University of Minnesota (Carlson) B-School Diary
Manish was admitted to Carlson with a full tuition scholarship.
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Manish Prabhu, University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management Class of
2006 |
An engineer by qualification, vocation
and profession I was always interested in the larger scheme
of things – be it the automatic lighter I constructed in
school or the fuzzy logic based power dispatch controller at
college or the 30GB data ware house I designed for my
company recently.
I graduated in 1999 from REC Nagpur -
India with honors in Electronics Engineering. Armed with the
technical degree, I joined an IT consulting company to
observe the intersection of technology and business. Over
the past five years, I have observed and orchestrated
cutting edge IT solutions to business problems in industries
as divers as banking, stock exchanges, smart cards and
retail, and client locations in India, Europe and the United
States. I have also been instrumental in the business
development efforts of my firm at the regional level.
Although an MBA from a top school was
always on the cards, the last year was more than decisive in
my decision to start my MBA this year. Over the course of
last year, I realized more often than before that my
technical qualifications and work experience fell short when
I tried to comprehend business problems beyond the domain of
IT alone. How does a company align its web-based operations
with its physical stores and provide a unified façade to its
customers? How will my client evaluate the effect of the use
of RF-ID (Radio frequency Identification) on its existing
processes and infrastructure?
Questions like these and my inability
to reach decisive solutions, made me realize of a gap in my
skill set and the skills required to understand business
problems in its entirety. I could always work for a few more
years and pick up these domains but an MBA I am sure will
expedite my understanding of these business basics and also
provide the decorum to attract recruiters who value my skill
set – and also help me pay back my loan.
While I face the pre-course
preparations and gear myself for the first day at class, I
can’t stop but wonder if anyone could quantify the benefits
that could be derived from this course such that it could be
understood by every applicant who strives for it. This diary
and similar diaries of other students, I believe, could be a
humble start to decipher if the degree delivers as much as
it claims or more. How relevant are the rankings provided by
the various agencies? What happens to the 100,000 + MBA’s
churned out annually by business schools worldwide?
At the end of the day, the degree is as
good as the person behind it. As said by some wise person,
in this case too the process is more significant than the
end.
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