A lot of starry-eyed MBA aspirants are conditioned to believe that getting an MBA degree is the solution to all their problems, leading them to behave like blinkered fanboys of b-schools and the process of getting through to a b-school. They then treat every stage of MBA preparation as an over-glorified affair and spend thousands on various types of entrance-exam coaching to learn the obvious.
At this stage begins the b-schooler hero-worship. Trouble is, that a whole lot of MBA students end up suffering from the Post-Acquisition Indifference Syndrome, because life as an MBA student doesn’t quite seem as sensational as was originally made out to be. You study a lot of material in b-school where the learning isn’t any more dazzling than ‘thirsty people need water’. According to Chuck_gopal:
“The marketing professor’s words in the comic are inspired from something I read when I was doing my MBA. In a moment of academic inspiration, I decided to read a book on published papers on marketing at MICA. I saw this 5-page study, replete with nice bullet points, graphs, and obviously a lot of research had gone behind it. Conclusion of the report: “At the end of this exhaustive study, we can conclude that children between 8-12 like watching TV.” Correct. And we always thought they were dissecting political arguments from The Economist, or learning about biological functions on Discovery Channel as one 21st century scholar proclaimed. Right?
But sometimes doing research like this is a necessary evil. Most companies are structured to shell out lakhs of rupees just to be told that pimply women use pimple-cream and biker dudes buy motorcycles. Like a professor at MICA summed up, “When the shit hits the fan, the marketing manager needs a research report to cover his head”.”
No wonder, that sometimes MBA students (those who undergo the awakening) stop seeing the big deal about getting through a business school.
But let this comic not discourage you from picking the brains of MBA students on PaGaLGuY or elsewhere! There are also a lot of MBA students who enjoy talking for hours about their preparation days. Form intelligent opinions about why you really need an MBA degree (“I am bored of my job” or “I want to be successful in life” don’t qualify) and whet them out with b-schoolers to get a reality check on your plans. Take all b-school propaganda with a pinch of salt and verify your perceptions about MBA, because even the top b-schools are just as fallible as anything else built by humans. But don’t end up being another Chatur !
Concept and Illustrations by chuck_gopal, graphics by Apurv. Deepak Gopalakrishnan aka Chuck aka chuck_gopal is a PG Wodehouse and Iron Maiden freak, who learned how to make better presentations and contextually use words of superfluous character length during his stint at MICA. He works in Bombay, and in his spare time, apart from scaring aspirants with cartoons like these, attends gigs, blogs and tweets.