IIM – Page 3 – Pertinent Observations

Dressing up in residential schools

As I was getting ready this morning to go deliver my lecture at IIMB, the wife expressed surprise at how casually I was dressed (I wore jeans, a (collared, “formal”) t-shirt and a hoodie). “In my business school all professors wear suits”, she said. My mind went back to the time when I was a student at IIMB, trying to remember what professors wore. While they were generally dressed more formally than I was today, no one wore suits – the only one who wore a blazer every day was easily the worst professor who taught me at IIMB!

I was thinking about why I don’t feel like dressing formally while going to IIM. And then I thought of the students, and realised that with the odd exception, I’m easily much more formally dressed than most of my students. When students turn up to class in track pants, professors have no incentive to wear anything close to a suit!

And this is not a new phenomenon. Back in my time too, close to ten years ago, people would wear track pants and other articles of clothing you might describe as “home wear” to class (Not me, though. I don’t wear track pants. As a rule. But I remember making it a point to wear shorts to all my final term examinations). So I started thinking about what it is about IIMB that makes people wear “home wear” to class. And I realised it has to do with the proximity.

IIM Bangalore is a wholly residential campus, and the student accommodation is a short walk away from most of the classrooms. In the second year, thanks to electives time tables are such that there is a good chance of having long breaks between classes, so you go to the academic part of the institute for only one class.

When you are going to a classroom that is only a short walk away from where you live, and when you go there only for one or two classes, it doesn’t feel like you’re “going somewhere”, so you don’t see any point in dressing up. Moreover, most of the people you meet in class are people you share a hostel with – these people would have seen you in your pyjamas anyway, and seen you get sloshed all over L^2 during one of those parties which I’m told are not so common nowadays! So there is no good reason for you to dress up! And you come to the class in pyjamas!

The wife’s B-school is not residential, and people live a few kilometres away. Very few pairs of people would have seen each other in their pyjamas, and the distance means people are “going somewhere” when going to a school. And so people dress up (and by that I mean they really dress up!). And when students are well-dressed, the professor wants to show off his superior social standing, and thus wears as formal clothes as he can – which usually means a suit!

Again I’m talking from small number of data points – I’ve lived in another residential institution (IIT Madras) – and that too was famous for its rather muted/horrible dressing sense. It’s a pity/mercy (depending on the way you look at it) that us IIMB people manage to well cover up our generally bad dressing by wearing suits at interviews and PPTs and other public events!

Missing data in IIMB Alumni Directory

Recently, I got a mail from the IIMB Alumni association asking me to contact batchmates who are not part of the association mailing list. The objective of the mail was to ensure that every alumnus is registered with the association and can be reached for whatever purpose. Among other things (including exhorting us to mail our class mailing lists, etc.) the mail contained statistics of the number of students in each graduating batch and the number of students who are not part of the alumni mailing list.

The pattern in the proportion of people not on the mailing list was quite interesting so I thought I’ll share it here:

For the earlier graduating batches, you can see that the proportion not on the mailing list is very high. And then there are two deep drops, one in the mid-nineties and one around the turn of the millennium. The latter I would associate with all students having a valid email ID at the time of graduation which would have allowed them to be reachable and be part of the alumni association. The former also would be associated with penetration of email.

What is also interesting is the bump around 2010 – while the enrolment rate up to the batch of 2009 seems to be pretty good, something seems to have gone wrong after that. The enrolment rate for the batch of 2010 is as bad as that for 2002, which is quite bizarre! Wonder if the alumni association messed up, or if there were some technical glitches around then or if for some particular reason that batch hated IIMB so much that they didn’t register!

All in all, though, a very interesting dataset.

Day 1 of teaching at IIMB

As I had mentioned yesterday I’ve started teaching at IIMB. Some thoughts after day 1.

The sweetener (idli-vade-chutney) at SN refreshments is awesome but leads me to take a route that is heavier on traffic than the more optimal route (via Sanjay Gandhi and East End). Too many school buses and office cabs that move haphazardly make it less than a pleasant drive
My car was again waved past at the IIMB gate. No questions asked. I’m still not sure how they do it every time to my car, given there is no insignia on it! I don’t believe that they remember the car from when I was a student!
IIMB has a new classroom complex and I “inaugurated” one of the classrooms there. It’s quite nice, students set out in a wide U format which I quite like. The projector takes HDMI input which is awesome!
The class started off rather quietly. I had to put on my sarcastic side and helpfully mention that “there is still time left to drop this course”. Participation picked up after that.
For an 8 am class, no one slept, which I take as an achievement! But then it is the first day of the term. Maybe they’ll learn as they go along
There were zero objections when I put up my “pie charts are evil. don’t use them” slide. This is the first time I’m not facing any resistance for saying that! In the past I’ve had people say “but then I used a pie chart once and it was very well accepted”, and this after I’ve told them about the perils of anecdata!
Everyone calls me “sir”, from the students to the administrative staff and officers. I’m letting them call me thus. It’s funny how one of the administrators who I used to call “sir” when I was a student now calls me “sir”.
The drive back was horrible. Insane traffic all along Bannerghatta road till I got past the ring road. Then it was smooth but the 3rd block circle was again jammed. But then IIMB is giving me office space so once I get that I’m unlikely to drive back immediately after the class.
I need to manage my voice better. Half an hour in, I realised I had come close to losing my voice. I need to be less hyper and “conserve my voice” at least for the duration of the class.
And no, I won’t put such an update after every class. Just that today was the first day so ..
I came back and added “adjunct faculty, IIMB” to my linkedin profile 😛

Teaching at IIMB

Starting tomorrow I’ll be teaching at IIMB. It’s a course called “Spreadsheet modelling for business decision problems”, and targeted at term 6 MBA students. I explicitly warned them to not take the course if they don’t consider themselves to be competent at mathematics. Yet, some 60 students have registered (current IIMB batch size is ~400)!

This promises to be fun. The only part that may not be so much fun is that in order to make it compatible with the rest of my work I requested for the 8-930am slot on Mondays and Tuesdays so that means I need to get back to my early-to-bed-early-to-rise ways which have served me so well for most of my career (last few months though I’ve become a late riser).

Now, for everything that I do I like to have a “sweetener” – something that is totally unrelated that spurs me to do whatever I’m doing. Usually the sweetener is something that sounds quite trivial but is actually useful in spurring me on. The sweetener in this case is that SN Refreshments in JP Nagar 2nd Phase lies on my way from home to IIMB, and they make absolutely awesome idli-chutney. So the plan for tomorrow (and every other class day in the next 3 months) is to leave home early and have breakfast there and then head on to IIMB.

I’m hoping for a nice lively class. I’ve reserved 20% of the evaluation for “class participation”. I hope at least that spurs them to be nice and lively! Then again it’s first thing in the morning on Mondays and Tuesdays so you never know..

I’ll keep you guys updated on anything whacky that might happen in class. Oh, and I’m going to be starting a “class blog” for my students where they can write for extra credit. Will send out the link once it’s up and populated.

Now to decide whether to go by car (for some strange reason when I take the car – the same one I had when I was a student at IIMB – I never get stopped by the security guys at the gate. there’s no sticker on the car though) or by motorcycle (easier to navigate traffic and park near SN)!

A One Year MBA Doesn’t Make Any Sense

Around this time last year, when the wife was applying for B-school, I was clear in my advice to her on one thing – that a one year MBA just doesn’t make sense. From what I recall I wasn’t really clear back then regarding that piece of advice – it was rather intuitive, and based on a few “data points” I know, but as I see her go through her (two year) MBA, I realise why my advice makes sense.

There are two important functions that a business school performs. The first – which is debatable since a lot of people I’ve spoken to, including my classmates from IIMB – is that it changes the fundamental way you think. Exposure to different paradigms of management and case studies and frameworks completely changes the way, in my opinion based on my tenure at IIMB, you think about a lot of things in the world. If I were to summarise my MBA in one sentence, I will say that it taught me, and reinforced in me, the issue of tradeoffs.

In corporate strategy we learnt that any strategy you adopt will have its pros and cons, and if a strategy helps you “cover one flank”, it will expose you to the other. In HR, we learnt that life, and all our decisions, are all about making tradeoffs. In finance, we learnt that the very concept of the interest rate reflects the tradeoff between consumption today and consumption tomorrow. And so forth.

This, and a few other concepts that I learnt in my two years at B-school, completely changed the way i look at a lot of things in the world, and that helped broaden my perspective and that alone makes me believe that the time I spent at B-school was time well spent (I managed to get a scholarship so I didn’t spend much money for my education there).

Coming back, the second function that a business school performs is that of an employment exchange. By having a highly selective admission process it signals its students’ quality to prospective employers, and helps people move ahead in their careers by getting jobs they would have otherwise not got, without the MBA. For a lot of people, this is the primary reason to go to B-school (let me confess that this was the case for me, too, 10 years back), and the learning or changing the way they think is a bonus. But having had ones way of thinking changed, one will realise that this change is the more sustainable impact that the B-school has on you.

So what does this have to do with one year MBAs? Ever since my wife started her classes two months ago, she has had to start preparing for summer internships. She worked on her CV, wrote cover letters, attended tonnes of PPTs and networking sessions, even did a short trip to network with some companies and so forth (it was a similar case for me 10 years back). In sum, she has spent a disproportionate amount of her time and energy in dealing with the placements, leaving little time and energy and mind space for her academics.

Now, the point is that this is only for a summer internship, which allows you to make a mistake since you are not permanently committing to a company. If you don’t like your internship, or if the company where you intern doesn’t like you, you always have a second chance during the so-called (in IIMB) “final placements” to make a better choice. Yet, despite knowing that the summer internship is not “final” and gives you a second chance, first year students of two-year MBAs everywhere end up getting quite stressed over it, with the stress not lifting until they know where they are going (which, for some curious reason both in India and abroad happens rather early – in the second “trimester”).

It is only when the summer placements are done are you actually able to concentrate and do justice to your academics, and do some learning, to try and imbibe the first function that a B-school offers. Then you can relax and concentrate on your studies till late in the second year when (if you haven’t “converted” your internship) you will need to find a full-time job. In IIMs, thankfully, this happens towards the very end of the course which gives you sufficient time to actually learn, change the way you think, or do whatever the hell you want.

Now think of what happens in a one-year MBA. Firstly, typically there is no internship, meaning you have only one chance to get your post-MBA “remodelled” career right. Secondly, since “final placements” are less than a year away, you will have to spend a considerable amount of your time and energy and mindspace in Business School to that end – worrying about it, wearing suits, attending PPTs, attending career fairs, networking and all such.

There is very little time that you spend in a one year MBA when you are actually relaxed and know where you are going next, which is a necessary condition for you to learn, and for the business school to “affect” you. And to change the way you think, which is the only lasting impression (apart from the brand) that the business school can have on you!

So unless you want an MBA just for the brand, and just for the change in career, a one year MBA makes absolutely no sense. It is cheaper, for sure (both in terms of time and money), but so much inferior in value, since the main function of a B-school has very little time to actually function!

Business School WAG series – day out with baby bulls

Ten years ago, I was studying in a business school. A few weeks before I joined IIM Bangalore, a friend told me about the concept of a blog. I was told about the existence of blospot and livejournal, and the concept of blogging seemed exciting (I’d just started writing earlier that year and quite enjoyed it). I signed up on blogspot and wrote a post perhaps in June or July 2004 (I’ve deleted the blog, and so have forgotten when). Then I found that most of my IIMB friends were on LiveJournal and I moved my blog to skthewimp.livejournal.com .

My blogging ramped up slowly during my two years at business school – the first increase in momentum was during my summer internship in an investment bank, when my readership improved. A series of fairly controversial posts in the next one year further improved readership. And then the blog did me a lot of good.

I’ve found a client and a couple of other business leads thanks to my blogging. It was also my blogging through which I got to know of the existence of <lj user=”favrito”> eight years ago. Four years ago, I married her, and earlier this year, she decided to go to business school. And I thus became a business school WAG.

My status as a business school WAG was first established two months or so ago when I got an email from “Club – IESE Partners and Families”. These business schools try to take themselves too seriously and sound too politically correct – they could have simply called it the IESE WAG Club (there is merit in the usage of the term WAG (with its origins as “Wives and girlfriends”) as a unisex term). But anyway, I’ve continued to get emails from this club about its various activities. So far none of them have impressed me, but some have freaked me out, such as “day out with kids at the beach”.

My status as IESE WAG was further enhanced earlier this week when I made it to Barcelona, albeit for a short period of time. I visited the school yesterday, where <lj user=”favrito”> introduced me to one and all and sundry, and they eschewed the “three way cheek peck” which is supposedly popular in these parts of Catalunya in favour of the humble handshake. I spent the day in the cafeteria sipping Coke Zero and Dark Hot Chocolate and watching students crib about their performance in placement tests, talk about “arbit CP” that others put in class, and indulge in the kind of nonsense that all business school students indulge in (I surely did ten years ago) which recruiters (mostly business school alumni themselves) pretend doesn’t exist. It was interesting to say the least, but not interesting enough to deserve a blogpost for itself.

I further embellished my credentials as a WAG today, though, as I accompanied <lj user=”favrito”> and some of her classmates on a sort of picnic today. There was a fair number of WAGs at the picnic today, though I suspect I was the only male WAG. And I got introduced to a new “sport” in the course of the picnic today – amateur bullfighting, or as <lj user=”favrito”> described it, “Rajnikanth bullfighting”.

So there is a bullring. And they let a bull into the ring (it was a young bull that was in the arena today). And people can get into the ring by way of a ladder. There are these hiding posts all around the ring, behind which people can stand and be safe from the bull. And more than one human being can be in the ring at that point in time.

And they taunt and tease the bull, inviting him to attack and gore them. The bull is young and his horns aren’t sharp, so it is unlikely that it will cause much damage. But the bull is easily ruffled, and he gives short chases to the humans, who having provoked the bull in the first place try to dodge and evade the bull. Some wusses run to the shelter of one of the hiding posts when the bull is about ten metres away from them. Other wusses (including Yours Truly) don’t even bother entering the bullring, preferring to guzzle on the beer and sangria available and make pertinent observations.

And so it was an unequal battle, with several humans and one bull, though in true Rajnikanth tradition only one human would physically interact with the bull at one point in time (though others would hoot and clap and jeer). I was about to use the word “grapple” in the previous sentence but there was no grappling here – the bull would charge you and try and knock you down, and you would try and evade it. Some people even fell while trying to evade the bull and got hit by it, yet seemed unhurt.

This went on for a short period, and soon there were so many people in the bullring that there was no merit in entering it – the bull would surely get confused. And then we retired to this resort somewhere else in rural Catalunya for lunch and more drinks.

Later in the evening, at this resort, I visited the urinal. It was fairly busy at that point in time, with all stalls occupied. The guy to the left of me and the guy to my right had both brought a beer bottle along – they held the beer bottle in one hand and their penises with the other as they input and output liquids simultaneously.

I had half a mind to indicate to them that they could just eliminate the middleman, but then I thought it wasn’t appropriate for a business school WAG to give such advice, and moved on!

I plan to make a series on life as a business school WAG. Not sure how regular this will be though since I don’t plan to spend too much time in Barcelona.

Planning and drawing

Fifteen years ago I had a chemistry teacher called Jayanthi Swaminathan. By all accounts, she was an excellent teachers, and easily one of the best teachers in the school where she taught me. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of what she taught me, the only thing I remember being her constant refrain to “plan and draw” while drawing orbital diagrams (I’ve forgotten what orbital diagrams look like).

Now, I remember wondering why it was that big a deal that she kept mentioning “plan and draw” while drawing or asking us to draw such diagrams. This question answered itself a few days later at my JEE factory, where the chemistry teacher started drawing an orbital diagram which soon threatened to go outside the blackboard. A friend who was sitting next to me, who was also from my school, quipped “this guy clearly didn’t plan and draw”.

The reason I’m mentioning this anecdote here is to talk about how, when faced with a deadline, we start running without realising what we are doing. I can think of a large number of disastrous projects from my academic and professional life (till a couple of years back my academic and professional life was rather disastrous), and looking back, the problem with each of them was that we didn’t “plan and draw”.

I especially remember this rather notorious “application exercise” as part of my marketing course at IIMB (btw, since the wife is doing her MBA now I keep getting reminded of IIMB quite frequently). We had a problem statement. We had a deadline. And we knew that the professor demanded lots of work. And off we went. There was absolutely no coherence to our process. There was a lot of work, a lot of research, but in hindsight, we didn’t know what we were doing! Marketing was my first C at IIMB (and the only C in a “non-fraud” course, the other being in a rather random course called Tracking Creative Boundaries).

Then I remember this project in my second job. “Forecast”, I was told, and asked to code in java, and forecasting I started, in java, without even looking at the data or trying to understand how my forecasts would solve any problem. Six months down, and forecasting going nowhere, I started coding on Excel, looked at the data for the first time, and then realised how hard the forecasting was, and how pointless (in context of the larger problem we were trying to solve).

There are several other instances – see problem, see target, start running – like the proverbial headless chicken (as made famous by former Indian ambassador to the US Ronen Sen). And then realise you are going nowhere, and it is too late to do a fresh start so you put together some shit.

That piece of advice I received in chemistry class 15 years back still resonates today – plan and draw (pun intended if you are in a duel). Its is okay to take a little time up front, knowing that you will progress well-at-a-faster-rate once you get started off. You need to understand that most projects follow the sigmoid curve. That progress in the initial days is slow, and that you should exploit that slowness to plan properly.

I will end this post with this beautiful video. Ilya Smyrin versus Vishwanathan Anand. Semi-finals of the PCA candidates tournament in 1994 – the tournament that Anand won to face off with Garry Kasparov at the WTC. Anand, playing black, gets only five minutes to play the whole game. Watch how he spends almost a minute on one move early on, but has planned enough to beat Smyrin (Anand only required a draw to progress, given the rules).

Law of conservation of talent

For starters. there is no such law. However, there exists a belief in most people’s minds that everyone is equally talented, and it is only that talent in different people is spread across different dimensions.

It starts when you are in school. If you are not good at maths, people tell you that you must be good at something else – arts perhaps. At that age it is perhaps not a bad thing – to be told when you are a child that you have no talent no way helps you in growing up. You are encouraged at that age to try different things, to find the thing that you’re good at.

And then you grow up. And you grow up with this entrenched belief of the “law of conservation of talent”. When you see someone good at something, you will assume that that is the only thing that they are good at. When you see that someone is bad at something you assume there is something else that they are good at. When you see someone good at more than the average number of things, you think they cannot be real, or that it is unfair, or perhaps that they are just faking it.

I once heard this story of a mother arguing with a schoolteacher that her son did not need remedial classes in maths. When told that the kid was indeed poor at maths, the mother responded “so what? He might be good at art. Why does he have to pass his maths exam for that?” (not sure I’ve paraphrased accurately but this is broadly the picture). While it might be a good idea to tell the kid that there is perhaps something else that he is good at, the mother strongly believing in the same thing is simply not done.

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Back in business school, there was this set of people who claimed to have a deep passion for marketing. Now, these people belonged to two classes. The first were actually passionate about marketing – there was something about marketing that gave them a kick and they wanted to pursue a career that would allow them to generate such kicks. From my conversations with them I know the passion was real, and most of them are doing rather well now in their marketing careers.

And then there was the second type. This was the class of people who had found that they were no good at mathematics and accounting and economics, and thus figured that they had no hope of a career in anything related to any of these fields, and thus found refuge in marketing. Of course they wouldn’t admit that – they would also claim a deep passion in marketing. While that was okay – perhaps marketing gave them their best chance of pursuing a successful career, and thus I don’t grudge their choice – what got my goat was that these people would claim that because they were no good at the “hard sciences” (mathematics, accounting, etc.) they were “creative”. Who says that mathematics and accounting and economics are not creative subjects? And why does anyone who is not good at these subjects (it is impossible, for example, to excel at mathematics unless you are creative) automatically become “creative”? It is the law of conservation of talent, simple.

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For people who are good at more than one thing, law of conservation of talent can bite you in more than one way. Actually there is more to do with this than just law of conservation of talent – people like to analyze other people by putting them in easily understood silos, or categories. And law of conservation of talent helps assign sets of talents to these silos.

Over the last two years, by hook or by crook, I’ve built my reputation to be a great quant. I consult with companies helping them with their quant and data stuff, I write a quant blog and I write a series in Mint on quant in elections. While it is all good and I’m glad that I’ve built a reputation as a quant, the downside is that people refuse to look beyond this and recognize my other skills.

For example, I think I’m rather good at economic reasoning, and I believe that my prowess in that combined with my prowess in working with numbers can deliver massive value to my potential clients. However, when people see me as a quant, it is hard for them to digest that I could also be good with economic reasoning, or behavioural sciences, for example. Thus, when I take on a mandate to do something beyond quant, people find it extremely hard to accept that I dole out non-quant advice too. I blame the law of conservation of talent for this – when people think you are good at quant, they exclude all other skills you might possibly have.

I’ll end this post with another anecdote from business school. A few months in, things were going well and I had (even back then) built a reputation as someone who was good at quant and mathematics and accounting and economics (in business school, all these fell on the same side of the fence, so the law of conservation of talent allowed you to be good at all these at once). Quizzing was a related activity, so I was “allowed” to be good at that. If I remember right, what perhaps upset people’s calculations was when I represented my class in the inter sectional basketball tournament and didn’t perform badly – based on reactions after the game I think people were a bit thrown off that I could be good at basketball too (especially given that I’ve never looked remotely athletic, and have always been a slow mover). Law of conservation of talent again!

Twisting and shouting

Ten years ago to the day, there was tragedy. Around this time I was home. That day I remember my father’s usual Ambassador (his office car) wasn’t available, so he had come in a blue WagonR which looked like anything but a government car. Not that I could see too well, though.

Back in 2004, spectacle lenses made of plastic weren’t yet popular, and even if they were available they were quite expensive. I remember having a shell frame back then (like I do now, except that that one was an ugly-ish brown). The lens was made of glass – the kind that could shatter on impact and enter your eyes.

And shatter and enter it did. I had instinctively closed my eyes, so not much had gone in, though. My first reaction at that point in time was to remember the phone number of my usual opthalmologist (yes I still remember things like that). I even remember calling that guy’s office (yeah, back on those Nokia phones you could type without looking). Friends, however, were of the opinion that I should go to the nearest eye clinic. And Shekar Netralaya (JP Nagar 3rd Phase) was where we ended up.

It was among the freaker of freak accidents. I was playing badminton. <lj user=”amitng”> and I were on one side, two others on the other. We were both close to the baseline when the opponents sent the shuttle high. Both of us went for it, <lj user=”amitng”> slightly ahead and slightly to the left of me. Both of us drew our rackets back with a slight backswing. And that was it.

His racket caught me flush on the left spectacle lens. The lens duly cracked, and parts of it entered my eye. I remember that the game immediately stopped. I remember that one other guy’s car was right there outside the court, so we could go quickly to the hospital. And back in those days there wasn’t even a signal at the Delmia junction, so the U-turn was taken fast so that I could go to hospital.

I don’t remember what they did at the hospital. I think they cleaned up my eye, but one or two pieces remained particularly troublesome. I remember going for a follow-up test two days later. And I remember that one day after the accident I went all the way back to IIMB (after the accident I went home, in my father’s temporary blue WagonR) so that I wouldn’t miss accounting class (yes I was in my first semester so such youthful enthusiasm can be expected). And went back again the following day to write a test which I nearly aced.

And then there was the back story. 2004 was the first time that the IIMs decided to make public the CAT percentile. They had used an algorithm to allocate percentiles, and allocated it up to two decimal places. So if your “percentile” (with decimal places the term doesn’t make sense) was greater than 99.995 (i.e. you were in the top 0.005% of the 130,000 odd people who wrote the exam), your percentile would get rounded up to give a weird-sounding “100.00 percentile”. Top 0.005% of 130,000 means about six or seven people. Two of those were at IIMB. I was one of them. <lj user=”amitng”> was the other.

During our inauguration the certificates for the “directors merit list” of the senior batch were handed out. It was possibly meant to tell us how important being in the top 10 of the batch was, and I’m sure it did inspire a lot of people. And having been the top performers in the entrance test, people perhaps considered <lj user=”amitng”> and I top seeds (neither of us ended up getting it, though he got considerably closer than I did).

And so when I got injured before our first ever unit test and he was in some ways culpable for it (though in fairness it was on the field of play), there was scope for conspiracy theory. And when you have a bunch of creative youngsters and scope for a conspiracy theory, you can well expect someone to stand up and do the honours. And @realslimcody rose to the occasion. And Twisted Shout was born.

The name of the organization has its own story. @realslimcody is a Beatles fan, and he suggested that he name the yellow journalist enterprise as “twist and shout”. Madness heard it as “Twisted Shout” and the name stuck. A couple of episodes later I duly joined Twisted Shout. And we did a lot of twisting and shouting and yellow journalism. If you were our contemporary and not slandered by Twisted Shout you might consider your stint at IIMB of not being worthy enough!

Of course in a place like IIMB, you don’t do something just for the heck of it. Everything has to result in a “bullet point” in your CV (back in 2005 I’d planned to write a book called “In Search of a Bullet Point” about IIMB, but that again didn’t take off. I put NED, I guess). I think I wrote in my final resume that I was a “co-editor in the campus informal journal Twisted Shout”. I think the placement committee (which whetter all CVs) let that one remain (bless them). And as with all such campus endeavours TS quickly died after we graduated (though I tried to resurrect it in a separate blog on this site, it didn’t take off).

It’s ten years since that landmark incident that sparked the birth of Twist and Shout. I must mention my eye is fine – fine enough for me to wear contact lenses as I type this. There’s a scar inside my eye, though, and that’s something I’ll carry all my life. But it doesn’t affect life one bit, and life goes on!

Oh, I wasn’t right on that one – after the injury the doctor had told me that I shouldn’t let sweat enter my eyes. Two months after the injury I managed to get myself a red bandana (with skull and crossbones on it), and I ended up wearing it at all “sweatable opportunities” – when I played or partied. The bandana got legendary in its own way, and its story shall be told another day (or perhaps it’s already been told somewhere on this blog).

Studying on coursera

In the last one year or more I’ve signed up for and dropped out from at least a dozen coursera courses. The problem has been that the video lectures have not kept me engaged. I seem to multitask while watching these videos, and the sheer volume of videos in some of these lectures has been such that I’ve quickly fallen behind, and then lost interest. I must, however, admit that many of these courses haven’t been particularly challenging. In courses such as “model thinking” or “social network analysis” I’ve already known a lot of the stuff, and thus lost interest. Modern World History (by Philip Zelikow ) was more like an information-only course which I could have consumed better in the form of a book.

Given that I’ve had bursts of signing up for courses and then not following up on them, for the last six months I’ve avoided signing up for any new courses. Until two weeks back when, on a reasonably jobless evening during a visit to my client’s Mumbai office, I decided to sign up for this course on Asset Pricing. And what a course it has been so far!

I went to bed close to midnight last night. I watched neither the Champions League final nor Arsenal’s draw at West Brom. I was doing my assignments. I spent three hours on a Sunday evening doing my assignments of the coursera Asset Pricing course, offered by Prof John Cochrane of the University of Chicago.

I’ve only completed the assignments of “Week 0” of the eight-week long course, and have watched the lectures of “Week 1” and I’m hooked already. I must admit that nobody has taught me finance like this so far. In IIM Bangalore, where I got my MBA seven years ago, we had a course on microeconomics, a course on corporate finance and a course on financial derivatives (elective). The problem, however, was that nobody made the links between any of these.

We studied the concept of marginal utility in Economics, but none of the finance professors touched it. In corporate finance, we touched upon CAPM and Modigliani-Miller but none of the later finance courses referred to them. There was a derivation of the Black-Scholes pricing model in the course on derivatives, but that didn’t touch upon any other finance we had learnt. In short, we had just been provided with the components, and nobody had helped us connect it.

The beauty of the Chicago course is that it is holistic, and so well connected. The same professor, in the same course, teaches us diffusions while in another lecture uses the marginal utility theory from economics to explain the concept of interest rates. In an assignment he has got us to do regressions and in some others we do stochastic calculus. Having seen each of these concepts separately, I’m absolutely enjoying all the connections, and that is perhaps helping me keep my interest in the course.

And it is a challenging course. It is a PhD level course at Chicago (current students at the university are taking the course in parallel with us online students) and my complacency was shattered when I got 3.5 out of 11 in my first quiz. It assumes a certain proficiency in both finance and math, and then builds on it, in a way no finance course I’ve ever taken did.

Also what sets the course apart is the quality of the assignments. Each assignment makes you think, and make you do. For example, in one assignment I did last night I had to do a set of regressions and then report t values and $R^2$ s. In another, I had to plot a graph (which I did using excel) and then report certain points from the graph. Some other assignments make sure you have internalized what was taught in the lectures. It has been extremely exciting so far.

Based on my experience with the course so far, I hope my enthusiasm will last. I don’t know if this course will help me directly professionally. However, there is no doubt that it keeps me intellectually honest and keeps me sharp. I might not have had the option to take too many such courses during my formal education. I hope i can set this right on Coursera.