The MBA Tour

This weekend is the MBA tour weekend in Bangalore and it is the first time that the MBA tour is happening over a span of 2 days. It is amazing that out of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, only Bangalore has an MBA tour spread over 2 days. That tells us a lot about the number of actual and potential applicants. I attended the event today and found it good but still below my expectations.

While going to the MBA tour, I did not expect so much traffic especially given that its a long weekend here. May be rains have forced a lot of people to rethink on their short vacation plans or many people are preparing for the next long weekend that is just 6 days away. MG Road is a total mess these days especially the stretch right before Trinity circle. I reached on time and registered for the event. I attended all the sessions before the fair and they seemed to be pretty generic. Given that this time I am better prepared, I was frustrated that some people had very basic or even irrelevant questions or may be I knew the answers. Whatever it was, I started feeling like the most knowledgeable. Probably the MBA tour is meant to spread awareness among the Indian applicants about most general questions and clear their doubts. Since I had attended one last year and am now well versed with the process by reading several books, I did not find it interesting.

Once the sessions were over and the fair about to start, I noticed that there are far fewer people this time than last year. But there seemed to be a lot of people either still in college or having just 1-2 years of experience. Not sure if that is good or bad. But the fair started very similarly to last year and there was huge crowd in front of all the big schools. I tried listening to the conversations on 2 of them and I understood that it is better to ask my questions after probably an hour when the crowd is tired and disseminates. So, me and my friends decided to eat something outside and come back. Well, it was worth it since most of the crowd started to lose interest and there were many empty counters.

I basically had some very specific questions. I first went to ESADE and asked my question. The director straight away told me laughingly that this is a very specific question. She drank some water and bought some time and then gave a general answer, which was acceptable given the other people standing surrounding me. She redirected me to an ESADE alumni and that guy (doing his internship in India) was very polite and answered all my questions. I felt very nice to know that he has the same undergrad degree as me and is into the same specialization that I am interested in. I then went over to HEC and the Rice University counters and had brief chats with their admissions representative. But I understood from my first interaction with ESADE that this forum is not meant for very specific school questions. Well, not exactly true, but if they have an alumni, the alumni will answer all the specific questions. I think the schools should bring along more alumni to help serious applicants. Anyway, there are always online channels to interact with them, but discussing face to face sometimes help.