Quarter 3 - Week 9

The penultimate week of classes for this quarter, it's really nice to see how fast the classes passed by! I get a familiar cold feeling, when I remember the exam is in two weeks. How nice it feels to know that we will have three exams on a Saturday, the first time when we're going to be this swamped. Now's when I'm definitely feeling the heat that our group should start on our Marketing and ManAcc projects..! Quit stalling, start doing! Good thing all our groups are still in the confused mode of which direction to turn in! :D

Law - We had a lot more to discuss on IPRs, and we began talking about the difference between Patenting, Trade Secrets, Non Disclosure Agreements, Copyrights etc. Apparently, we are even going to have someone come over next week and give us a talk on Open Source... that sounds like it's going to be very interesting! It's almost funny to note how many people had questions regarding patents and other company policy related doubts. At the end, while talking about arbitration, the prof cheekily gave us an example of how we would ask for difficult questions for the exam, while the prof wanted to give easy questions, so we would use the PGSEM chairperson as an arbiter, where he'd suggest that we have 40 marks in multiple choice and 20 in short answer type questions. Or something like that. And with that, we ended our tryst with him, marking the occasion with the now-standard thunderclap of appreciation. If we see him again next week, I wonder if we'll thunderclap again?

Marketing - This week we studied how a person goes about making a sale, and about how low cost amplification can help with bringing about great impact. We were also given a basic case on negotiations, and when we came back the next day, we split into our groups of four to fight two_mano-i-two_mano, and we had the occasions to needle, threaten, plead and ultimately come to a victorious middle ground between the two teams. Naah, we didnt do that... we chose to continue haggling since we aren't awesome negotiators yet. All in good time. The second day's class was more to do with how we should go about giving the other party something, taking something ourselves, and staying out of a "we-attack, you-defend" spiral. A couple of anecdotes that the prof told us about, wherein one person could act like he owned the marketplace, but on further investigation, we found that the traders felt he was one of the few people who really cared for them. The more I listen in this prof's class, the more I get to hear that being a nice person, taking care of those around you, not trying to cheat someone lie at the heart of being a good marketeer. But then again, what is it not at the heart of?

ManAcc - The class seemed a little more sombre than usual during our prof's classes. We've gone beyond Activity Based Costing now. We're now in Performance Evaluations, and the class just seems waiting to be done with this. But there is a more marked attention span that our class now has during her sessions, we might have just made a breakthrough with the sleep_for_10_minutes-pay_attention_for_20_minutes routine. I'm proud of us.

One more week of this madness, and then it'll be time to go really mad. God help us all.