Qualitative Vs Quantitative subjects

I didn’t like theoretical subjects in School or at College because mugging was something I always hated to do. I don’t claim to have never done mugging, because you have no choice when a) you haven’t been very attentive in classes; b) when you are left with only 11 hours for final exam and c) you are still trying to make some sense of the countless pages of text floating around. But over here, these subjects are called “Qualitative” (I emphasize the double quotes) subjects. And any subject with numbers in them are called quantitative subjects. I couldn’t understood that because my perception was otherwise.

A title that seems as boring as Organizational Behavior, where you don’t expect to see anything other that hundreds of pages about how an Organization Structure has to be, what are the values should they posses etc etc, is classified under “qualitative”! (Again, quotes emphasized). But not after attending a class and discussing 2 cases of Organizational Behavior (OB), where the Entire class is discussion oriented and there is significant marks for it. OB professor seems pretty smart. He would award 90% of the participation marks at the beginning of the class for everyone. Then if you make an Exceptional point or share a relevant experience, you get bonus. Where as if you make an irrelevant point, your points are gone. And if you don’t even try to open up, then your points fall drastically. You got to risk it!

The Americans here are pretty good at discussions. They bring in really wonderful points onto the table that sometimes I feel like “wow! where was that from”. I believe they love these discussions and hence the classes are called qualitative. Yeah, even I enjoyed the class and I seem to have understood the point. And it is qualitative, as I tend to understand some of the practices in Cognizant such as why often we were assigned into more than one project, why our project leads sit along with us etc. Work experience is indeed a good thing to have for this class!

Well, rest of the classes are quantitative in nature and have a lot of assignments and case studies to do; so its kind of boring. Its been just 2 days into classes and I’m spending most of my time in the school.

Oh Yes, Monday evening we got to attend a presentation by Tim Koegel and I must say that he is indeed an exceptional presenter (just like the title of his book). He even gave us some tips to be one like him and made us do some practice such as how to use your hands etc. It was like a ballet dance practice session.

End of honeymoon period

It has been 3 weeks in US and I had a great time so far. I was kind of enjoying a holiday period, almost all by myself. From Monday onwards, its serious business as classes are about to begin. I’ll still keep updating my experiences in this blog.
Unite week ended with a lecture by Samuel R Allen, Chairman and CEO of John Deere. His speech was mainly about the challenges in a Globalized world and how John Deere is committed to meet the requirements of the increasing population. He also spoke about the three superpowers of the World: USA, China and India. The reason he mentioned these three countries as superpowers was the dynamism the companies in these coutries are bringing into the global market. For instance, he applauded the Tata ‘Nano’ car, that changed the pricing strategy in the auto industry. He had also mentioned about the partnership with Ashok Leyland for entry into the construction space and also about the progress of the company entering in India into the agricultural equipments market, which is the flagship business of John Deere. Later during the reception, I got to meet Sam Allen, I asked him specifically about the strategy the company used while entering Indian market, considering the challenge of small size fields owned by many farmers in India. He told me that the company has products for operation in small scale and has also come up with addressing other issues such as drift irrigation that can help small farmers grow. The idea is that when the small farmers grow and start owning big farms, they would stick to John Deere.
Monday onwards, our classes will begin and that means my schedule would be mostly to meet the pre reading requirements, assignments, case study, exams. By the way, the first mid term exam is on 9th sep. And yeah, we have to start searching for jobs for internship as well. I have to find this job in the next 3 months and I want to find a job that I’m really interested into not just ending up with any job.
Sunday, 3 pm, we have a lecture organized by the University to be presented by Khaled Hosseini, author of the book "Kite runner" and I’m pretty much excited about that!

Update on Sunday 7pm:

I attended the Khaled Hosseini’s public speech along with may be more than 5000 folks at Purdue. It was such amazing to see so many people being moved by his story and narration. He said that the main character of Kite runner “Aamir” was his alter ego. He said many things about him, as an author, that he does not make any profile of characters, rather the characters build their profile themselves as the story progresses. He also mentioned that he is more interested in bringing out the characters and their relationships in most of his writings than highlight an event or a particular situation. Probably, that’s why his writings are bit more emotional. He also said that he had actually finished the book even before visiting Afghanistan several years after his family moved to the United States. So, most of the book was written imagining how it would be if he were to visit Afghanistan. One prominent thing he told was that he would feel guilty because he has been able to live a better life while many of his countrymen were in the clutches of Soviet Union, Taliban and the US. I was just wondering how people would be living there for almost half a century when rest of the world was progressing in Industrial revolution and the IT revolution. The third wave might have never hit those shores!

Thursdays are fun @ Purdue

We had a session on Purdue libraries and it was interesting to know how the concept of libraries with millions of books have turned into a bunch of databases. Being a student is often a luxury. For instance, we have access to reports that are worth some millions of Dollars. Information has so much value in the real world! I was kind of struggling to find the latest IRS (Indian readership survey) back in India. All I could get was some bits and pieces. Now its just a click of a button away! This session also had a 20 minutes session on the Capital IQ database, which, as Krannert students we have access to. And that too for free. Some of the finance freaks where like “wow!” I was like “Hey, I know someone who works there!”. Honestly, Data monitor, Capital IQ were mere “just another IT firms”, back in India. Now I’m kind of a user here. Some other fascinating things here are Online classrooms, submission of home work by uploading into a sharepoint server, and then reviewing, grading and almost everything is online here.

Classrooms are so much fun here, not just in Purdue, in all of US I believe. You can eat in the classroom, I’m Kind of carrying a cup of coffee for every class. We get free Starbucks coffee every morning! That caffeine keeps me awake in class. People do eat their lunch and breakfast during class. I’m kind of imagining those days when we had to hide a box under the table, if we had to eat in the classroom! Another cool or rather not so cool thing is that we call our professors by Name. Not so cool because I’m still struggling to do so. These guys here are like “hey John.. what was that you said just now?”.

Coming back to Thursdays, we kind of have a schedule where classes are only from Monday to Thursdays. Fridays are usually for leadership speaker series when we have guest speakers in our campus. We have pretty interesting speakers in the 1st module such as Steven Levitt, author of freakanomics, some FBI Agents who cracked down the Enron case etc. Yeah, So by Thursdays all assignment submissions and class work is over and from Friday afternoon we begin preparing for the next week. That’s the system here. Thursday nights are meant for chilling out like I mentioned about Cactus nights last time. Today, I went out to Lafayette Brewing Co., a popular pub where we get locally brewed Beers (Of course, this was a school sponsored event!). And I tell ya, these beers are nothing before Kingfisher! But I like hanging out with these American guys. I like their sense of Humor!

Happy hollow adventure

I know, this sounds like the title of a horror movie, but the adventure we had was not any less. On the day when we had gone out for a picnic (read free food) organize by our school for “Socializing with team mates” (imagine: both hands held up symbolizing double quotes”), Ayan and I ended up in a misadventure and got lost in the woods.

Today, we were divided into teams. My team consists of an American guy, in fact a local, Joshua (Josh), Pierson from Tiwan and Erica from China. Josh is a History major with considerable experience working with NGOs and Pierson is an Economics graduate from USA and later worked in Tiwan. Both these guys are here for MBA. Erica is a graduate in Labor relations and is here for MSHRM (Human resource management) and is straight out of college. For the first module, we’ll share classes with MSHRM and MSIA (industrial Admin) folks. But the group looks pretty diversified. One of the team goals that we set up is to maintain a good work life balance, which Josh likes to call PPA (Professional and Personal alignment).  Nice one!

Then we were into case studies and related discussions. One of the case study was about Google entering into social gaming market and being a threat to Facebook. When I raised a point saying that Google can increase its customer base in the social networking domain, my professor asked “Is Google into social networking?'” Then I said “Yes, it has a product called Orkut”. He was like “Or.. what? I’ve never heard of that!”. Strange, Orkut was like one amazing invention which many reading this blog has embraced, something like a Thomas Alva Edison’s bulb, is never heard of in this part of the world. In fact, for half the class Orkut was a new term. People are so obsessed with Facebook. It seems, in Korea, the government had to ban Facebook during certain time of the day so that the Kids can stop playing Farmville and go to school. I just got bored harvesting…

One of our seniors told us that one of the good things about Krannert is that there is lot of free food. Yes indeed there is. This whole week we have breakfasts and lunch. There was a picnic at Happy Hollow park (if you are wondering where the title came up from,) where we were invited. Many came there with families. We honestly went there to eat and probably catch up some seniors for free advise. We were quite early there and quickly had our food. When we were finished, everyone just started eating. We thought of taking a short walk along a trail in the woods near by. At one point it almost seemed like the trail took a U-turn but it didn’t. And by the end of the trail we realized that we had almost walked in woods for more than an hour. and wanted to return quickly. We had to find our way out to a cemetery and to a road which was quite on the opposite side of where the picnic was held. Then, thanks to Google maps, we found our way through the streets and thus walked for almost 4 miles for 2 hours. Man (pronounced as Myean here), that was tiring!.  We did manage to capture some pictures in the woods.

There was a junction in this trail where there were two roads. Inspired from a famous Robert Frost Poem, we took the road not taken and ended up in a road like this…

Had it not been for some interesting places like below, I would have sued Robert Frost!

Induction to Krannert

Today was kind of the first day for our batch. This is known as “Unite week”, where we get to meet our team mates for the coming module. To introduce the system here in Krannert, we have 2 modules per semester, each running for 7 weeks. And we have to work through the module in teams. This week we will be introduced to our teams. I’m excited about that!
The first day started with photographs that we’ll have in our profiles. We had to be in business formals for this event. A first look in business formals…

Its kind-a weird, considering that I’m not very comfortable in formals even without a suit. But I guess there is no other go. I got to suit-up for every occasion.
Few of the important things that I can remember from today’s events are the guest lecture by Kevin Sullivan, who served as Assistant (Communications) to George W Bush, the Alumni advise and the business ethics session by KGSA (Krannert Graduate Student Association) president Ben. Almost everyone unanimously emphasized on one thing; Building a brand for yourself. “You have to Build a brand of your own to sell yourself in the market”. Brand building is an important activity to focus on in the coming years. One of the line items in this task is to be associated with certain brands, because it speaks out the person you are. Sometimes it shows your character and virtues. And its true to an extend I see it. For instance, I prefer drinking Starbucks coffee because I appreciate the values, which forms the foundation of the company. In fact one of the first things I wanted to do in US was to go to Starbucks and experience it. One another thing I remember about branding is a statement made by one of our managers after our campus placements. He said “You have a brand known as ‘Vasavi’, now you have another brand ‘Cognizant’!, it is your responsibility to preserve them”. Well, Cognizant Brand really helped!. Now an additional Brand (read responsibility) is “Purdue”.
We had a diverse alumni panel. Paroon Chadha, an MBA grad and an Entrepreneur, John Goodrich, MBA grad, previously served in the US military as a helicopter pilot, Rebecca humphery, an MSIA grad and is pursuing her passion, working for NGOs after graduation, Koji Sado, an MBA grad and working in P&G in corporate finance and Adrien Green, an MSHRM grad working as a consultant in Deloitte. Everyone in the panel had one thing in common: They pursued what was their passion. John went on saying “I worked as a Helicopter pilot and now I’m managing operations in a helicopter manufacturing company. Every morning I’m excited to go to work”.
Ben was amazing in his oratory skills. He brought in an important aspect of team spirit through an analogy of a karabiner used in mountaineering. When a team is climbing up, every member has to double check if their karabiner is right. And not just his/hers but also of all the team members. Even if one member doesn’t fasten his, all the members in the team will fall down. Interesting analogy.
Paroon left us with telling a fact, that the more you dig into Purdue, you would learn more. For example, Purdue’s Golf course, considered the 2nd best Golf course in the country in campuses, is designed by a famous designer Pete Dye, who has designed courses for many PGA tours. I’m enrolling for the golf course next year!
One another thing emphasized today was networking, networking, networking. Paroon gave a good tip: to follow American Football, baseball, basketball etc. And I’m a Boilermaker from now on, supporting my home team…

Another Welcome coffee

Okay, There is nothing much I did over the week except for the International students orientation. So, there wasn’t much to write. I’ve been covering all the malayalam movies that I didn’t get to see in the last 3-4 years, in this week. I’m all relaxing before the rough time begins. Today, there was another Welcome coffee. The gathering was pretty huge today. Seemed like the entire batch turned up, however the Chinese invasion didn’t appear any less (No offense, I’m just Kidding).
There was a senior guy who helped me in setting up my laptop. He told a lot of things about the curriculum. According to him, the major difference between undergrad and the MBA is that, during undergrad, you have to do all the stuff on your own: your course work, assignments, preparation for exams etc whereas in MBA, its a team effort. i.e one who is good at one thing does the job for his/ her team in case of an assignments. Similarly during exams, not everyone gets to study everything; you do it as a team like everyone prepares his part and help others understand. Any bells ringing (to Nikhil and Surender, if they are reading this)? This ain’t new practice!
I got to meet a few folks from my batch as well. There are people from all over America: Texas, Colorado, Alaska! and from all over the world. Honestly, until a few years back I thought there were no human settlement in Alaska! There are folks with really diverse backgrounds, from arts to commerce to languages etc. except for one set of folks who were from the companies we know a lot (Infy, CTS, TCS). In all, I believe, there are 15 folks from India this time for the MBA course.
So much has been talked about malluization (a term i coined out of globalization) that there is a popular joke in Kerala that, when Neil Armstrong landed on moon, he found a tea shop run by a mallu! Then it might not be very surprising for him that there are few mallus right in his backyard. There are four mallus in our MBA batch. One guy from Kochi, another from Thrissur (The only two places in Kerala I’m associated with, rather lived in); And there is a girl, who is a mallu brought up in Hyderabad. Strange, this world is such a small place!

Time to click some photos

It has been quite a while I’m here that I thought of uploading few photos (nothing much to do these days). After all, last few days I’ve been walking around the campus and nearby areas that I’ve figured out a few places to take photographs; I didn’t want to be photographed in front of some random buildings.

First, Here is where I live…

To attend the school…

in the University…

The below statue in the picture is one of the legendary alums of Purdue, situated right at the entrance of Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering. Well, there has been conspiracies around his accomplishment but I don’t want to believe in any of them now!

“One Small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”…

Then there is the Purdue Engineering fountain right in the middle of Engineering…

What is not seen in the picture is: where the fountain is located. so, here is a picture (though not captured by our camera), that can give a sense of the location…

Then the Purdue memorial union…

Well, that’s it: Purdue University, Indiana State, United States of America!

Welcome coffee

Yesterday morning we had been to the Welcome coffee organized by our school. The objective was to meet up the new class and get familiarized with the environment.
We did reach there on time and found many students there already. We were asked to pin on the world map where we belonged to with our name plates. We could find some Indian faces and got ourselves introduced. Interestingly I found another cognizant guy, who is from Pune. But seems like most of the students were from China, Tiwan, Korea, Vietnam etc. At our table, we had two Koreans and an American and a senior along with us. We shot all the questions we had to know with the senior including those about the cactus nights. He was kind enough to explain all that we wanted. One thing he told us was that, they spend 80 hours a week in the building. hmm, that’s a correction in my first post!
Back home I was quite bored by evening, that I took a walk along the campus. Now I feel much more comfortable roaming around the campus. Kind of got familiarized with the roads and buildings. I found a Mc D within the campus and had a Mc Chicken. And contrary to how its in India, Mc Chicken is better here. But I see why not many eat it here, very fatty. For about 2 hours i walked, met a couple of neighbors. Also cooked Chicken at my place.
So that was a hearty welcome to the campus!

Being a Roman when in Rome.

It has been a week exactly after I landed up here in the US. I thought of putting down some of my experiences about living in US. I’m not commenting about the commodes here anyway, but anything other than that. When touring around places, I like interacting with the locals, eating local food, exploring the roads and famous landmarks and visiting Markets, Restaurants and Bars, inspired by a program called Sancharam in Asianet.

There aren’t enough locals as such in the campus. Seriously seems like this territory has just been occupied by the Chinese troops. Lots of Chinese folks around that its not like being in America itself. This apart, I find people here cool. One thing I like about the Americans is their communication skills. When we go into the shops we get to see such amazing way they market the products. They never look shy and are pretty much willing to help. Every other person on the road greets saying “how are you” or “Good morning”. The young chaps address saying “Wazz up?”. In a quest to find out the correct response to “whazz up?”, I tried greeting a guy, who simply nodded his head. I guess that’s the best response. I had been to a walmart in the nearby town, Lafayette. On our way back, we took a cab. The Cab driver, a local here, gave us an overview of the two cities here divided by the Wabash river. He also told us about one of the biggest party in the campus, the cactus nights on every thursdays, where we get one mug of beer for 25 cents. What 12 Rs?

This place is not a very big city as such, in fact there are two cities: Lafayette and West Lafayette separated by a river known as wabash. Purdue university occupies most of West Lafayette. University is huge. The first day I went around the campus, I got lost many-a- times. Since this being a very old university, the roads are not very huge. Most of the lanes inside the campus are one way. I took a map and started exploring the places, yet I used to get lost somewhere in the middle. Some Korean folks came to rescue one day. They were kind enough to walk along with me and show a few buildings where I needed to go. West Lafayette has only a few market places around the boundaries of the university. We live in a place called south chauncey avenue, which according to the folks here is the most happening place in west Lafayette. There are many restaurants, and food stores and bars out here. But, its all too costly here. Interestingly there are two Indian stores also here, including a pakistani store (Somehow Indo-pak ties here seems pretty good).

Some of the strange things I see here are the obsession of folks with anything that’s large. I ask for a small coke cup, the guy gives me a cup that can hold half a liter of coke and guess what, with unlimited refills, all for one dollar. The smallest Pizza is 10” in size. And you go to walmart, everything is so big. Juice, starts from one gallon, that is what more than 3 liters. Milk also the same. These things are preserved for weeks in the refrigerator. I got a few beef patties, some eggs and bread and got cereals for breakfasts. I’m waiting for a day to come when I’ll put some cereals into a bowl and pour chilled milk straight into that bowl and eat that as breakfast. Also, I’m mostly munching on frozen parathas reheated in oven. Somehow that seems to the only go for food here. Another strange thing is drinking water directly from the Kitchen pipe. At first, I felt a little shy to drink directly from pipe, but now I kind of got used to.

Weather seems horrible. Outside, its so muggy (that’s what humidity is known as) that it would put Chennai, Mumbai at shame. 30C seems like 40C in India. God knew what it was like when the temperatures touched its peak at 45C. The sun raises at 5am and doesn’t set until its like 9pm. Pretty strange; I was mistaken many times thinking it was just 5:30 – 6, only to discover it to be 8:30 in the night. Nights are quite pleasant here, however.

Just as they say Rome was not built in a day, you can’t be roman overnight!

Dollar syndrome

Back in India, money was never on my mind first. Yes of course bad debts brought hell of a time when I had to think about money a lot. Before coming to US people often warned me of the conversion habit that Indians have. To spend every dollar, people convert it into Rupees and then decide. Apparently, I too have fell into the same trap. After all, my source is from India and the money first converts from rupees to dollars.


In India Rs 350 for an 8” pizza seems pretty okay kind of “Chalta hai”. But 7 dollars for the same Pizza in US seems too expensive. Well dispossession of those 7 dollars somehow brings in a sense of insecurity!

I couldn’t understand cents at all. A dime (10 cents) looks cheaper than 1 cent. While travelling to Purdue from Chicago, I wanted to buy a water bottle. I went to a vending machine and it was mentioned $1.25 for a bottle of water. In India it would take a maximum of 5 coins to make up for Re. 1.25. I had twelve coins in my hand and I kept on putting coins into the vending machine (I was running short of time, so didn’t check the value on those coins). I was surprised that despite putting in 12 coins, I was short of $1.25 by 20 cents.

Strange! I'm yet to adjust to this new currency!

Back to School

When I was working, I missed my college life a lot. There was work pressure, deadlines to meet etc., that care free life was something I missed. The very thought of going back to school was so exciting and I’m glad that I’m back.


I’m not too sure whether the school life is going to be as much fun as it was. First, back in college, the fun aspects were friends, bunking classes, endless discussions in the canteen from politics to sports and lots of extracurricular activities. Yes, extracurriculars would be there but the major difference I see is that, extracurriculars in college were meant to be fun and we did it out of interest such as Organizing industrial tour or the Robotics. But here extracurriculars seems so much as a resume’ building activity, something that’s forced upon.

Second, everyone here is scaring me about the curriculum. Folks here say “Relax this week, from next week onwards, it will break havoc”. We have about 16 credits to finish that means 64 hours of a week I’m occupied for the coming semester. That’s 1.5 times the work load at office.

School life is something we always love. I still remember in Gowtham Junior college, we were literally treated like prisoners; those beds, nine in a small room; the canteen (aka mess), all seems so scary now to even think of. Yet we managed to find some pleasures in many ways. The very thought of that always gives me a confidence, thinking “I’ve seen even worse”.

Anyway, I’m happy that I’m back to school!