A very happy new year from chennai to all of you!

Busy with interview prep and meeting good old friends :)

Back home after 8 months. Enjoying my time at home. Updates can wait :)

Year end break...

The one week year end break is coming up... tomorrow is the last day of exams and then, for the first time since we walked into this campus, we are off, for a whole week, through chirstmas and new year before we come back on the 5th of Jan for term 7.

Term 7 has been the most looked forward to term, though the reason is not the fantastic line of courses and professors that it offers. Its of course the interviews term, with a majority of the job interviews happening during the 6 weeks of this term. Its all going to be a blitz with people praying that their dream job becomes theirs as soon as possible, so that you dont have to smart with the tag of "not placed yet"...

The course line up for term 7 is such that, if not for the placements, everyone would have opted for the maximum 5 allowed... check this out...
Customer Focused Product Planning - Seenu Srinivasan (Stanford)
Advertising - Ajay Kalra (Carnegie Mellon)
International Finance - K John (NYU) & Ananth Sundaram (Thunderbird)
Commercial & Investment Banking - Greg F Udell (Indiana)
Information Technology Infrastructure - Saby Mitra (Georgia Tech)
Managing Strategic Partnerships - Phanish Puranam (LBS)
Economics of Strategy - Ram Shivakumar (Chicago)
Strategic Profitability Management - Bala Balachandran (Kellogg)
Logistics & Supply Chain Management - Narendra Agrawal (Santa Clara)
Capital Raising Strategies in Corporations - NR Prabhala (Maryland)
Negotiation Analysis - Madan Pillutla (LBS)
Creating Value from Technology: IT-Enabled Services and Strategies - Ravi Aron (Wharton)

We here are almost at the level of complaining to the acad office that they never should have lined up such terrific courses during the placements season but then, its a tough proposition adjusting them in other terms anyways...

For now, I am looking forward to finishing my Consumer Behaviour final exam tomorrow and leave this campus to go back home for the first time since I came here... I will be in chennai from the 27th through to the 2nd... If anyone reading this will be in chennai, drop me an e-mail at r_sankaranarayan at pgp2004 dot isb dot edu and I will be happy to meet or talk.

Biswajit's prophecy comes true ;)
http://in.rediff.com/money/2003/dec/22sld1.htm

Random thoughts...

Sitting in the LRC, I am trying hard to concentrate preparing for my "Pricing" finals tomorrow... I am beginning to get the feeling now that I am going slightly off the boil... I dont know if its placements thats distracting or its just the amount of work built up over time... I hate to think it is the amount of work, for in my belief, to some extent at least, it is hyped up, thanks to the mass of 200 of us saying the same thing again and again... its a mindset you cannot escape once you are in here but would do well to escape if you can...

I havent written about many things that have happened in the last two weeks... One, was Raghuram Rajan's visit... I had to drop his course midway through as I simply could not take the load, given the leadership summit work that was going on simultaneously... But he did address an audience comprising us, alums and some business folks from hyd about the future trends in global economy... Some recollections:

The US economy is recovering but we do not see a corresponding increase in employment... Why? Because there has been a structural change in the emplyoment scenario in the US... What typically happens in an economic cycle is that, during the downturn, industries, especially manufacturing fires labor and when the economy recovers, hires them back... But of late, manufacturing in the US has become do high tech that, these fired workers are no longer need to be hired back, even though the economy is looking up... In short, the lack of rise in employment in the US is more attributable to this than to the job flight to India. Japan is showing signs of recovery but its estimation of deflation, or for that matter, inflation is not perfect due to which, the signs of recovery have to be read with caution. There is a likelyhood that we will see personal consumption going up, which is certainly a positive sign of growth and recovery... Japan has tradionally been a export strong economy and will continue to be so... Europe is yet to get out of the slump and is probably going to find it the toughest, though the EURO is showing strength... The US dollar is weakening and the US deficit is a worrying factor in the long run... Given this and the fact that the returns on US treasury bonds is hoveing around 2%, it is quite possible that countries, which are still saving in the greenback may shift to the Euro or other currencies... This will be an interesting observation with potential trouble brewing for the US... But US personal consumption is going up and we may also see the deficit being serviced by the economy improving with the phase of personal consumption going up being followed by investments... For India, the primary focus area has to be infrastructure... China spends approx 40% of gdp on infrastructure and we here spend 2% (if i remember this right)... The focus on infrastructure is critical to the future of the India... Also, consistency in regulations and policies is also required to improve investor confidence, which is positive now... Its can be grown to higher levels by consistent policy statements from the fin minister... For infrastructure development, one or two projects like the golden quadrilateral will not suffice... Rural infrastructure is in bad shape and the government can use innovative methods to tie up with the private sector to finance improvement of the rural infrastructure... While the money can come from the private sector, the risk accompanying such investments can be covered by the government through consistent policy...

There were also interesting discussions on what to do with the huge forex reserves in India and what will be the implications of a currency deregulation of the chinese Yuan... Overall, it was two hours of great "Gyaan" :)

Today Im in the mood to blog... Im in some very good mood... :)

Just listened to "The Warriors of Heaven and Earth", the chinese movie for which A R Rahman has scored music...

First impression (from a die hard fan): Impressive as usual :)

AP First...

The state of Andhra Pradesh has been progressing rapidly and many give credit to the Cheif Minister, Chandrababu Naidu for that... Sure he deserves all the credit, but there have been an army of brains working behind him to ensure that AP becomes a leading state in India... One of them is Randeep Sudan, special secretary to the chief minister. He runs AP First , (Agency for Promoting and Facilitating Investment in Remote Services and Technology)

AP First's mission is to make Andhra Pradesh the world's preferred Business Process Outsourcing / Information Technology Enabled Services (BPO/ITES) destination. This is one of the pets of the dynamic CM...

Now what if I said they recruit MBAs to help develop the state, you can get to work with the top brass and the CM himself, you can get to play a part in improving the infrastructure in the state, promote destinations in AP to MNCs looking to set up base in India and do some good to the people of AP... Well, one of our alums is doing exactly the same with AP first and they are so happy with him that they are here again, to recruit from ISB...

Personally, I have always wanted to do good to the people but politics always put me off... I was never one for IAS but an opportunity like this, to work under some like the CM, well, very interesting...

Randeep is here in campus today, presenting the pre placement talk for AP first... I am part of a few invited to have lunch with him. Im looking forward to this...

The deluge of ppts is so excruitiating on the available time now that I missed the Wipro PPT yesterday... its kinda tough keeping track given all the end term work, assignments, project and the final exam prep... Somebody spare me! :)

And here some responses to some comments:

Where is this school you go 2?
Sahithi

Indian School of Business is in Hyderabad, India. Please visit www.isb.edu.
I had actually linked all the pictures and the logo to the website but somehow they have disappeared!! Blogger is playing games? Anyways, there is a link now. Please do visit when you find time.

I am guessing I am not the only one who wants a RSS feed of your blog - so here it is:
http://feeds.blogstreet.com/27763.rss

I created it at Blogstreet.com.

Nice blog Ramki. All the luck.
Prakash S

Thanks a ton, for the rss and the luck :)

Happy Birthday!Congratulations for winning a fortune ! And thank you for the LS updates.
Biswajit

Updates wanted on a regular basis ! Insider info :Rediff is going to carry out a slideshow on the ISB leadership summit + an interview with SB Mittal.
Biswajit

Thanks and yes sire! you will get your updates regularly from now onwards, given all the hectic work of the past few days are past us... Given that placements are approaching, you certainly have interesting info coming your way over the next couple of months...

Thanks for the comments guys.

Placements...

Placements are in full swing with Job postings coming in by the day... Everyday is a pre placement talk... today we had ICICI, Wipro and Colgate... Thus far we have had nearly 45 job postings, of which round 6 have been international... Goldman Sachs has posted a few openings... All the big names are there are in the pipeline...

And so, accompanied with this is the process of submitting Resumes and EOIs... The McK shortlist of 25 people was out today... that was 25 out of 111 who applied... there was a distinctive bias towards high CGPA and and IIT background or a CA background... Every nigh of mine here now goes in submitting EOIs, resumes etc etc... Researching companies, interview prep are the talk of the town... the Colgate GDs are happening tonight and possibly some interviews as well... they may be the first few offers on campus, though the real interview process starts only in Jan

Off to meet some EOI deadlines around midnight... Placement updates will come in thick and fast and I hope I will keep up with them in this blog... Life is rocking!!!

Finally...

Finally, I find some time for an update... the week gone by has been beyond words... The leadership summit followed by the alum reunion, "Solstice"...

Leadership Summit - Day 1: Wednesday

This was the day almost everyone in the campus has contributed for, for the past 4 months... Bright morning, beautiful day and participants from other schools were ready to take us on. The day started with the inauguration in the first event of the day and the summit, "Interface", a technology paper presentation competition. Organised by the Business Technology Club, in which I play a part, we had been working tirelessly, with dry runs until the day before, to ensure everyone, from the sponsors, to the judges to the participants were happy all the while. After a short inauguration the event kicked off with presentations by the 6 finalists, 3 from NITIE, one each from IIM A, C and ISB. The team from ISB won the contest, much to the delight of everyone around. Arti Gupta and Saurabh Khanna, both good friends of mine, were excellent in the way they covered the topic, the number one reason why they won according to the judges. The teams from NITIE and the one from IIM C were excellent to say the least and the presentation of the topic by IIM A was beyond words. It was a fitting start. The evening was reserved for the Entrepreneurship Case Writing contest, won fittingly by IIM A, followed by ISB. This was followed by some informals and good dinner.

Day 2: Thursday

This day also happened to be my birthday :) Morning was Brasstacks, a very interesting concept that Abhimanyu and Tushar from ISB conceived. We for students from different schools to team up and work together. So we had teams which had IIMs, ISB, XLRI. Pretty interesting. Combined with this was a stock market game, for which entry was thrown open in the morning. I was dragged into this and lo behold, ended up winning the game and 5000 bucks. The investment game required us to invest in the five teams participating in Brasstacks and live NSE stocks. The Nifty was going down and there was no money to be made in the two hour window we had. So, we took a gamle and invested all the money we had in the teams we thought would do well given intermediate financials in Brasstacks. This gamble worked. By birthday treats were paid for ;) The day ended with the Finfest, a divestment game devised by the Finance Club. In this one, I felt, the IIMs were far ahead of the ISB teams. IIM A and B won first and second respectively.

Day 3: Friday, the big day

this was the day when all the big honchos of the corporate world landed at ISB for some interesting panel discussions, themed "Think Asia". The focus was the emerging Asian economy, with topics varying from emerging industries, bottlenecks, nuances and advantages of doing business in Asia. The impressive list of speakers, lined up thanks mostly to some hard work by some of my mates here, made the day for the many delegates, media and alums who had wonderful takeaways from the four panel discussions. I wish I had all the time in the world to write pages and pages about all the takeaways :)

Solstice: The past two days have been a wild wild party at ISB, with alums from all over the world landing up here for our annual reunion... More about that tomorrow, for I am dead beat but have lots of assignments for the classes resuming tomorrow..

Have a class at 11 in the morning tomorrow and its back to the routine submissions, placements, EOIs and resume building... Oh what a depressing thought, after a rocking 5 days! ;)

A week to go for the leadership summit...

Its a week to go for the leadership summit and everyone associated with it is on overdrive... Calling up delegates, fixing up travel plans and accomodation, arranging pick ups, sending out mailers, confirming schedules of judges, students, speakers and visitors, dry runs of events to ensure time management, media arrangements, food, accomodation details, advertisements, sponsors... i can go on and on and on... immediately following the summit will be "solstice", the alumni reunion, for which many alums have confirmed participation... its going to be one big wild party for those two days... and lots of networking for openings as well... in between all this, the ppts keep coming... latest additions, TCS and Infotech Enterprises...

exciting next few days ahead... expect lots of interesting info...

Ppts galore...

Its beginning to drizzle ppts... Around 160 companies have everything but landed up on campus... Another 50-60 are still being talked to... The first set of shortlists, from J D Power, singapore were out today... Suddenly, the focus of the whole campus is shifting... the only interesting thing in acads is we looking forward to raghuram rajan's arrival for the second part of the "cases in corp fin course"...

So much more to write... so little time!!!