Vacation

Finally! These plans have been in the making for over 6 months, after getting delayed and then delayed again, we are finally leaving tomorrow. These past week has been crazy busy. A lot of pending work needed to be completed, responsibilities shifted and reports written.

In addition to the work, I had to prep for my accounting class today, and after the disastrous last class, I couldn't goof off on my reading. The class was surprisingly easy today, and I don't think I can attribute it to my preparation. The usual suspects were all there, the French fry muncher, the bald thug, the 'I have a question' Indian, the fat lawyer who thinks using the flush is below is dignity, the clueless Chinese girl, a few more bland personalities et moi. The classroom discussion was excellent and for the first time the class seemed to be gelling as a group. Appearances being very deceptive, the bald thug is probably the smartest in the class, and for all his thug clothes and attitude, he is the one with his hand up to answer most of the questions (correctly too, blast him!).

Well, goodbye all, for the short duration. The next time I blog will probably be around when the results for various schools are released. I have my fingers crossed for myself and all the other bloggers out there. Hopefully the love gets spread a lot more evenly this time around. Good luck to everyone who is waiting out there. Good news is around the corner.

I must try to post some pictures of our journey.

Hamfisted!

What with me going on vacation next week, a regular 12 hour work day is insufficient to deal with the work that I have been inundated with. But I haven't been so busy as to be untouched by the controversy raging in the MBA applicant world.

I received an email from HBS the other day that shocked me to some extent and made me clutch my stomach and laugh aloud.

We understand that some users of ApplyYourself, the on-line application and decision notification system we employ, have inappropriately attempted to access decision information about their own applications before the specified notification date. We take this abuse of the ApplyYourself system very seriously. Such behavior is unethical and inconsistent with the behavior we expect from high-potential leaders we seek to admit to our program. We want to assure all applicants, however, that:

* HBS decision information housed within ApplyYourself is neither complete nor final until our application notification dates
* The application information that all applicants and recommenders submitted to us has been, and continues to be, secure

We appreciate your interest in Harvard Business School, and we want to underscore to all our applicants our commitment to make and communicate our admissions decisions in the most rigorous, fair, and secure fashion.

Sincerely,
Brit K. Dewey, Managing Director of MBA Admissions & Financial Aid
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field Road
Dillon House
Boston, MA 02163

At that time I felt this was a small little storm in the tea cup, some software developers are going to get their fingers rapped and life will carry on as normal. Today I read an article on MSNBC that claims this storm has taken on hurricane proportions. HBS is taking this as a personal affront, and reacting to it by puffing out their chests and closing all orifices while blowing themselves with air. (For some reason tweety comes to mind.)

To add to the confusion there is a major thread on BW where every Tom, Dick and Harry are opinioning themselves to death. They have divided themselves into two camps. The first who belong to the "You snooze, you lose" cadre, consisting of people who jumped on the bandwagon to get a little advance intimation of their results and are now being castigated as people of low moral values by the other camp consisting of the "snoozers" who are thanking their lucky stars that they had better things to do than read BW forums and by virtue of inaction have the moral upperhand.

Coming from an engineering background I seem to agree with PowerYogi's argument, that the HBS admissions committee seems to be laboring under a serious misunderstanding. Accessing information in public domain is NOT hacking. Besides I can understand the concerns of people who wanted to check their application to ensure that their data is not accessible by others. Having given all kinds of personal information to ApplyYourself, including credit card numbers, it is natural to want to ensure that your information is safe. (Regardless of HBS grandiose claims about the security of the system. Since we have already established that they know nothing of technology, so their claims have very low credibility.)

I feel sorry for the admissions committee at HBS, who is probably kicking themselves in the butt for over reacting to the problem. Instead of handling the situation in their usual blackbox fashion, they have made an ass out of themselves by putting their foot in their mouths. They are going to be held up to ridicule for a long time, specially if they employ any ham fisted method to deal with the perpetuators. I feel even worse for the poor applicants who now have to deal with three additional weeks of terror while the HBS adcom comes up with their punishment.

That being said, I would like some professors to take this up in their ethics and leadership class.

Jackal

I was looking for my library card last week and in the process of turning my bookshelf into a disaster area I stumbled across some books I haven't read in ages. Leaving the demolished bookcase as is, I picked up the first book that caught my eye and it turned out to be Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. I got past the first chapter and I was hooked. The fact that I hadn't read the book in over 10 years meant that I had forgotten most of the plot and could read it anew. The ancient magic was still as strong as ever and the master's book just as intriguing.

But I did find some of the details a little funny, the biggest of which was how the antagonist expected $ 500,000 to guarantee a life of luxury for the rest of his days. I guess the things a dollar can buy has suffered drastically due to rising inflation. Reading that book bought memories of a bygone era when I could curl up on the sofa and read without the slightest care of what the future held for me. The book was written at a time when despite the upheaval going on around, the world was a relatively serene place with a clear demarcation of friends and enemies.

Isn't it funny how, for books written in the 50's and early sixties, it was always some rogue Nazi who was the bad guy, after which the spy stories and commies took over the mantle of evil, followed by the Chinese and now it is the turn of the Arab terrorists.

Parallel to the spy thriller, I am also reading 'Uneasy Money' by P.G. Wodehouse set in the 1920's which is a completely different era and a different genre. Not one of P.G.'s best works, but certainly funny in parts and over all a great read.

If you haven't stumbled across this site as yet, and you like to read, either on your pocket PC or in the form of an ebook, do check out Project Gutenberg. The greatest collection of free ebooks. I usually pick up several books from here, specially the classics.

Stampede

I was walking in the corridor outside my classroom last night, trying to get my circulation going after sitting through 10 hours of work and 2 hours of class. At the very same instance a different class (statistics I think) went on break, either their professor had gone on too long or the students had indulged in a little too much soda to stay awake but they were on a mission. As I was walking by the restroom door, I could see the whole class enmass making a beeline towards me. Now I am see quite vividly what happens when you get between a bear and her cub or a rhinoceros and water. I almost got pushed in the restroom myself and it was only with great dexterity and agility, I weaved and bobbed my way out of the stampede and weakly made my place back to my class and seat. Thrombosis be damned! I wasn't going to risk the stampede again.

While on the topic of class, what is it with people who bring burgers and fries to class? I can understand people feeling peakish, even a little hungry, but to responsible for wafting the smell of fries under the noses of several other hungry students when they are trying to study is a little too rude for me. I have been known to munch on chips and pop a soda right in the middle of an important point, but this? A little too much, don't you think? Specially when the person sits right behind you and makes loud noises while he chews?

The professor yesterday seemed to be completely charged up. Keeping up with our Jungle analogies, he was charging through the matter like a bull elephant through the weeds. I could barely keep up with his notes let alone understand the matter under discussion. I guess that is going to require some extra amount of time spent over home work. To add insult to injury, the professor was pleasantly surprised that he finished his lecture notes about 15 - 20 mins earlier than scheduled.