Quarter 2 - Week 5

Funny how when you have exams coming up, every topic seems to make sense.

I must have spent quite a lot of time trying to read the Managing Organizations class binder AND the book, or even BizStats (Complete Business Statistics, ahem!) for that matter... I would invariably (and very bizarrely) fall asleep after 4 minutes and 22 seconds.. either that, or my mind would wander and I'd end up thinking of horses(wtf?!). Weeks would just pass by, and my book would be open on page 3. everyday.

But when midterms come up (like the ManOrg one this week, or the BizStats quiz on the very same day), suddenly the book opens up to you, and you actually understand the stuff that's in it. Remember I was cribbing about how I wasn't understanding jack about Random Variables in the BizStats class? One look at the book, and the two and 2 came together.. :). I was on a roll, in two days I had managed to read up the portions for the BizStats test. On Thursday, good ol' me started reading up for the test on Managing Organizations. THE mid-term I might add. The exam was on Saturday. *The mission impossible tune was running through my mind the whole evening, with a horse galloping for good effect*. In any case, I managed to cross 3 pages and reached the end of two articles... TWO! Unfortunately, it was 1 AM that night (or morning), so nobody came by to give me an award.

The next morning, I groggily woke up at 6(the alarm rang at 6, but the bed was really glued to me and wouldnt let me go, so I somehow fought it and got out by 6.45... The Battle of the Bed, every Friday and Saturday at 6 AM, watch it to believe it), and rushed to class by 7.45. In the Macro Economics class, we got the results of our last quiz, I'd got a 5 on 10. Whoopee, I thought! And then the prof says "Anyone with 6 and below, please come by and meet me, we need to go over your fundamentals.. If you have any doubts, we can clear them up". Whaaa?!?! I thought 5 was good..! We then proceeded to discuss our quiz, and we watched as all our defenses went out the window (or were unceremoniously thrown out the window, is more like it). That quiz was just too cool, tested all our fundamentals with the most basic of questions! Damn. And some guys had the audacity to get 10 on 10 in it. The nerve!

In Managing Organizations, we tried to fish for the type of questions he'd give us... there were constant questions about "Sir, what should we read for tomorrow? The binder or the book?" and the prof, time and again, said "See, whatever is covered till today is coming tomorrow. I cant say that nothing will come from the binder, but you definitely have to read from the book." After all these questions had been answered, one student asked "Sir, what should we read for tomorrow? The binder or the book?". I think the prof got pissed. His voice seemed just a leeeetle more menacing than usual. After he STRONGLY addressed this question for the last time, we got down to the day's case. It was about a company which had quite a few divisions, and they were struggling with coming up with new innovative products because of their horizontal/differentiated structure (Ahaah! Article 2!! It's useful! For those who dont know, when work is broken down into specific areas/tasks, then those particular areas/divisions kinda get divided from the others, so they're distinct. They can then focus on that area and get a whole lot better at it. Unfortunately, that tends to bring communication down by quite a few notches due to inter-team alienation).

So we discussed and decided it would be a good idea, to pluck one guy out of each division, get them together to build and innovate, and once they're done send the prototype to the normal divisions to efficiently build it. That way communication is not an issue, since they're in a temporary team and you overcome the issue of working together. Apparently, this is called integration (bringing these different teams together). So when you do both differentiation and integration, that's when you are being ambidextrous, since you can be efficient and innovate at the same time. The engineer in me kept yelling all the time, which idiot would first differentiate and then integrate, you could have left it as it was in the first place! Stupid engineer should have read Article 9. (I wasn't there yet.... yet!). I remember something about complexity, formalization and centralization being thrown around (All from article 2!! Looks like I wasnt the only guy reading the articles for the first time!), the best thing was the prof was agreeing with us. Looks like we were doing something right after all!

In BizStats, we discussed the Continuous (Uniform and Exponential - distributed over time), Normal Distribution. I had read this because it was coming for the quiz, so yeah, I already knew the stuff he was going to talk about. That was till he started talking. That jackrabbit can still hop around randomly, even when you've read the random stuff in advance! Goes to prove, you can't predict random, even if you've read random. Aaargghhh! Anyway, he was talking about how we can map these variables, and proceeded to give us some pretty cool live examples.

When class was done, the newborn manager in me began calculating. You have another 7 articles to read. Around 6 chapters in the book too... which everyone was saying was an irritating book in the first place, apparently the articles were way better. On top of that, my facebook horoscope had very plainly said that I was supposed to focus on the task at hand, and not worry about distractions, not now. Taking the advice of a virtual fake, I ended up not going to work so I could study at home. I had taken the horses into account, so according to my calculations... I would be done by 7 AM on Sunday(Wait, what??!). I didnt have the time, so me-manager decided that I should skip the book, and only read the articles. I was finally done by 11 PM. Then the me-engineer who was happily sleeping all along, woke up and said, you've read the articles, you can read the book till 1 AM. At 20 pages per chapter, you only have to read 80 pages, skip the first two chapters. Stoopid logical me-engineer. But very tempting advice, so I did it. And promptly kept falling asleep, even the four horses that were galloping around were not able to wake me up. Once I was done (or had given up), I fell asleep and thankfully, didnt have any nightmares about the two oncoming tests. Funny, how the horses always ride without the mares and vice-versa.

The next morning in Macro Economics, we studied the IS part of the IS-LF model, honestly, I was thinking about the two tests, so I only remember the part where we talked about how the GDP will rise only if the investors WANT to invest and the banks want to lend. That's why we kept seeing articles like "RBI prods State Banks to lower interest rates". There were some math formulae which linked all this stuff, and other blah blah. It was interesting, but my mind was elsewhere.

In the Managing organizations test, I wasn't lost.. but I wasn't found either. Some of the terms were alien to what we read in the articles OR the book. Even the me-engineer remembered that some terms weren't there in the book for sure! Anyway, the prof had been smart in ensuring that there were negative marks. Since half the course was full fundas, he didn't want us coming up with our own.. so he said for every wrong answer, minus one mark. That hopefully deterred some of us from guessing. Didn't deter me though, so I look forward to one big egg when the results come out.

The BizStats quiz was even better. Two very simple looking questions. And I didn't know how to solve them. I was cursing me-engineer because I was awake till 2 AM that morning, but he was the guy solving those numericals then, so I didnt have the heart to tell him anything. 20 minutes passed by in a flash! I was still scratching my head at the end of it, me thinks that this was some kind of googly, and required the application of binomial distribution TWICE in each question. Grumbling at my great preparation, I left the college, never looking back ( I was driving, and didnt want to meet with an accident. If I looked back, then the hospital would have needed to be internet-enabled for me to write this article with a different ending).

I think I've digressed quite a bit in this post, what with the horses and all... but you now have an idea as to how a person who's deriliously studying for an exam is like, after the exam. With 5 hours of sleep everyday over the entire week, this is what you'd have to go through to. And I dont have kids, imagine the poor souls who do! Looking forward to the free week this week, since we have no classes on account of Diwali! Whoopeee!!