Read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Those were annoying waitlists. Here are some that will impact life in a big way.
The year began with great expectations to join one of the top business schools in India; in full time business (Exec) programs offered by IIMA, IIMC and ISB; in that order, for my own reasons.
By the time Ahmedabad opened its online applications in April, I was ready to register; was among the first few of 1350 to do so. But the journey ahead would prove to be a long one.
In the next three weeks, I had to complete the forms for IIMC, get recos from across multiple time-zones and send the docket out to Calcutta. "If things have to go wrong, they will. If they do not have to, they still will". Cutting the long story short, my application reached on the day after the last date. Between the time I sent out the application and I was shortlisted to the interviews, I moved back home. In mid-August, the interview happened. It went well, by most standards. Regardless of that, the bottomline was that I was not yet in. I was on the fourth waitlist this year.
Meanwhile, the Ahmedabad application was submitted and interview date announced. As luck would have it, the interview was in the same location as the Calcutta interview has been. I put aside any thoughts of destiny around the coincidence of interview location. If the interview has opinions flying back and forth , a few moments of laughter and a smiling panel at the end, I think I am allowed to think it went well. But I would not know for another month.
While waiting for the Ahmedabad results, the most practical thing to do was to apply for Round 2 of ISB. ISB application process is perhaps the most technologically mature one, much like that of INSEAD and a couple of tier-1 schools in the US (I have filled my share of recos for a few folks). Every part of the process, including recos is online. It makes life much easier in one way. But automation also requires you to follow the instructions to the T. It would be a cakewalk I had been told, by a friend of mine who had studied at ISB. So, I was taken aback when ISB sent me a regret mail a few weeks after that.
Since then, I have thought a little more about it. What stood out is the fact that I was not even shortlisted for the interview. (Without leading you to any conclusion, I would like to add that later I was to find out that many others with my profile or more experience had been in the same predicament). So, while this did not put me in a waitlist, my being on the waitlist of Calcutta gained more significance. More so because it was a little over a month before the term at Calcutta would begin. Chances were getting slimmer by the day.
So, while I was nursing the regret message and the vacuum of Calcutta waitlist and IIM Ahmedabad results, I started making enquiries about the waitlist mechanisms in the latter schools. It turned out that Ahmedabad waitlist had gotten fully used last year. That was good news, but each year is different. So, I braced myself just in case some surpise were to be awaiting around the corner.
No surprise (not no regret) then, that Ahmedabad put me on the waitlist. Those were undoubtedly the most harrowing days of the year. Much of November was not sweet at all. Fifth waitlist of the year had me in its grip.
No one said life was easy, but one has to be ready. It was I then sent out my scores to INSEAD, the first school I thought about outside India, in such case that the India story did not work out. I had already sent my scores to another British school earlier.I was getting reminders from them about application deadlines. I repeat, those were the most harrowing days of this year.
In the middle of the last week of November when the first set of waitlisted folks were bumped up by Ahmedabad, came the most gratifying email I have received this year, or life maybe? I think I need not say more.
Looking back, all's well. But this has been a year of waitlists, down to the penultimate month. With this, I will end this note, this year, and the waitlist saga.
Wish you a very Happy New Year 2008!
2007-12-28
2007: A year of waitlists: Part 2
If not already done, read Part 1 here.
After touchdown at Miami and arriving 15 hours too late to our 4-Star Hotel, we were in for a bigger surprise when at the swank reception of the hotel, we were told that our reservation stood cancelled. What the heavens was happening?
Earlier, the previous evening, I had called up The Hotel and told them that we would be arriving half-a-day late, and had grudgingly consented that half of our two-night charges would be flushed away. Apparently, after talking to me, the night operator, off duty then, had messed it all up.
Budget travellers have quite a few options in the American travel 'system'. One of them is a service called Hotwire.com. Basically, you provide your budget range for a nightcap and the system sets-up a 'blind reservation' with a multi-star hotel. This means that until you make the payment, you are privy to only the facilities offered at the location; it is not easy/possible to guess the exact hotel they are offering you. But the promise is that you will not be disappointed. We were not.
Such services exist for two reasons. One is the proliferation of e-commerce in tourism makes way for creative business models. The second is the fact that doing this allows hotels to fill rooms for a cheaper rate, especially during lean periods of the year. If you will, it is an effective yield management strategy, much like how airlines sell $25 air tickets. It works well for all hotels in such consortia, since people are allocated hotels in a category ,probably, in a round-robin fashion. It works well for the travellers.
The problem happens when a problem happens. What I mean is that when there is a change in plan, you are now required to deal with two parties- Hotwire.com and The Hotel in this case. I had talked to The Hotel. They never told me I had to talk to Hotwire. But yet, the night attendant confirmed the change of plan.
Two things helped me resolve the quandary. Firstly, when the manager refused to acknowledge the fact that we had called, I showed him the call record on my cellphone. It showed that I had been on the call for all of three and a half minutes.
Secondly, the Hotwire.com services work like an open-market. Democracy is supreme here, since the services thrive on user-feedback, much like e-Bay. A brief mention this fact brought new perspective to things, endingour second waitlist of the year.
Knowing the lie of the land is important for any traveller. Yahoo! Maps and Mapquest are definitely up there when it comes to accuracy and reliability. But traffic patterns are another thing altogether. Then again, Florida is a pensioners paradise, despite the glamour and youth thronging the place. The speedlimits are lower than in other states to cater to the majority senior population. This was something to be expected but came as a surprise to us.
Additonally, the drive through The Keys to reach Key West is on several narrow several-miles-long bridges separating the Gulf of Mexico from Atlantic Ocean. These bridges have long stretches of no-passing zones. All this added up to our reaching the rendevous point of water-adventure cruise at Key West, less than 10 minutes before yacht took off. Thus ended third waitlist this year.
I will end the chronicle of our Florida trip by saying that in the midst of this canonball run, my wife and I had the best time of our life, or should I just say 2007.
The waitlist saga continues in Part 3.
After touchdown at Miami and arriving 15 hours too late to our 4-Star Hotel, we were in for a bigger surprise when at the swank reception of the hotel, we were told that our reservation stood cancelled. What the heavens was happening?
Earlier, the previous evening, I had called up The Hotel and told them that we would be arriving half-a-day late, and had grudgingly consented that half of our two-night charges would be flushed away. Apparently, after talking to me, the night operator, off duty then, had messed it all up.
Budget travellers have quite a few options in the American travel 'system'. One of them is a service called Hotwire.com. Basically, you provide your budget range for a nightcap and the system sets-up a 'blind reservation' with a multi-star hotel. This means that until you make the payment, you are privy to only the facilities offered at the location; it is not easy/possible to guess the exact hotel they are offering you. But the promise is that you will not be disappointed. We were not.
Such services exist for two reasons. One is the proliferation of e-commerce in tourism makes way for creative business models. The second is the fact that doing this allows hotels to fill rooms for a cheaper rate, especially during lean periods of the year. If you will, it is an effective yield management strategy, much like how airlines sell $25 air tickets. It works well for all hotels in such consortia, since people are allocated hotels in a category ,probably, in a round-robin fashion. It works well for the travellers.
The problem happens when a problem happens. What I mean is that when there is a change in plan, you are now required to deal with two parties- Hotwire.com and The Hotel in this case. I had talked to The Hotel. They never told me I had to talk to Hotwire. But yet, the night attendant confirmed the change of plan.
Two things helped me resolve the quandary. Firstly, when the manager refused to acknowledge the fact that we had called, I showed him the call record on my cellphone. It showed that I had been on the call for all of three and a half minutes.
Secondly, the Hotwire.com services work like an open-market. Democracy is supreme here, since the services thrive on user-feedback, much like e-Bay. A brief mention this fact brought new perspective to things, endingour second waitlist of the year.
Knowing the lie of the land is important for any traveller. Yahoo! Maps and Mapquest are definitely up there when it comes to accuracy and reliability. But traffic patterns are another thing altogether. Then again, Florida is a pensioners paradise, despite the glamour and youth thronging the place. The speedlimits are lower than in other states to cater to the majority senior population. This was something to be expected but came as a surprise to us.
Additonally, the drive through The Keys to reach Key West is on several narrow several-miles-long bridges separating the Gulf of Mexico from Atlantic Ocean. These bridges have long stretches of no-passing zones. All this added up to our reaching the rendevous point of water-adventure cruise at Key West, less than 10 minutes before yacht took off. Thus ended third waitlist this year.
I will end the chronicle of our Florida trip by saying that in the midst of this canonball run, my wife and I had the best time of our life, or should I just say 2007.
The waitlist saga continues in Part 3.
2007-12-27
2007: A year of waitlists: Part 1
This has been a year of waitlists. A turn of a New Year is a good time to recall our escapades, remembering that, while planning anything can be fun, seeing it go haywire and then unravelling the mess and coming out gleaming can be more fun.
It all began with booking tickets to visit Florida. Having taken over the portfolio of managing all our travel plans (and more), my wife booked 'special price' tickets to Miami around 120 days in advance.It saved us quite a few greenbacks and I, though wary of perils of nonrefundable tickets, was optimistic of local weather conditions in future(!). Choreographed to perfection - we even had decided on places for dinner and lunch in Miami and Key West, a couple of months before the travel date- we thought nothing could come in our way (somewhat).
Weather gods, meanwhile, had been planning their own little thingy. Six hours before ETD, our flight to Miami got delayed. Two hours later it got cancelled. 30 minutes later United Airlines dumped us, literally, on to the next day, Friday, morning flight at Six with American Airlines. We left home at 3:45 AM to be there ahead of everyone, only to realize we had undermined everyone else's determination. An hour of hoarse shouting at UA and AA, who kept shirking the responsibility about why we were being treated like a football at FIFA, intensely kicked around, only yielded that everyone was helpless; and we were 11th down the waitlist of passengers who could just make it to the 8 AM out of O'Hare.We had an option of taking the 1 PM confirmed seat. In the face of the fact that we had already lost a night's prepaid stay at a 4 star hotel in Miami, the choice was easy.
Being in the thick of things brought us face to face with how airline companies do yield management. They have a few very important tools to beat the holiday season nightmares. One of them is overbooking. Some passengers cancel out (not a statistical impossibility that) and those tickets are sold at a premium. Some passengers don't mind selling their tickets back to airlines in exchange for travel vouchers at the same time delaying their own travel to any of the next few flights out. Lastly, the most important 'investment', a passenger realizes, is to be on the loyalty programs of airlines. Because, when a flight is cancelled, or when overbooked people are moved around Loyalty card holders make it to the top of waiting lists. I will not argue with that, since if I were running the business, I may just run it the same way.
In the next two hours we would count our chances of getting on that plan a hundred times, confirming with each other, every time the boarding gate attendant announced a name cleared for boarding. We were willing to forgive them for mis-pronouncing our names, as long as we made it on board. Not until Six minutes before the plane doors would close, were we told that we were cleared. That was the end of our first waitlist.
But wait, the story has only started!
It all began with booking tickets to visit Florida. Having taken over the portfolio of managing all our travel plans (and more), my wife booked 'special price' tickets to Miami around 120 days in advance.It saved us quite a few greenbacks and I, though wary of perils of nonrefundable tickets, was optimistic of local weather conditions in future(!). Choreographed to perfection - we even had decided on places for dinner and lunch in Miami and Key West, a couple of months before the travel date- we thought nothing could come in our way (somewhat).
Weather gods, meanwhile, had been planning their own little thingy. Six hours before ETD, our flight to Miami got delayed. Two hours later it got cancelled. 30 minutes later United Airlines dumped us, literally, on to the next day, Friday, morning flight at Six with American Airlines. We left home at 3:45 AM to be there ahead of everyone, only to realize we had undermined everyone else's determination. An hour of hoarse shouting at UA and AA, who kept shirking the responsibility about why we were being treated like a football at FIFA, intensely kicked around, only yielded that everyone was helpless; and we were 11th down the waitlist of passengers who could just make it to the 8 AM out of O'Hare.We had an option of taking the 1 PM confirmed seat. In the face of the fact that we had already lost a night's prepaid stay at a 4 star hotel in Miami, the choice was easy.
Being in the thick of things brought us face to face with how airline companies do yield management. They have a few very important tools to beat the holiday season nightmares. One of them is overbooking. Some passengers cancel out (not a statistical impossibility that) and those tickets are sold at a premium. Some passengers don't mind selling their tickets back to airlines in exchange for travel vouchers at the same time delaying their own travel to any of the next few flights out. Lastly, the most important 'investment', a passenger realizes, is to be on the loyalty programs of airlines. Because, when a flight is cancelled, or when overbooked people are moved around Loyalty card holders make it to the top of waiting lists. I will not argue with that, since if I were running the business, I may just run it the same way.
In the next two hours we would count our chances of getting on that plan a hundred times, confirming with each other, every time the boarding gate attendant announced a name cleared for boarding. We were willing to forgive them for mis-pronouncing our names, as long as we made it on board. Not until Six minutes before the plane doors would close, were we told that we were cleared. That was the end of our first waitlist.
But wait, the story has only started!
2007-12-05
Review of 'Snapshots from hell- The making of an MBA':
Set in the recent past,1988-1990, this book published in 1994 is a very funny, honest and absorbing take on the life of a Stanford MBA student. The author, Peter Robinson, does not spare himself or the college in describing his emotional roller coaster ride of realising his ambition to be a business graduate. With brutal honestness Robinson recounts, in first person narrative, his fears, failures and successes in overcoming the natural Poet (In Stanford lingo, a person who has no significant engineering, mathematical or financial educational background) in him while grappling with the quantitative-heavy Stanford syllabus.
This is a fictionalised autobiography in that the incidents in the story are all true and the protagonist or the observer is the author himself while the names, which could feasibly be changed have been masked. The author admits that 'there was no point in masking popular personalities' and so some of them from his friends' circle or faculty have been retained. Focussing primarily the first year and the summer internship period, Robinson traces his daily life with quotations from his personal journal. The natural flair of rhetoric that the author possesses is quite evident in three places: his pre-Stanford position as a speech writer for President Reagan; Robinson's own journal entries (no doubt written under heavy B-school-pressure) and the wit in storytelling itself.
The book is useful to any b-school student. But, it is especially required to be read by any student who is entering a well-placed or top b-school anywhere, as the philosophy or pedagogy of Stanford (like that of other global top b-schools) is bound to have influenced his or her school's didactics. What make this book timeless are the principles of selection and teaching of Stanford that are only pioneering and not transient, meaning that with time the best practices will only spread globally. The pedagogy and rigor influence a student's life significantly and therefore the experiences are bound to be similar. Today, this is especially true to India because we are witnessiing a globalisation of b-school education here, not suprisingly due to the free-market capitalisation being attempted by India, the growing demand for globally-experienced b-school graduates in Indian mainstream economy and the rise in ambition owing to affordability of quality b-school education. Of course, there are also more than ever Indian students who are able to afford and embrace international business schools.
The reader, especially, if he is in the target audience described earlier will instantly empathise with the author since within the first few pages, the author gives examples of various types of questions and analyses (and answer with diagrams) discussed in the class that added to the latter's misery. The reader thereby gets the benefit of learning about the mindset expected of a b-school student. The author describes with a natural sense of humour, his tribulations in mastering the apparently simple concepts (for the non-Poets) all along doubting his fitment in the Stanford's scheme of things.
During the course of the story, one also gets a glance at the recent history of the school and an understanding of the factors that challenged and led to the evolution of some of the top schools in the US. In the process of understanding the author's student-life, the readers are bound to get satisfactory answers to whether it was all worth it for the author and by extension lead to an introspection of their own motives. Of course, everything is relative and situational and then the book itself is not instructive; but, the subtle impact is lasting.
Wit, honesty and brevity are the key take-aways from Robinson's style.This is an unputdownable book and a must read for all b-school aspirants; an almost 'rite of passage' as I had been told.
Set in the recent past,1988-1990, this book published in 1994 is a very funny, honest and absorbing take on the life of a Stanford MBA student. The author, Peter Robinson, does not spare himself or the college in describing his emotional roller coaster ride of realising his ambition to be a business graduate. With brutal honestness Robinson recounts, in first person narrative, his fears, failures and successes in overcoming the natural Poet (In Stanford lingo, a person who has no significant engineering, mathematical or financial educational background) in him while grappling with the quantitative-heavy Stanford syllabus.
This is a fictionalised autobiography in that the incidents in the story are all true and the protagonist or the observer is the author himself while the names, which could feasibly be changed have been masked. The author admits that 'there was no point in masking popular personalities' and so some of them from his friends' circle or faculty have been retained. Focussing primarily the first year and the summer internship period, Robinson traces his daily life with quotations from his personal journal. The natural flair of rhetoric that the author possesses is quite evident in three places: his pre-Stanford position as a speech writer for President Reagan; Robinson's own journal entries (no doubt written under heavy B-school-pressure) and the wit in storytelling itself.
The book is useful to any b-school student. But, it is especially required to be read by any student who is entering a well-placed or top b-school anywhere, as the philosophy or pedagogy of Stanford (like that of other global top b-schools) is bound to have influenced his or her school's didactics. What make this book timeless are the principles of selection and teaching of Stanford that are only pioneering and not transient, meaning that with time the best practices will only spread globally. The pedagogy and rigor influence a student's life significantly and therefore the experiences are bound to be similar. Today, this is especially true to India because we are witnessiing a globalisation of b-school education here, not suprisingly due to the free-market capitalisation being attempted by India, the growing demand for globally-experienced b-school graduates in Indian mainstream economy and the rise in ambition owing to affordability of quality b-school education. Of course, there are also more than ever Indian students who are able to afford and embrace international business schools.
The reader, especially, if he is in the target audience described earlier will instantly empathise with the author since within the first few pages, the author gives examples of various types of questions and analyses (and answer with diagrams) discussed in the class that added to the latter's misery. The reader thereby gets the benefit of learning about the mindset expected of a b-school student. The author describes with a natural sense of humour, his tribulations in mastering the apparently simple concepts (for the non-Poets) all along doubting his fitment in the Stanford's scheme of things.
During the course of the story, one also gets a glance at the recent history of the school and an understanding of the factors that challenged and led to the evolution of some of the top schools in the US. In the process of understanding the author's student-life, the readers are bound to get satisfactory answers to whether it was all worth it for the author and by extension lead to an introspection of their own motives. Of course, everything is relative and situational and then the book itself is not instructive; but, the subtle impact is lasting.
Wit, honesty and brevity are the key take-aways from Robinson's style.This is an unputdownable book and a must read for all b-school aspirants; an almost 'rite of passage' as I had been told.
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