Saturday, May 06, 2006

[MBA] Still hanging in there

When your own blog falls off your browser's history, you know that you haven't blogged in a while.

Well, the last several weeks have been quite hectic. I set my plan B in motion - basically get a job in a fast growing company where I could get a chance to try out new things and then decide between 1) Reapplying 2) Doing part-time 3) Going back to India

If you have 5-6 years experience and are not looking for a job which is exactly same as what you are currently doing, you have loads of studying in front of you. So back I went to my software engineering roots. At first it made me feel so miserable. Wasn't I supposed to be reading books from that cool list I had prepared at the start of the application season? You know books like 'Against the Gods' or 'Witch Doctors'. But instead, there I was dusting off old textbooks to re-learn the finer points of paging and thrashing. But then figuring out how to prevent deadlocks is way easier than writing down what you really really want to do with your life. So I slowly eased back into familiar territory. I have to admit, to be back in a market where people actually dig your skills and background was a nice break for my poor little battered ego. I could almost close my eyes and pretend that all was finally well. But my powers of rationalization are not that strong. There were reasons why I wanted to do an MBA and those reasons haven't gone away.

It required a superhuman effort, but I managed to pull myself out of the comfortable world of design patterns and effective C++ to write and send my final update letters to Kellogg and Tuck. Of course after that I spent 2 says like a lovesick teenager trying to read between the lines of each school's responses. To those who are wondering one was enthusiastic, the other was ho-hum. And interestingly it was a neat reversal of the response my 1st update letter had received from the two schools. Unless something drastic happens this should be the end of my contribution to this year's app season. But then something always happens. The day I submitted my MIT application I had proclaimed that it would be the last weekend I would spend writing essays. Look how that worked out!

4 comments:

Marina said...

I hope everything works out for you the way you want it to! Good luck

SgHama said...

Hang in there - there's a space for you yet this year

Forrest Gump said...

i am in a similar boat, and i can feel your pain. i too thought that i hopefully wont need to write any more essays, but alas, that was not to be. is Kellogg showing you some hope, because for me, there's hardly any response.

Marina said...

You are right about the iBook, but I am scared of them since I have never used a mac before =/