1 Down..7 to go.

As I walked out of the exam room, finishing my last exam of the term and walked up the red bricks stairs towards the now all too familiar ISB main building, with its trademark brick patterns, the thought that was going on in my mind was not about the exam, was not about the relief, was not about the celebrations late in the day (irrespective of how one performed in the exam!), but was about what we had managed to learn in just 5.5 weeks here in the first term and which ones were most close to my heart.
Economics came out as my favorite, not surprising because I have always had flair of math and logic. And the fact that this will be in some way relevant in our career sometime down the future also adds to the likeability.
What surprised me was the choice that my subconscious mind came up with for the second favorite subject.

It was marketing.
Now let me tell you, the average number of hours the junta out here studied for the marketing exam will be 1.21 hours with a standard deviation of 2 minutes. Yes. That’s it. This is one subject that has a costly textbook, a fancy one too, and I can bet you for a 1000 bucks that not more than 1 out of 100 people have gone through all the relevant chapters in preparation for the exam. (400 guys in the batch, work out the math!!)
How do you study marketing? Can you study marketing at all?
I mean, yeah, you can learn all those brand resonance models and push-pull strategy and value based pricing and all. But then, how much of it does a marketing professional get to use in their day job? Isn’t it more of a real-world-constraint-driven game? Will all these perfect models and strategies work in the real bad world?
This might be a fallacious argument with a lot of pitfalls and might be because of my lack of knowledge of the job profiles.
Anyways, the point is, I realized in that flash of moment, that I actually liked the subject, even though I am pretty sure that I am not made for marketing.
Let me get this straight. I don’t like marketing as a subject for which I have to study. Period.
But I like marketing as a science which helps me understand a lot of things which happens around me, which I was not able to understand without my newly gained (limited though!) knowledge.

Accounting came a third because this was a subject which was entirely new to me and I do not foresee myself using this in my career a lot. Yeah, when I do become a CEO and when my CFO (probably one of the CA’s from my class!) gets caught for a fraud, I wont be able to tell that “I don’t know accounting and left it to these guys!”

Statistics – well, all I can say is that I don’t fancy fitting lines and trying to figure out shapes out of nothing! (I know, I am bad at this!)

So the first term finished before we could say “Heteroscedasticity”. Yeah, that’s from the stats class and kind of in one word, represents what I feel about the subject. Something which is huge and cannot be conquered and exotic. I love the word, but not where it came from.

And yes, it’s official now. The rat race has begun. And no. Sarovar is not involved in this.