Curtains to Pre MBA

Well I am just back from the Thursday Social, and God! What a fun it was. We drank, ate, danced, played games and had a lot of fun. When Punjabi music was played, I really missed my country. I missed my wife too; if she would have been here I would have enjoyed more. No worries. She will join me tomorrow.
Today I got to see many different types of dances and the best performances were from Marina and a couple from South America- Louis and Veronica. Marina is from Russia and she really danced very well. It was impressive. And of course I was always there with Bhangra and other dances. I enjoy dancing.J
Our Pre MBA course has come to an end as tomorrow is the last day and from Monday our main course starts. So far we were only 48 students and all international participants. I came across people from numerous countries- Peru, Argentina, Russia, Italy, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea …. and the list continues. After spending last fortnight with so many different individuals I learnt one thing that people from non Asian backgrounds are more polite, nice at heart and very open minded. Especially people from Russia, they are very sweet and cool. And I like people who are cool… as they just go with my mantra of life- Stay Cool. One of my team mates is Russian- Victor, that’s his name. He is really cool and so straight in his words. He will simply tell you where he feels you are wrong and will definitely praise you where you are good. Similarly I met another person from Russia- Natalia. She is not in my team but I got to interact with her as we were organizers of the Thursday Social. She too is again very simple and plain in words. And of course she is also very nice and extremely polite. I feel this quality is missing in people from Asia- particularly India and Pakistan. We guys tend to appear differently from what we actually feel and actually are. I think we need to learn a lot from these chaps. Even Professors at Cranfield say that Indians normally have tendency to agree when they actually don’t.

Regarding this week at Cranfield, we started with WAC- Written assessment of Cases. We were given a task to analyze the economic situation of a South East Asian nation and my team chose Malaysia. First we were asked to discuss in a team and then were asked to present a report on that. Then in rest of the week we learnt about Case Studies- how to go about them, Globalisation and about Project Management. We spent whole of Thursday on Project Management with Steve Carver and he is really a very interesting Prof. He has an excellent humour and his teaching style is very dynamic. He gave many live examples of how the projects fail. He also gave a task to each team in which every team has to choose a Project Manager. In our team I was the Project Manager. Our team did complete the task but at costs and time, both of which were very high than the stipulated ones. Of course the time and the costs are two things which are extremely critical to every project. It was another failure but then I’d many lessons to learn from this. I also had something to cheer about, that at least I started well and it was only in execution phase where I made mistakes.
With every passing day, I have a feel that there is so much to learn and there is so less time. Time Management- Is not it so important in our lives?