If you are an MBA, or are studying MBA, or are preparing for entrances, you must be familiar with the rigorous pothole filled routes that you need to pass through before getting an admission in a good MBA college. Firstly the concept of ‘a good MBA college’ is so subjective that it screws up with the mind of an aspirant throughout the preparation. I am pretty sure, even quantitative concepts asked in entrances are not that difficult to understand, than deciding which college to apply for.
And to the people who say, “Apply to every college. There is no loss in applying”, nobody here extracts oil from Saudi Arabia and makes money out of it. Hence the kind of money required to fill out forms of all the colleges can be manageable if you can convince a bank to give you a loan for filling out forms. But that again would be a good idea only if your role model is Vijay Mallya.
Now if you are a commerce student, chances are that you will hate engineers during the quant lectures. They will become an unexpected anathema to you who will shatter all your confidence and walk on the pieces of it. Their speed and accuracy is so envious that you, in fact, picture them doing an evil laugh after solving each sum. But if you are an engineering student, you get to sit on the other side of the table during lectures for the verbal section. You probably would have visualized commerce students doing an evil laugh when you went on to search the meaning of the word, ‘anathema’ that was written in the second line of this paragraph.
Before the exams season starts late in October, you’ve already given too many mocks. For each MBA entrance exam, you have appeared for at least five mocks. The exam season comes with mixed feelings. At some days you are in ‘bring it on’ mood, while the rest of the days you are in “Duniya mein aaye hai toh jeena hi padega (If you’ve come into the world, you must live)” mood.
You feel anxious and nervous because you think your preparation is not sufficient. You feel frightened because you did not score well in a few mocks. You feel guilty because you’ve spent way too much money in filling out forms. You feel excited because you know one of these days, would be your day. Although so many exams leave you distressed, some part of you is enjoying this enigmatic phase.
The last phase of your journey is the stringent never-ending group discussions and personal interviews. Questions like “Why MBA?” and “Tell me about yourself” have been asked so many times that you start giving out idealistic structured answers even to the relatives who ask, “What’s the plan after MBA?” This is the time, most of you will regret not getting a proper CGPA or not participating in any extracurricular activity. This is the time where your puraane paap hit you back in your face.
After all the phases are cleared, a new guilt and set of expectation emerge when you check out fees for different MBA colleges. You might have hated Arvind Kejriwal personally, but in this phase, you yourself become an Arvind Kejriwal and ask where exactly do they spend this kind of money? When you tell people that you spent such a sum of money, their reaction leaves you questioning your own decisions. The most common reaction would be, “Why spend this much money on MBA? Get a job, after two years, your worth will be the same.” God forbid if you get into a college far away from your city, you get to witness the over dramatic side of your friends.
Ignoring everything you finally end up in a college but the debate of ‘a good college’ still doesn’t end. You could have ended up in the best college possible, there’ll always be people who will be more opinionated than Arnab Goswami and will tell you that some other college that you didn’t end up in, is better than the college you are going to. But you’ve, by this time made peace with yourself. You are satiated and excited for the new journey that you’re about to start. And, although the journey of entrances was rolled up in disappointments and anxiety, you’ll always cherish the learning, the jitters of the result, the mystery every interview carried with it and most importantly, how you learned to deal with rejection.