The MBA types

Haven't posted here for a while, and the short hiatus was due to the end of the semester rush. Now that everything seems to be all set for my graduation, I have time to sit back and look back on the time.

From my time at Tech (as well at IIT), the classes that I'm going to remember are surely all the management and the humanities classes. While both my grad and undergrad degrees were at 2 of the techiest (I'm not even sure if that's a word, but that sure conveys the meaning!) schools in US and India, the management and the humanities classes were supposed to provide enough spice to balance out the geeks. While I'm not sure if we really had that many geeks (considering the varied professions my batchmates from IIT are into right now), the courses still did a very good job.

Apart from their apparently important role as discussed above, the management classes were a very interesting ground to observe the students who came from varied backgrounds. Even though I'm not a big fan of generalizations, preliminary observations in a couple of classes could help you figure out the background of a particular student (if you were a keen observer :).
For example, the students in a management class (atleast at Georgia Tech) can be (roughly) divided into the following categories:

1. The engineering student taking his first management class: Most innocent and naive of the lot, this student can be seen looking with awe and amazement at the other more experienced students in the class who are raising their hand at every other question that the professor asks to provide their opinion on and participate in the "class" discussion. The student is wondering where he has been all these years, whether he's been living in the same world as the others who seem to talk of product-process lifecycle, NIBT, ROI's etc. as if those were their first words when they were born instead of mama-papa. The student is making notes so that he can look up the terms on wikipedia, while also making resolutions to start reading the economist, the wall street journal and any other hep sounding business magazines on a daily basis, devoting 30 minutes to each magazine.

2. The engineering student taking his nth management class:
More experienced than his other engineering counterparts, this student has started participating in the class discussions, throwing in his "comment" or "observations" on the case-study in question by pointing out some technical aspect of the issue, while trying to embellish his comment with some management buzz words like "portfolio", "economies of scale" etc so that it is more palatable to the majority. This student usually provides his invaluable contribution only once or twice during the class, after which he gets back to the research paper he was reading for the meeting with his advisor, or the novel that he had to look up from at the most thrilling climaxes.

Observe that the gender used for the engineering student in general is not coz of a bias in my mind, but a safe assumption on my part that the engineering student in question would be male nine times out of ten (because this is Georgia Tech!!).

3. The MBA student who was a techie in some previous birth:
This student appears to be the most attentive in the class, coz to him it's obvious that he is probably the only one who's following the discussion in it's totality. It is not sure why he left engineering (probably the people at his old job told him that he was upper management material, coz he was spending more time hanging out with his boss than working on his seat!!), but he considers himself as an authority on all matters technical, and all things relating to business. Never the one to forget manners, this type always starts its monologue with "In my *humble* opinion blah blah blah ....." to go on and completely destroy everybody else's argument, albeit not so very humbly. Having conclusively proved themselves the master of that issue, this type does not sit back and relish the victory. Rather, they will wait attentively to jump on the next opportunity to tear apart any argument, like a hungry lion devouring a deer.

4. The MBA student with a business background:
This type speaks a language that most people don't understand, but it gives an impression of knowledge. Majority of the listeners just hear the keywords like "second-degree price differentiation", "forecasting", "market research" etc brought together by conjunctions that make them sound like intelligent sentences. A lot of people will nod when this type speaks - a sign of support, that no matter what you say we are with you. Usually very active in the class, they become a little reticent when one of the engineering majors starts speaking for too long, and sometimes have to interrupt them with "can you speak in a language understandable by normal people?", usually meaning that you haven't really adorned your sentences with enough management jargon so that it sounds boring (and complex, and over-the-head!!) for the to-be managers.

Apart the above 4 types, there is another kind - these are the ones who come to class a little late, a laptop in hand, and give you a look of coolness like they've just landed from the coolest club in Atlanta while you were wasting time on the stupid case-study deciding what a fictitious manager Joe should do about his fictitious company AlmostBankRupt to save it from going while his fictitious superiors have given him a fictitious deadline to turn things fictitiously around. Even though they aren't interested in fictitious stuff, you know they are going to be surfing the virtual world for the next 1 hour looking at weird posts and videos from anonymous people from around the world!!

So really the management classes have taught me more about psychology than business, but neverthless, they have allowed me to get through all the technical classes by providing that much needed spice every day :D