Life at a European Business School

It’s different, very different from what I was used to back home at IIM Kozhikode where the boundaries between days and nights, between weekdays and weekends and between courses and exams seemed to non-existent. Even if they did, they were too blurred for mortals like us to realise. It was a constant engine, where every inch of your horsepower was used to move yourself ahead. Time was a luxury and pressure was the best friend people had.

Here, life is simple. I still have 9 courses and will have to pass all of them but I am sure of many things about them. The professors are different and to a certain extent I like their way of teaching better than I liked at IIMK. The pedagogy followed is less demanding and I have a lot of time to spend beyond reading cases and worrying about quizzes. A short reference list with differences between EBS and IIMK:

1.       No classes on weekends here compared to just 2 weekends free in the whole term at IIMK.

2.       Classes generally don’t end at weird times and neither do they start at weird times. The duration of classes is also manageable. Back home, I can’t tell you how ridiculous it became sometimes.

3.       Very small class strength compared to humongous 65 people at IIMK.

4.       No cases to read and prepare here. This I feel is worse compared to IIMK where the cases were sometimes good but many a times there were too many of them. Its difficult for me to transition from infinite cases to no cases. J

5.       Slides prepared by the profs are very very professional as compared to slides prepared back home with weird backgrounds and funny animations which almost always became a pain to be printed. Here professors provide the print-outs of the ppt before every class.

6.       No set textbook prescribed in almost all the courses and hence no textbooks distributed by the school for the students to mug-up. I like this system of multi-reference studies (though haven’t studied at all till now)

7.       Students come to class very nicely dressed up compared to us where we would just get off our hostel beds and rush to the class with red eyes and dishevelled hair.

8.       Most of the students would have read the reading material or cases (if any) definitely for the class as a home work. I don’t remember that happening back home very often.

9.       Teachers respect students’ time and end the lecture on time with appropriate breaks. Back home, the teachers took pride in making sure to extend time.

10.   Students don’t do CP just for the sake of doing it, no marks for CP, hence they speak only they really want to say something substantial and valuable.

11.   Very few components of grading compared to infinite components back home. No surprise quizzes, no graded assignments, no midterms and in a few cases, no end term.

12.   No compulsory attendance. Back home, people lose a grade for missing 2 classes. I particularly like this system since in a post graduate course like MBA, students can decide what is good for them and what is not.

13.   Smoking not banned in college though there are non-smoking zones in the college. Same maturity principle applies here as well.

14.   Students here take submissions and presentations very seriously. They would prepare the ppt 2 days in advance and would have had at least one dry run even when the submission is not a graded one. Indian students would laugh at this J

15.   Haven’t seen people free-riding here. In India, we find plenty of them.

I am not going to say which system is better and which is worse. It’s a huge change for me and I love it. MBA can’t get easier than this for people from India. J