Quarter 2 - Week 7

Results for the tests are now out... got around 7/10 in the BizStats quiz, a 56/100 on the MicroEconomics and a 14/25 on the Managing Org paper. Respectable, atleast at class average! ;) (Note to self: Study a little harder, everyone else seems to be doing so!)

This week seemed a whole lot easier than the last week, probably due to the absence of three tests! But the classes have picked up pace, and I mean PACE! I think we hurtled through topics in MacroEcon just because we now know the IS-LM curve, we discussed how the markets reacted the way they did during the dot-com bust, the recent realty bust, then we spoke about how a credit-card fraud can affect markets... man, and I thought you need to be intuitive to manage money, it's all science and formulae here!

Managing Organizations now seems to have gone down a little "gyaan" route... We read up an article which spoke about how organizations can be "learning organizations", basically by making mistakes and REALLY learning from them, not just putting into a MS Word doc, and leaving it there. We saw how you can disseminate this learning across all parts of the organization, which in theory is difficult. Why would a engineering division bother to know why the finance division failed? Apparently, there's a lot of common learning. You just have to pass your experience around, that's how ABB's doing it. Those guys have 5000 "mini-companies" which keep communicating, and acting on some points. The next day, we learnt about how good organizations become great, and it's apparently when the leader is humble and yet iron-willed. Humble and iron-willed? What is this, moral science class? Be the lion and the rabbit?! Seriously! But, grudgingly, you have to admit that guys who gets to smell clouds (a.k.a. stuck-up nose) tend to stop focussing on the ground, while the guys that look at the grass, tend to see the pace of movement while looking at the horizon to ensure they're going in the right path. But seriously, I came to a management school to hear "Be humble"? Me finds the air to be cool and scented at this scintillating height... (Note to self: Shut up, stuckup!)

BizStats, I finally understand SOMETHING of what's going on!! Credits to the prof, he posted on a thread that 'you're no longer in nursery, so stop expecting golden words to drop out of my mouth and fit itself in your head'. Not exactly. He said, you're now studying post-grad, read up the topic BEFORE you come to class... I aint spoonfeeding your lazy butts! Well maybe not the second part verbatim, but in spirit. He's right, pulled up my socks, went to class and actually understood something! So we studied Confidence Intervals (what confidence I had I say, too much!) and Hypothesis Testing (Yea, I didnt read for this one, so didn't understand much). Anyway, his style of teaching has changed a bit, we now do more probs in class.. so that's more of looking at each other in dismay and then smirking at ourselves and the nerds in class. But was able to do the Confidence Interval probs... looks like I'm a half nerd, a herd? Summarizing the two, Confidence Intervals is about how confident you are when you claim that your sample statistic represents something very close to the actual population parameter. For e.g., how sure am I that the toothpaste I use is used by a majority of India's population? To put it better, if by taking a sample, I find 74 out of 100 people use my toothpaste brand, then with what confidence can I say that 74% of India's population uses the same. So it comes to be sometihng like "With 95% confidence I can say that 70.4% to 78.6% use my toothpaste". Something like that.

Hypothesis testing is more like coming up with some funda, and because people don't believe you, you have to prove it to them. So to do that, you have to prove that whatever current funda is there, is not responsible for the output of your sample, and that only your funda can explain your sample's output. As prof said, let's say there's a normal battery brand (Nimboo) and a sooper battery brand (SuperNimboo), and SuperNimboo is claiming it gives 20% more charge. So you have to assume that "SuperNimboo can't give it" and prove that if you take SuperNimboo batteries, it doesnt fall within the standard deviation of Nimboo's output. If you find SuperNimboo's sample lies outside of Nimboo's output, THEN you can claim that yes, ok, maybe SuperNimboo is actually a way more awesome battery.

Saturday went off in a blur, since after class we had (no time for lunch and) a talk with the Director, and this was followed by another class of Quant, and then some project discussion till 7 PM. Wait, roll back, a talk with the Director?? Yeah, he wanted to speak to us mano-i-multimano about what we thought of the programme, what was on our minds... the usual stuff of placements and internships came up, and the Director said that this course was more meant to enhance our skills, we have access to all the facilities the other courses have, and it's upto us to use it... if our company allows us to go do an internship elsewhere (like hell it will), then by all means, go for it! But placements is another thing altogether. The other courses here come with a huge opportunity cost, they lose that salary when they're studying here, the PGSEMers keep their salary. We are here for two very different reasons, the full-timers to actually make a major orthogonal shift in their careers, and the PGSEM-ers to enhance their skills. He pretty nicely told us you cant have your cake, manage it AND eat it too! I thought he did make sense, I mean, we did know that the course offered no placements before we came here. And besides, with over 8 years of experience, who'll just drop a senior position in my lap just because I have a PGSEM degree? Even the full-timers dont have chocolates dropped on them like that!! And I sure as hell dont plan to take a cut in my salary just so that I can start at the lower rungs of management, like hell no!

But anyhoo, everyone's entitled to an opinion (placements shouldnt be there!! SHOULDNT!!), and the day got over and I went home to study. Why? Cos we had a tute the next day, on the BizStats course, and I for one definitely wanted to understand the fundas of sampling and confidence intervals, like, pukka! The class was good, got a couple of probs solved (out of what looked like fifteen! #@$@$!!!!) and our teacher kept telling us to pay attention! I felt like I was in pre-school, good ol' days... Good thing I understood something in this class, else would have been a major waste. Rest of the day, I spent at home... dreading the fact that I have a whole load of work and assignments/projects to submit the coming week! Sigh.