Barbarians At The Gate

I picked up this book Friday morning and finished reading it yesterday night at 1 AM. I read all of its 600+ pages in 4 days, during my exams (I had an accounting final exam today morning).

This was my first book after a gap of 4 months. I had never thought that I would take time out of my MBA schedule to read books but I started reading because I wanted a book to kill time when I felt bored of other routine activities. But once I started reading it, there was no stopping me.

The book is about the bid for RJR Nabisco - one of the larget takeover bids in corporate history. It details the history of companies involved, the people involved and makes a compelling reading for anyone interested in a career in Investment Banking and particularly Mergers and Acquisitions.

The significance of this book can be gauged by the fact that it has been named 4th in the list of 20 most influential business books by Forbes.

HEC Paris - Top Ranked European B-school

We have done it again. For the second year in a row, HEC Paris has been ranked the top b-school in Europe by Financial Times. Read the complete report here

Exams approaching

Core 1 will end in 3 weeks. Our first exam is on Wed and I haven't even started studying; there are so many other things to do. Today, I applied to 2 banks for summer internships, thus taking my total applications to 3. I did hear back from one of the banks only 2 days after I submitted my application; the HR lady wanted to interview me for a role/function that I wasn't too keen on, so I politely declined and she said they will keep my application for my desired function and will get back to me later. Hopefully, they should call me before the end of Dec.

Last week was another hectic one; I had 3 presentations - French was ok, Sustainable Development was good but Marketing was not good. We went unprepared for the presentation and it showed. There are some important learnings from this presentation which I hope will help me do better in future.

Last week, we celebrated Japan week in our campus. Our Japanese classmates organized a host of events on this occasion - the notable being Japanese films, Wii games, Japanese fashion show and Sushi eating competition. The events were organized very professionally and we had a great time. Looking forward to more such events at HEC..

Submissions, Business Games

I wanted to write last weekend but could not as I had many other things to do - mainly related with presentations. This week I was supposed to be part of 4 presentations - 3 in group and 1 as an individual. One group presentation has been postponed to next week, I am done with the individual presentation, now there are two presentations lined up for the next two days..

Last week was the most hectic I have had here; the main reason being that we are heading towards the end of this core which means more individual submissions, group assignments etc. We (my group) made a mistake of choosing topics that were to be presented towards the end of core - in this core, each group had to make 4 presentations; so far we haven't made any... This means we have to spend a lot of time on presentations when we also have other things to take care of (exam studies, internship applications, usual b-school fun activities etc). Things would have been much better if we were finished with presentations by now..

One thing I like about HEC MBA program is that we get to play many business games - so far we have played 4 games - Negosim(Negotiation Simulation), Accounting, Organisational Behavior, Supply Chain and we are playing a game again this week. Games help a lot in clearing the theoretical concepts and I wish our MBA program had more games.

Right now, I am attending a seminar by Daniel Porot on "Career Design and Job Hunting". It has been an interesting seminar so far (2 hours already) and it will last for 6 more hours.. Gotta pay more attention to the seminar now...