Problems of Plenty

"Yeh jigar jala kar peete hi Ahsaas ki narmi hoti hai...

Yeh baraf ki chaadar kya samjhe kya khoon ki garmi hoti hai!!!"

Some time back, I was wondering as to why am I being left out in this race to networking and as I pressed the pedals on this front, I found myself with too many things to do. Here is a day every MBA1 focusing on consulting dreaded… both haves and have nots…

The First Thursday of December was when even the calmest minds would have gone crazy. There were just a few consulting firms that had tried to network with dinner invites etc. till then and then it poured. I first grabbed dinner invite from A.T.Kearney and I felt relaxed to have networked well with them this semester. However, what followed it was just crazy. I got the dinner invites from BCG, BAIN, and Booz for the very same day. I am sure the restaurants were running a discount that day. On top of that I had office hour appointment for Bain and Co and for BCG in the afternoon. Things didn’t stop here as McKinsey decided to have its case workshop the very same day. How many things you can do after all... I had to decline BCG and Booz and went to the other events rushing through one stop to another, eating 2.5 dinners in less than 3 hours and finally managing to network. At the last hour during my Bain dinner, my cheeks were paining finally due to the 7 hours long smile and I gave it up.

Dine with glory – Another problem discovered during these invites was how to make sure you can connect to the person on the other side of the table. How can you weave a chat around similar areas of interest? So if Computer games (Super Mario) saved the day for me while chatting with one of the principles, I was completely out of place while talking about skiing in Denver or Ice Hockey in Boston… it seems there is a lot to learn here.

Solution – I have asked a few of my American student to help me with the dinner chats and guess what I am using poetry and drama to understand this. So I will be reading some of the contemporary plays and poets to ensure I can talk a little about the mile high city next time :)