An article on Health 2.0
Recently, one of articles that I authored on Health 2.0 is been published in Asian Hospital and Healthcare management magazine. I have copied the link to article below.
http://www.asianhhm.com/healthcare_management/health-2.htm
Your feedback is most welcome.
Things I want to do in years to come .
Here are some of things I want to do over next few years. so let me see how I fair against my expectations 🙂 .
– Write a book . It would mostly be related to healthcare / Healthcare technology since thats the area which has been my bread and butter over past 6 years and I am passionate about it. I hope I would find few takers for the book too.
– Fit and healthy me : yes , I have been known as one of the laziest folks around in my friend circle 🙂 . But I wish to change that . And now is the time.
– Travel across India and globe: From Leh Ladakh, to Kerala – I seriously want to explore India to begin with and travel across some of the most beautiful and mysterious places.
– start a venture of my own in 10 years. I am still exploring various aspects of myself , digging deeper into various aspects of how business runs. But I am optimistic I could do something on my own in due time.
– Help lesser fortunate people on the way while living my life.
– Try and learn lots of new things , that I always wanted to do. playing a guitar, learn to dance, learn to cook exotic dishes.
– Earn money, lots of it – because all the things I want to do above may not materialize unless I got dough.
– Be happy : Now that is more important than anything else , strive for your dreams and be happy with what you got . There are far more number of people in this world who are lesser fortunate.
Too much information and too many choices.
I read this term Too much information and too many choices yesterday while reading the book Future files: A brief History of next 50 years by Richard watson. The author predicts that we all will suffer from Too much of information for too many choices we would come across while making decision. And I really dont think we need to wait for too long to face this situation. It is already happening in India.
I purchased my last cell phone 2 years ago. It was pretty easy choice then. It was Nokia all the way , I just had to pick one which would suit my budget the best. And in stray cases, I would browse through handsets of Samsung and Ericsson.
Buying car was no different. I had about 2-3 models to study from Maruti and Hyundai stable and pick the one – most of time which would be Maruti and go ahead with it.
A whole generation has been raised with Maggi Noodles as their favorite junk food.
And now, all this is changing. I had to make 3-4 visits to the cellphone shoppy to narrow down on one. Every time we went to buy one, we were swamped by about 10-15 different models. It was draining to go back and research for the best one.
Buying car is not any easy either. You end up struggling to decide which one you go for ,given that there are
many competing models within each price segment.
And when I go to supermarket, I struggle to decide whether I go with tried and tested Maggi, or opt for Froodles, souply noodles.
Internet has made our lives easier in many ways, but getting the right information you need is still a challenge.one cant help but be swamped by volumes of information that is there which one needs to sift through before arriving at an opinion or conclusion.
There should be , I am sure , business models evolving around this problem and I hope they would make lives of us all easier !!
Life post MBA !
ok, so its been about 13 months since I posted something on my blog here. I happened to stumble upon my own blog when one of friends read something here and told me that he liked the post. In this fast paced age of facebook and twitter, somehow my blog took the backseat.
phew,so where do I start now , now that I have decided to resurrect this place from dormance . why not talk about what life is been all about ,right from MBA days at great lakes and the career after that.
so here I go. one year at Great lakes just flew by. I entered the campus with uncertain mind ,not sure whether it was right time to go for MBA thanks to the slowdown and gloomy economy. However as year passed by, I drew confidence and was glad to have been part of something which I always wanted. Peer learning , learning from faculty was just great at Great lakes thanks to avarage work ex of students of about 4 years and the faculty being the best who came from all over the world to teach us.
one year at Great lakes made me very competitive and significantly changed my perspective towards life. and if any aspiring students are reading this blog and wish to my opinion on whether you should go for Great lakes, it would be resounding yes.
And here I am now, working at United healthGroup in Hyderabad ,working on something which I always wanted to, so that marks fairytale ending to my MBA career path, a dream job to start with. Life is pretty much stable now after oscillating widly outside comfort zone for an year.
There are few posts which I wish to write subsequent to this one which would take a bit of scratching the brain on my part but I should complete those articles. one would be about my two cents on placements process and survival guide for job aspirants at campus. I wish to follow it up with a short story that I wanted to write for a while.
Adios for now !
whats in the name ?
” whats in the name ? ” , said Bard centuries ago .
I say a lot. Especially when you share your name with 7 other people in the class . Today the class was asked to sit in Alphabetical order and to the astonishment of everyone , we realized that there are 8 Abhisheks in class occupying larger part of first row 🙂 .
Now I had unique name all along thru my life , and whenever Apoorv or Appu was called for , I was the only one to answer . Not any more . Apurva , my namesake lives couple of doors next to me. Many times I need to answer the door bell only to find that next door Apurva was the one who was being looked for . Most of my namesake`s not so good deeds seem to be mistaken to be that of mine from time to time 🙂 .
If this is the sort of confusion I am facing with 1 namesake , imagine how bad it would be for 8 Abhisheks .
Bottomline is Be careful when you name your kid and let me him be as unique as possible !!
The Magical Three Hours .
Its been fairly long time since I wrote the last one about life here at great lakes and this one too , I am writing this post in the middle of all the chaos going on here . These days , I am somehow keeping up with deluge of presentations , quizzes , exams and most important , sleep.
It seems to have happened in distant past but I would not be able to forgive myself if I don’t write about much talked about last class of Prof. Rakesh singh’s Macroeconomics class .
Throughout the semester , we all were struggling with the assignments he used to give us ( assignments ranged from Inflation in India to Singapore exchange rate management to US current account deficit to India on the move to name a few 🙂 ) . Most of us had the first taste of rigors of B-school once his classes started . Fondly known as ” Rocky ” among student community , Prof. Singh is an economist who would make you appreciate good things about india and at the same time , he would make you think hard about problems faced by India in general , and rural india specifically . Within span of 20 hours of his classes, students started talking in terms of GDPs ,WPIs , CRRs , Repo rates when they talked about nations .
I vividly remember one of his quotes , ” I still want you guys to remain confused and do the good job with assignments ” . First 17 class hours , most of us were clueless which direction classes were heading . But it was last 3 hour class where Prof speaks about ” India on the Move ” when it all made sense .
There usually is lot of hype about This last class, what with all the seniors telling you at length about it .
Prof easily exceed all my expectations and all the hype in those three hours . when I sat through those 3 hour class , I , rather none of us realized that its been 3 hours . Prof went on speaking for 3 hours , he did not take break to drink water or take a breath . Right from india`s economy in 1950s to Indira Gandhi`s tenure to liberalization to role of IMF in forcing india to open up the economy to Rural india growth to Enron to Anna Hazare to PC chidambaram to comparison of india and china , he simply went on and on .
And when the class ended , the entire 230 students stood up for standing ovation for Prof .
Rest of day was spent doing research about so many things he told in class ( There is a joke , that Prof. Singh speaks in hyperlinks 🙂 . you could spend hours after each class analyzing various things he talked about , and you still wont be content ) .
Hats off to you sir ! Those three hours were the most precious hours of my life as a student . And today our Dean , Prof. Bala Balachandran sent the weekly mail stating that there will be many more such wonderful experiences over next 10 months !!
B school Grads : Looking for job in times of recession
I had to summarize an article from business week related to job hunt in the time of recession for MBA grads for placement committee. Thought I will post it here too , as it makes good read .
The article keeps MBA class of 2009 as target audience and draws examples from students class of 2002 as both classes entered the market at peak of recession . Article states that finding job , career switching becomes extremely difficult in such times . Students need to be patient and many cases, they need to put their ambitions on hold for few years before market starts looking up again .
Aaron McNally graduated from UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in 2002 . McNally was looking for a tech job after spending his pre-B-school career in the TV industry . After MBA , he worked part time on campus to make ends meet for an year while hunting for job parallelly . Finally , he gave up on Tech job and he started with job in TV industry in 2003. He was running financial analysis on new projects for the company’s satellite properties. He continued there for 4 years and in early 2007, a position opened up at Google in its newly-formed TV advertising platform which was perfect match for his earlier ambitions .
The poor job market forced Aaron to be flexible about the kind of positions he was looking for. Ultimately, he reverted to his former career path, but in the end he arrived where he wanted to be .
Amy Brooks graduated from stanford in 2002 after leaving her job at Sun microsystems .Her initial plan was to use the MBA to break into the sports industry, but based on the job and internship outlook, she put the career switch on hold. She had interned with Bain & Co. and returned back to school with job offer from Bain . She wanted to find job in Sports industry by the end of college though .But when that didnt happen, she joined Bain as consultant and worked there for 4 years .When the sports job she had been longing for came around in the form of a marketing partnerships position at the National Basketball Assn., Brooks was ready, thanks to her experience at Bain.
It’s true that the position she accepted right out of B-school was not exactly on the path she was seeking, but it led her to a job she wanted. “If you can see a position as a stepping stone to where you eventually want to get to, take it,” she says.
Aparna Narang graduated from Kenan-Flagler School of Business in 2002 .Aparna was keen on finding a position in renewable energy which was a fledgling industry then .she got involved in the Sustainable Enterprise Program on campus, which gave her exposure to people working in the industry. A few of those individuals worked for Dupont and were able to help her secure a summer internship at the chemical company working on a “solar initiative.”By second year , job climate had worsened though . She continued her job hunt over next few months .She began talking with a contact who worked at General Electric whom she had met earlier in the year. Over the next six months, the talks with GE became serious until finally, in April, she was offered a position in the company’s renewable energy leadership program.
The article concludes with emphasizing on importance of networking in these times of recession . Few quotes of students which deserve special mention about networking are :
“You’ll have better success finding jobs through who you know than what you know,” Murphy says.
“The people I know who find jobs the fastest tend to be the ones who take advantage of the network and who aren’t afraid to ask people to take a look at their résumé.”
For the above members of the Class of 2002, the job search was much different than expected, but with focus, flexibility, patience, and a little luck, each was able to find the position they were looking for. It just took a them a little longer.
If there’s one thing the MBA Class of 2009 can take from the experiences of the 2002 grads, it’s that nothing’s forever. It definitely can get frustrating . It may not feel that way right now, but anyone that’s had access to a great education is in a good spot and things will work out eventually.
The article can be read at :
Life in Nutshell :)
Soldier : “Sir, we’re surrounded!”.
Army Officer : “Excellent. We can attack in any direction now !”.
Thats life in a nutshell right now 🙂 .
With deluge of assignments , journals , pre reads , term end exams lined up this and next week , there is no space to breathe . chunk of efforts are directed towards assignments of economics . The more you read about factors contributing towards trade deficit of USA , the more perplexing it gets . Economics has been easily my favorite subject so far . It doesnt mean that I am the best at eco of all subjects ( relatively that is 😀 . I am equally bad at all the subjects 🙂 ) , but I find it difficult to put the eco books down . To top all these assignments, Prof. Rakesh singh has asked us to go through a book related to macroeconomics ( non syllabus book that is ) over next few days and come up with the learnings out of it . Needless to say , this too needs to be done within next 2 weeks again 🙂 .
This week , its going to be end term exams for Accounting , IIO . busy times ahead till 23rd june .
and Its already been a month !!
2 years ago , when i was preparing for Gmat , I used to do two things . I used to study a lot and I used to eat a lot ,thanks to my mom 🙂 ( off the topic : Those were the golden days seriously . prawns ,fishes , chicken . I would get anything I ask for , coz I was studying 😀 ) . and now after 2 years , its time to shed the weight i gained then . Thanks to the hectic schedule here at Great lakes , I finally seem to be melting down ( my melting down has got nothing to do with global meltdown , its got to do with pure veg food we get here 🙂 ) . Its been a month and I already feel bit lighter 🙂 .Accounting principles of credit and debit and depreciation seem to be at work !
oh btw I am 1/12th MBA now , having survived through the rigours of first month 😀 . Time just flew by over past few weeks since I landed here .
Quick updates from the campus : yours truely could get into The much coveted Placement commitee . Financial Accounting – 1 classes ended , I thorughly enjoyed classes of Prof. Surya sekhar . With heavy heart ,we bid good bye to him . I casually looked for his profile on school of accounting – Florida Int. University website and was completely at awe looking at the accomplishments of the Gentleman . We will miss you , sir !! Prof. Krishnan`s classes ended too , relieved in a way for I wont need to go through texts of Upnishadas , Geeta and Vivekananda`s speeches as pre reads here after 🙂 .
Its been fun so far . Throughly enjoying life here , there is huge scope of improvement for me . I am taking longer time than I should to work at optimum limits . My perenial bete noire , bad time management , has not completely been taken care of . I hope to be better when it comes fighting with sleep in forthcoming days .
And am back to Land of Rajni …
And I reached chennai to start off with MBA . and as it happened in the past , the autowalla took me for ride again 🙂 . I hope to be smart enough by the year end at Great lakes to handle these chaps in better way , thats the yardstick to gauge how much I could make out of MBA 😀 .
And before I write anything further , well this space is going to talk about my life and experiences during rigours of 1 year MBA for time to come .
Its been 3 weeks in chennai now , after fun filled first week at a resort on ECR road as part of orientation , we finally packed our bags and shifted to new campus on ECR road . I must say this place is slightly far from chennai , but one year MBA hardly gives you scope to fool around . It feels great to be part of bunch of 260 folks with avarage work ex of about 4 years .
Classes started a fortnite ago . assignments , tests followed too and then the fun began . I am completely clueless how I am going to cope up with 3-5 hours of sleep a day , having slept for more than 8 hours a day for my entire life 😀 .
with couple of weeks , we had mid term of Accounts , a test of Marketing and Statistics . And we got going with our Empirical study project for Yale – Great lakes Empirical research projects .
Having worked for 5 years , I was skeptical about my decision for personal reasons and for the shape of economy . Whatever doubts I had about my decision evaporated when I sat through convocation of senior batch . I think thats it for now shall keep on writing as and when I get some time . yeah , time is the most precious commodity here 🙂 .
Reflections of My life and My thoughts .. 
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