Making sense

On project submissions

I did not sleep the whole of the night between sunday and monday. That was because of the marketing management assignment submission. It was a study of the distribution channels of the alcohol industry in Lucknow. I had bravely but naively assumed that I could do it myself. But it turned out to be much more time consuming than i had thought, and had to wake up the rest of the team in the middle of the night to do their bit. The submission ended on a dissatisfying note for me, as there was a misunderstanding, the editing of the report cut out the meaty part of my analysis. All in all, the whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth.
So, to shake off the fatigue, I had to sleep the afternoon and the evening off yesterday. I woke up for dinner, and the hyped Southern Spice dinner( Southern Spice is a eat out in Lucknow which specialises in South Indian food; the Mess arranges special dinners sponsored by willing restaurants once in a long while) turned out be worse than the usual fare. There was only roti and dal available when I reached the mess as the food brought by the organizers had gotten over. I chose not to wait for the second order to arrive( which would have taken half an hour) and instead had a masala dosa in the canteen.
After the marathon effort on the marketing project, I needed to unwind. I worked on my part of another project report for a couple of hours and then watched a movie, Enemy at the Gates which I liked immensely( why did I not watch it before?) except that the ending was missing. Then I watched another movie 'wild things' and another today, 'Raising Victor Veigas' which is very good.
Then I sat down to write this blog. By choosing to write now, my first ever, I am consuming valuable time that would be well spent on the project report on job hopping in the Indian Industry that has to be submitted tomorrow.
MBA education stresses a lot on projects, reports and presentations because that is one way to make people work in a group, which we would be doing so much of in our jobs. We also need to get enough experience making those presentations and reports( my friends in the software industry assure me that managers in their companies make a lot of those). Many of these projects are on topics and matters where one cannot come up with tangible recommendations because of the nature of the subjects( which are unstructured). In such cases, one cannot do anything valuable in the projects. Also, because of the cramped schedules and the sheer number of them, most of all the projects submitted are not of good quality thus defeating any other purpose that they might have served.
Whatever the reason for giving them so much importance in the curriculum, these projects make life miserable 4 weeks out of the 10 that constitute a term.

This is week is one of those. I would now be leaving to work on another 30 page project report.

posted by Rajesh @ 1:32 AM