Travails of a ‘senior’ citizen’s MBA

When you are in your late 20s (I refuse to use the term adult here) there is a general lack of excitement and challenges in your life. I am not talking about the free-spirited creatures here; for reasons of sanity they have been excluded from this gross generalisation. After all, if you justify doing questionable things with the foresight of a toddler putting a fork in the socket, your problems are largely different from the general population. However, I digress, my point is, as you hit your late 20s you experience what “experts” are calling “the quarter-life crisis”.

And people have different ways of managing this, some people take up a hobby, some watch endless American sitcom marathons, others indulge in controlled substances and finally you have people who take up higher studies. However, since it is clear by now that I am still evolving mentally, I decided to live every engineer’s dream — To do an MBA.

Lest you think I was courageous, let me give you a picture of the highly dubious situation I was in. I was in the US, working on an “onsite assignment” when I decided to throw it all away, come back and do an MBA in India. I had to quit my cushy job, end my housing lease (incurring a heavy loss) and above all, be separated from my wife for one whole year. First world problems to some, terrifying situation for a man-child like me.

With ample support from my mother in that unique mixture of cursing and cajoling and the constant counselling efforts of my father, siblings, wife and in-laws, I mustered up the courage to take the leap of faith and joined Great Lakes Institute of Management, in a select band of ‘senior citizens’.

And that’s when I realised that without doubt, this was the most masochistic of choices; because if you were chewed up and spat out by an unforgiving educational system more than half-a-decade back, why would you go poke the bear again?

And so, you realise that you are not prepared to handle the simplest of accounting problems or the eloquent tautology of marketing or, god forbid, the absolute obscurity of human sciences.

You scream at Maslow that there is no “pyramid of needs”, rage at the incoherence of corporate finance and surrender your dignity to the machinations of market research.

You realise that your skill set, or the lack of it, which served you for the past six-plus years in your industry, fails to serve you when it comes to presenting your findings from a case study in front of the professor and comrades just waiting to see you slip up.

Why then, would you choose to join this rush of madness? Is it because this is the national pastime now? Or you fear irrelevance in a highly changing world?

Whatever your reason is, if you are a “senior citizen” contemplating an MBA, realise this, you will be challenged, you will be mocked and put down (mostly by yourself) and you will find yourself staring into the “abyss”.

(The writer, who now works for an IT major, plunged into the abyss, and slogged for his MBA from Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.)

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