After I retired, my wife insisted that I accompany her on her trips to Sainsbury’s. Unfortunately, like most men, I found shopping boring and preferred to get in and get out. Equally unfortunate, my wife is like most women – she loves to browse. Yesterday my dear wife received the following letter from the local Sainsbury’s… Dear Mrs. D’Souza, Over the past six months, your husband has caused quite a commotion in our store. We cannot tolerate this behaviour and have been forced to ban both of you from the store. Our complaints against your husband, Mr. D’Souza, are listed below and are “documented by our video surveillance cameras”: 1.…
Back to Mumbai after Exams
My last post was in Mumbai. And here I am back again posting from my home city. Returned to Pune after Diwali vacation on 30th itself to make sure that we study for the Corporate Finance and Software Project Management exams on 1st. Well, study we did, but managed to mess up SPM 🙁 The rest of the week passed by with some good, some bad and some really really ugly papers. Well, January 3rd is the tentative date for the results. Had originally planned on leaving for Mumbai on 10th itself. However, I had to attend a student interaction session by the NAAC team. Symbiosis International University is currently…
Pain in the SAS
Have spent the last two days working on a SAS presentation that is scheduled for this evening. Our topic is Business Decision Making in FMCG industry using SAS Enterprise Miner. Everything would have been fine and hunky dory, except that we do not know anything in SAS! So, the last two days has been a desperate attempt of learning Enterprise Miner. SAS and Enterprise Miner are both extremely complicated softwares to work with without formal training. In addition to this, we had to find our own data. Are we in MBA-II or is this self-paced learning? The funniest part of the whole exercise is that his part is supposed to…
Ten Busy Days
The last week has be very crazy. Having worked on our Financial Statement Analysis, we finally submitted the same on October 2. Our presentation was rescheduled for 8th due to the upcoming summer placements. Spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday cooped up in the vipasana hall working at the helpdesk for the summer placements of the juniors. I’m not at liberty to discuss this, but I can say that we did a good amount of work, spent a good amount of time doing all kinds of activities and lastly eating and drinking till we burst! 😀 8th was a packed day. Woke up early in the morning to give a 7am…
More Interviews and Tests
Spent most of Sunday working on the Project Management presentation for Monday evening and so had to spend the little time available on Monday morning preparing for the Corporate Finance quiz. The quiz turned out to be dedicated to the time value of money which was pretty decent, so I won’t complain about that. Could have done better I guess. Tuesday usually is a light day, as is Wednesday. However, they are usually consumed in working on the new Financial Statement Analysis case or some other assignment that manages to crop up. Monday to Wednesday evenings were spent interviewing juniors for the Admissions Core Committee, the last obligation we have…
SCMHRD Life Continues
Returned from Mumbai early Monday morning. Awoke nice and early and caught the 6.15am Volvo from Teli Gali. Reached here around 10.30 and immediately got down to studying my Corporate Finance assignment. Had classes on all days of the week except for Wednesday, which was an equally busy day. Also got asked out for freshers. Didn’t expect it so soon. Took an expected surprise test in the FSA class. I’m far from where I need to be. Also have an FCQ in the Corporate Finance on Monday as well as a presentation for Project Management (Ops) on SPACE analysis and BCG Matrix. So, basically got my hands full all of…
Ek Saal Baad
This day last year, more than 180 students found their way to a Business School in Hinjewadi. The school was Symbiosis Centre for Management and HRD and yours truly was one of those 180+ students. The first fortnight at SCMHRD was crazy. But, that was just the beginning. What followed was a crazy semester during which Ravi and me formed the WebComm and redesigned and relaunched the SCMHRD website. Also joined the Admissions Team, which would ensure that the next semester would be more hectic than the first. Not because of the hectic schedule we have at college, but because Admissions demanded our total dedication, which we did. The admissions…
Electives Selected
After intense internal and external debates, hours spent on pondering and an equal number on (re)searching, I finally selected my electives for third semester. So, here goes (number in brackets are number of credits): Finance Electives Corporate Finance – Theory and Practice (4) Financial Statement Analysis (4) Mergers and acquisitions (2) Operations Electives Supply chain analysis design and modeling (2) Project Management (Ops) (2) IT Electives Software project management (4) SAP-BIW (2) Economics Electives International Economics (2) Now, I hope they prove to be a good choice, because I had a really bad experience last semester.
We’re being reFCQed
The past week I have followed a rather standard routine. A sample process flow for a day is given below… note for sake of readability it has been shown as a single flow, however it is a vicious cycle. Today was the reFCQ for Six Sigma. We were surprised to find a 45minute theory paper given for just 30minutes. Considering that the rest of the batch gave a semi objective paper, this one was a killer! Tomorrow is the Operations Management reFCQ with the full portion… God bless me On better notes, had a good Spanish viva last week as well as a few good tests to which I actually…
Back to Lectures
Spent the entire day today in the classroom for Sales and Distribution. This is back to a full day of lectures after several months now. Didn’t feel a wee bit sleepy as can normally be the case and sat through eleven hours of the same lecture. We covered a good amount of the portion. Have finally opened the books of Financial Management, which midterm exam we have in another two days. I hate midterms as they are a go-nogo from our point of view. Same was the case with Managerial Accounting, whose midterm happened last Wednesday. The paper went ok, but I could get screwed by the 1.6GPA rule we…
