Saturday, February 06, 2010

MBA Tour. New concept. Refreshing.

Some 20 days ago, I attended the MBA tour event in Bangalore. The very reason that I dedicate a full blog post to it is because it was different and refreshing. It was much more informative than the earlier MBA tour that I had attended. This MBA tour was called the MBA round table workshop. It had a different concept than the earlier ones that are primarily held during September each year. This MBA tour had 8 round tables, each table marked with numbers from 1 to 8. There were only 8 or 9 schools participating and each school's representative (usually the director of admissions) had to spend 10 mins on each table.

Not many people knew about this event and even if they knew, the timing was quite odd given that most of the schools just got over with their Round 2 deadlines. Not many people care about such tours during the months of Jan or Feb. But I think the reason I liked it was lesser crowd and greater interaction with the school representatives. The MBA tour in September was analogous to Bangalore Traffic where a lot of vehicles ply on narrow roads and then there is chaos. The earlier MBA tour also had lots of attention seekers and time wasters. Surprisingly, a lot of people ask questions about average GMAT score and placement numbers in the schools when all this information is easily available on the internet. The recent MBA tour did not have such chaos and many such people.

Although 10 mins was a bit too short, but it seemed like the MBA tour committee was trying out something new. I really liked the concept and felt that it was informative. Each representative talking about their school and answering whatever questions they could answer within those 10 mins. Yes, there were always the "crowd-surrounding-admissions-director-clearing-doubts" type of sessions at the end of the event. But the new concept would work only if there are fewer MBA aspirants attending or rather if the space were much bigger and more schools were participating.

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