Tuesday, May 24, 2011

BoB Nominee!

Yes, I realise I have realised this very, very late! But I wasn't really around the last few months, so I'm elated NOW!
I was a Best of Blogging Nominee :)
And my blog won under the Best GMAT Preparation Advice category! Wow, this feels really good! Although, since I didn't campaign for getting any votes, I really do want to know how many votes came in. Because if I've won with a grand total of 3 votes, I'd feel silly placing any importance on the win. So, how happy should I be?

Also, I want the java script for the "BoB Nominee" or "BoB (something!)" box! Anybody?

Monday, May 23, 2011

An MBA education costs HOW much?! *fainting with a thud on the ground*

What I've learnt today after a full day's research:

1. Cost Matters (pun intended) -
MBA from top US B-school: atleast INR 70 lakh
MBA from European B-school: INR 50 - 57 lakh
MBA from ISB Hyderabad (12th ranked in the world?): INR 20 lakh
Damn, if I got into ISB Hyderabad, I'd feel super guilty about opting for a US B-school. That's a 50 lakh difference! Half a freaking CRORE of a difference!!!

2. What exactly is Investment Banking?
Found this beautiful description on GMAT Club:
Investment bankers serve a variety of functions, depending on their specific position. They advise clients on financial organization; underwrite, sell, and trade stocks and bonds; and manage assets, among other responsibilities.

If you are working in corporate finance, you will serve as a financial consultant for corporations. Often banks will assign bankers to work in a certain industry (health care, communications, finance, etc.); you’ll be responsible for helping firms execute financial strategies, analyzing their financial needs, determining valuations for new offerings, and underwriting equity and debt offerings, among other responsibilities. Mergers and acquisitions is related to corporate finance and sometimes serves as its own department; if you’re an M&A banker, you’ll give advice to companies that are merging with or being acquired by other companies. M&A requires a detail-oriented, strategic mind to ensure you’re able to work out all the specifics of the merger or acquisition deal.
If you are working in sales and trading, you will buy and sell securities and commodities; traders must keep track of the markets constantly while communicating with buyers and sellers.
Research analysts become experts in their given industry. They use their expertise and do continued research to predict the movement of stocks, usually either in fixed-income or equity. Traders rely on their educated advice. Research analysts do many different types of research on a company’s financials as well as economics trends in general.

3. Can you take mini-MBA-lessons and get a sneak peak into what you'll learn during your MBA?
Yes you can! At this Financial Times MBA Gym.

That's all for today. Hopefully I make use of tomorrow's holiday equally well. Happy studying and researching!

PS. I am open to any suggestions on how to raise a substantial amount of MBA financing funds over the course of the next 2 years. Anyone?

Update: There are full-scholarships up for grabs, according to this BusinessWeek article. Although it was written in 2008, I guess it must still be somewhat relevant. Also, not sure how many of these are given to non-US citizens. Still, there is hope :-). When else will the Secret come into use right?

Kick-starting Career (read:MBA) Planning

Look who's back!
So the last 4 odd months have been spent on a 5 day Mauritius/Dubai holiday, getting back to a super-light workload followed by a 6 week back-breaking workload. I honestly have not spent too much time thinking about my MBA plans. Till my father kindly kicked my a** back into gear yesterday.
We discussed how I will probably want to continue down the consultancy path - I enjoy working in this kind of a role, the wide scope it offers in terms of experience across sectors, and obviously I seem to be doing well for myself here (see how I have so quickly forgotten [read: stopped giving a rat's a**] about parallelism rules).
But, there are still a LOT of other things to consider. Let me break it down -
1. Career options - consultancy, finance (investment banking/private equity), media/publishing (management side of it), entrepreneurship (restaurant industry), non-for-profit (or NGO, as we call it in India). Yes yes, it does seem to be all over the place. But, I could potentially do something in any of these.
2. Qualification - The one thing that ties together all of the above is an MBA. That degree will (I hope & assume) give me the skill-sets and foundation required to get onto any of these career paths.
3. Secret ambition - to become a renowned writer :) but I'm keeping that aside for the time being. I need the security of bank balance amount containing many, many, many 0's to be able to consider this seriously.

Anyway, keeping aside #3, you can see how I need to seriously start chalking out my career plans now. I'm not quite sure yet how I'm going to go about figuring my life out. I need some serious help. Action points anyone?