Volte Face at IIM L

10.00 AM IIM L @ IIM B

GD Topic: "Parliament sessions are a waste of public money"
No of people: 10 - 2 = 8
10 mins to write 150 words on topic

GD starts
Me chip in 4 times..with points about:
(1) Parliament elected by US and money paid by US so we must be responsible
(2) Airing of parliament sessions so that they are transparent
(3) Media projection.. in case of 'cash for questions' scam
(4) Attendance during sessions.

GD dominated by 4 people, got very little chance to speak
becomes redundant after a point of time.. so sort of became quite towards the last 5 mins.. and began praying as to when is this thing going to stop...?

Overall: not satisfied with performance.

Interview:
Panel: P1: Strict Lady (Prof of Mgmt Strategy); P2: Belly man (Prof of Agri Bussiness Mgmt)

P1: So how many calls have u got?
P1: You must be very proud?
P1: First time CAT?
P1: Trend of Engg joining MBA
P2: certificates please.
P1: What do u do in your free time
P1: So what do you do at job?
P1: What difficulties did u face
P1: What are first year courses in MBA
P1: So if all the technical strength goes off, what will happen?
P1: So how would you be interested in studying them
P2: So why should there be so many degrees..why not make all of them one single course
P2: So why should civil/eee enggs join IT.. they don't know anything of coding.
P1 & P2: Some discussion regarding NIIT course i did
P2: What's the full form of NIIT, why didn't u write it down?
P2: Why didn't u write NIIT, Chennai
P2: for eg. u say IIM,Lucknow.
P2: why MBA from IIM and not from Anna University
(trying to get into a stress mode)
P2: Write down full form of NIIT in the form
P2: Why write it in small letters
P2: Instruction says Capital Letters
P2: So u have no regards for instructions.is it?.. all these are useless things
P2: So have u heard of Right for information?
Me: Right to information Act??
P2: Ya that only.. tell something about it
P2: Is there any conditions? is it mandatory?
P2: Is there any procedure?
P2: Why should the request be in writing on a form and not oral?
P2: So if i my company's profits depend on some infomation, and the govt refuses to disclose the information?
P2: So what is more important provisions or efficiency?
P2: So is it better to have an informal work culture or a strict work culture?
P2: Thank you Mr. Bobby.. and something else

Okayish performance

Lets see...

The Debacle that was IIM I

The start of the long journey...
9.00 AM Monday 13th Feb. IIM I @ IIM B
My venture into the realms of the unknown.
I get to meet Akshay.
All of us asslmbel at K-23. Attendance at 9.05, at around 9.20 prof comes and reads out names. All of us are split into 3 batches of around 7 in each batch.
My group was a pretty nice group. 6 guys + 1 girl. None of them were of the dominating type.
We are lead into a meeting room at the ground floor. We are alloted places, and i'm at the beginning of the horse shoe arrangement.
Case study given :
Something about company Satpal & issues between Ahmed and the workers under him. Issue of retrenchment affecting morale of workers and thereby causing low productivity.
at the end of 5 mins,
P1 says start...
and wot the.. there is silence for around 4 secs and finally one of them start off by defining the problem. I came in 3rd and also chipped in around 3-4 times at regular intervals, mostly adding new points.at the end of 15 mins, P1 says stop, and asks to write summary.
I had noted down such a lot of points during the GD that i couldn't finish my summary, and was dangling in mid sentence with the last word as : competency... eek.

My ratings : GD : 4.0/5.0,
Summary : 3.5/5.0

We are sent out and interview session starts, i'm the first to be called in.
(i'll mostly just be putting in the questions)
P1: Can i have ur files
P2: What is the difference between IT & CSE
Me: Tell out what seriously is the only differnce i feel, IT->web programming, CSE->harware oriented.... this worked out at the TIME Mock PI,..sadly didn't work out here... they expected an ans that was suiting to their tastes...
[ Best ans: CSE deals more with as to how the computer works in order to solve problems..more
technical; IT : deals more into how computers can be used to manage infomation.. more focussed on programming and applications ] evolution : EEE->CSE->IT
P2: Why did u choose IT
P2: If i'm a student, tell me as to why i should IT
P2: What are the prospects of some1 who's done IT & someone who's done CSEMe: Something about electronics vs programming
P2: So why does the industry need 2 different branches if it makes no differentiation
Me: *stumped*
[end of first discussion]
P2: Ok so tell me about the sort of work u do at job...
Me: Yeah...start... go on and on.. and then stop
P2: Ok so tell me in the most non-technical terms what u r doing at work..
Me: (Huh.. my previous explanation was totally non-technical).. ok.. repeat the same thing again..
P2: So what was the scenario before this product, how is this product going to help?P2: So what is the term for what this product is supposed to do?
Me: data analysis?
P2: naa..
Me: some technical term?
P2: yea..
Me: Data Mining?
P2: Yea,.. so is ur production going into that aspect..?
Me: No..
[End of second discussion]
P1: (the technical fellow..catching on to Datamining).. What is Datamining
P1: Datawarehouse?
P1: Difference from DB?
P1: Flat structure
P1: Star schema?
P1: RDBMS?
P1: difference between Flat-Schema-DB..
Me: (huh.. they r not comparable)..
[End of third discussion]
P1: diff between 8080 & Pentium
Me: majorly screwed up..gave everything other than the most important feature..i.e.. no of transistors...
P1: latest Pentinum?
Me: Duo-Core..
P1&P2: not happy
P1: differnce between 32-bit & 64-bit
P1: competitor to Pentium
P1: Why is AMD better than pentium inspite of less clock cycle?
Me: *stumped*
[End of fourth discussion]
P1: women chief minssters..
Me: tell 3 of them except for last name of vasundhara... tells it as "Scindia" instead of "Rajse"P1: Are u sure,.. what about Bihar, MP..?
Me: sure
P1: CM of MP..
Me: *stumped*
P1: Governor of RBIMe: YVReddy
P1: VP of IndiaMe: *stumped* How dumb of me...told the last vp's name...eekP1: Which is the most literate State?
P1: Are u sure? What about Mizoram?
P1: How do u measure literacy?
Me: *stumped* say somethign about Primary education then changes to read & write
[Correct Ans: Any person above the age of 7 who knows to read & write with
understanding any language]
P1: computer litracy? how is it defined?
P1: is there such a term?
[end of fifth discussion]
P2: under which ministry is nss formed
Me: *stumpted*
[Correct ans: min. of youth welfare]
P1: ok so u like drawing, tell me some famous cartoonists of india
Me: Narayanan...man how did i confuse Narayanan for Laxman
P1: any one else..?
Me: Keshav of Hindu..
P1: did narayanan draw in hindu
P2: Oh so u like reading Hindu..
P1: anyone else
Me.. *stumped*
[end of sixth discussion]
P2: so tell me something apart from programming that occupies ur mind always.
Me: online programming contests.. ;-)
[end of seventh discussion]

Inteview rating [1.5/5.0]

Was confindent about the wrong answers i gave.Made a lot of silly mistakes, forgot important data, mixed up answers, did everything possible to commit suicide.
I know I's surely not gonna take me...
Hoping for the best at the next one.

The Enlightenment

Just as the euphoria and daze over the unexpected subsides, so does the anxiety and unpredictability of the future course of events loom ahead, and suddenly i feel as though i had a big crashlanding experience.

The experience on the road to enlightenment is a journey by itself. It has opened me up to the sheer beauty of diversifying ur knowledge. Suddenly i get the feeling..."where was i all this while... while so much happened all around the world"... From being a technie guy... sorta i'v begun to fall in love with the most unlikely of bedfellows... Economics, Politics, Society.... wow, and just dwelving a little into those huge topics just cases a tingle in my thoughts... Suddenly i'v begun to understand the concepts of currency, stock, inflation, economy, idealogies, societies, ... although at a superficial level as of now... and the more i gather knowledge about it, the more i'm beginning to fall in love with it.

That not just being the end of it... there's more to it... coming back to the technie part of me, i'v just graduated from the 'technie' to the 'super technie' level,... again with superficial understand of concepts related to "cognition"....

(1) Fuzzy logic : The mathematical modelling of situations involving partial states...

(2) Neural Networks : The process of learning based on associating a cost function ... to come to recollect supervised/unsupervised/reinforced... gradient descent, perceptron, cognitron (Hopfield), back propogation...

(3) Aritifical Intelligence : Production of machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behaviour ... Pattern recognition, NLP...

(4) Expert systems. : Programs that are made of rules to analyze information about a specific se t of problems so as to come up with a set of recommendations.... concepts of fwd/bkwd chaining & confidences. Elements involve Knowledge base, Production rule and Inference engine. Main point here is that rules are encoded in datastructures, so to upgrade the system u merely have to expand the knowledge base rather than change the procedures... wow. Eg. Clippy, Dendral, Mycin, Caduceus, Prolog

(5) Game Theory : Branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic situations where players choose different actions to maximise returns.. concepts of zero-sum, Nash Equilibrium and the well known examples o f hawk-dove,hare-stag and prisoner's dilemma. Gametheory is now widely used in economics for auctions, voting; Biology for evolutionary predictions; Human behaviour; Computer games, etc.

If u have time go thro' Prisoner's dilemma, it's something that all of us face in a real life, it basically shows the paradox involved between trust and self-interest. wow!