SURPRISE! SURPRISE! SURPRISE!

                                   

Monotonous work lives and sagging energy turned into a thing of past the day we all entered this Mecca of education and one of the most happening places in city of Chennai. 

               Yes Sir, we are the batch of 2012-14, MBA DoMS IIT-MADRAS and we are proud to call this place our home for the next two years. We became part of this huge IIT System very first day. It all started with hostel allocations, Mess registrations and Gurunath Shopping (where we also discovered many of our batch mates who were there shopping for everything they may require right from the Colorful Mattresses to the not so colorful broomsticks).Trying to settle in the legendary hostel rooms wondering who was assigned this room before us (both for the right reasons and the wrong ones;), was in no way an easy task, esp. when you have to fight with monkeys to take possession of your own room and belongings. And though we have reached a friendly treaty, that struggle continues yet… We were all soaking in the IIT Madras’ serene yet dynamic atmosphere feeling ecstatic and curious about what was to come for the next week.

View from hostel

The fist week was a “BREEZE”. It was like a honeymoon period for all of us where faculty talked about anything and everything, right from hobbies, interests, food, good eating joints to beaches in the city and not about assets, liabilities and inferential statistics, where our HOD’s speech consisted of very interesting motivational short stories, where we all talked about how lucky we were to be in such place i.e. DoMS, IIT MADRAS. I still wonder whether we will be so chilled out ever in coming two years.

But alas, how can we ever forget that life can’t be so beautiful all the time, that, if there is an MBA batch of 2014, there must be a batch of 2013--

SENIORS: (Sportingly Ensuring that Nobody Is Out of REAL STRESS).

Our seniors very sportingly (and I’m not at all sarcastic here) ensured that the rosy picture didn’t last long for us. They started with fun filled activities to win over us, made us play games, discuss on hot topics (I mean very HOT ;)) and just when we were about to feel that our seniors are so kind and merciful they unleashed their real side onto us. Just when we thought, aaahhh... tomorrow is Sunday…. finally a day of rest, an announcement was made (in the middle of the night) that we had to come up with a basic marketing strategy for a product (which, of course, was allotted by seniors, and which, of course, nobody on planet Earth will buy) What was shocking was that these products were to be presented the very next morning and all we had were, some, 4 hrs to prepare for them. Can you imagine the plight of us poor kids, who had never even heard who Kotler was, going through the bible and understanding those concepts, all in a matter of a couple of hours!! So we hurriedly left for our rooms, not to sleep, but to struggle to sleep, all the while waiting for the mail to arrive and start working on the presentations which would start on 8:00 AM the next day ( next day was SUNDAY--yes this is how we learnt the truth that there are no weekends in a B-School). So our seniors ensured in a very “SPORTING” manner (and again I’m not at all sarcastic here) that we all were in some real stress. Somehow (Please note that somehow entails a lot of effort) we were able to manage it and as a byproduct our weekend too got managed itself .

a 'field visit' in a rainy evening

If that was not enough, Monday was full of more surprises with subjects like Financial Accounting, Data Analysis and Micro economics threatening us poor guys to realize that it was time that we got out of our comfortable chairs which IT work ex had given us and do some real hard work!

Days passed at Godspeed and in just one month of our stay it felt as if we have been here since ages, waking up early (definition of early is very subjective though), either skipping breakfast or a bath to reach class on time (depends on which takes priority in your life – hygiene or hunger), rushing to the department on our cycles as Tom Cruise would rush on his Triumph TT600 with Mission Impossible tunes playing in our head.

But just when it was getting too much for all of us somebody made sure that we were not over stressed. Yep you guessed it right... OUR LOVELY SENIORS!!! They hosted a fantastic fresher’s Nyt which had it all-- Games, Dance, and Good food. (I still dream about the food that nyt whenever I see Dal-chawal in the Himalaya mess).

All in all it’s been a wonderful experience till now. With best faculty, highly talented seniors and batch mates and of course, with the IITians tag we all feel that IIT-Madras belongs to us and we belong to IIT-Madras. How fast can life change? Waiting for the next surprise that DoMS IIT-MADRAS has in store for us???

 Compiled by:

Sameer Arora

DoMS Interface

Class of 2014

Photo Courtesy:

Vinod Ellamaraju

Class of 2014