempted 20, 18 and 23 questions respectively. With some certainty I can state that 90% of my answers were right. The second part was a case study which had two questions or essays, unfortunately I don't remember the questions exactly but it was running along on the following lines.
1) Obama's decision to put a cap on executive salary
2) Indian PM's statement on limiting the executive salary.
The time limit was 30 minutes for answering both the essays.
I came out of the Exam hall feeling pretty pleased with my performance and with a sigh of relief, the exam was over and I could now get back to my lazy and slumbering ways during the weekends:)

Finally made it

Well, decided to start a new blog specifically meant for posts related to my take and experiences from the PGSEM course offered by IIM-B, An executive MBA stretching for 2 and 1/2 years in duration. I knew about this course way back in 2004, but finally decided to take the plunge into it only about 5 months back. The reason for this long delay was due to my long standing desire of getting a masters or even better, a PhD in engineering, but unfortunately I sat on the idea of getting one for a very long time and finally the embers of that desire died out.
My main reason for taking up this MBA course was frankly for the degree and the second reason was for the all round development that I would gain for eg, in terms of polishing my soft skills. I do hope to learn a lot of new knowledge but being a complete new bee to management it is all, still a big black box for me. I'm also not sure at this point whether I will be able to leverage this degree into any course change in my career in the future, but one thing is for sure I'm going to enjoy it.
The classes are still a couple of months away, so in the mean time I will post my experiences with the test and Interviews. This blog's primary purpose would be to record my experiences, so don't expect to find all the info here.