It felt a little strange waking up today at home and not rushing to the class … Not worrying about the test and not skipping breakfast ! Every term at ISB I think is a “time capsule” from which each of us will emerge with new knowledge and a greater set of tools much like mankind progressed through the ages.
Term 1 started on Aug 4 and the first professor that taught us was Prof Sudhakar Deshmukh. I went in with trepidation … Probably I wont understand probability. No such luck with Prof Deshmukh teaching ! He slowly, easily slipped into our heads and re-energised the old neural pathways that held our old learnings of the subject and in some of our brains he laid new super highways of understanding. Then the post lunch session, we thought we could get a power nap after all the mental gymnastics Prof Deshmukh got us to do … Hmmm no such luck again ! Prof Mark Finn came armed with interesting fraud stories, some from the day’s newspaper, some from his archives and accounting suddenly seemed “the” thing to do !
As the days progressed, this act was repeated and it was amazing how we forgot all about our office, the so called “big” roles that we all played, I even forgot a few birthdays along the way… Just to get that one case study done or prep for that quiz. If you want to know the impact, I started the day today by analysing Reliance’s annual report – a document that would have been as uninteresting as nursery rhymes are to a 43 year old till 7 days back. Prof Finn – you did us in.
Besides his interesting style of teaching accounting and the oodles of energy he has, his ability to remember who said what and relate a concept to that a couple of days later was just amazing to watch. I do pride myself on my ability to remember things but Prof Finn you are something else !
I have to record Antony’s discoveries for this time capsule – the Dull hypothesis instead of the Null hypothesis, the depression instead of the regression and the Standard deviants that we all became instead of standard deviation. The best of all was ofcourse the “confidence intervals” and Antony’s take on it – we gained confidence every time we got an interval (read break) and promptly lost it when we got into class !!! :):)
Not to forget the time Anand asked a question to Prof Finn and with the help of all of us nearly convinced him to change a “+” to a “-” on one of the slides, before he quickly corrected us instead of the slide !! If we really think back, Prof Finn pulled a fast one on us by getting us to agree to a closed book quiz – am still trying to remember how he slipped it past our protests …..
Then the 420 error that only Manoj got every time he tried to login to the Atrium and Feroze’s smile when he got it right even though he arrived at the answer in a new way. Srini’s tutorials brought many a smile – from the dumb goat to the utterly confusing hypotheses !! Hopefully Sajive has come to terms with wNhy zero was counted as an outcome, and Sanchita has made up with Prof Finn for the Coca Cola remarks and Wong has come to terms with the quizzes.
Gala dinner with Prof Deshmukh singing (he knew what was in store for us the next day) …Sajive singing hoping he would get some grace marks, Arun singing because he knew he will GET the marks. Krishnan and I went cycling and am still smiling at Prabhu’s reaction to my hello 🙂
I also counted the number of times Prof Deshmukh asked us “are you with me?” – 15 times and not once did he get an unanimous emphatic “Yes” except from one student – yeah, the same guy who run’s A-run’s Academy for the Mathematically challenged. Ofcourse not to forget our dear Sandeep Vij who nearly took over from Prof Deshmukh in one session :):). Also, the last day when some of us cheekily asked Prof Finn whether Betty Vinson had an accounting degree from Kellogg… That’s why we have 36 questions in quiz 2 rather than 35, go on be cheeky, Prof Finn remembers it all.
Did we really spend seven days at ISB ? It feels like one long day of making friends, regressing to our student days, just without the school uniform, getting a couple of intervals, long sad faces after one test, happy ones after the next till the questions were discussed in the class, a moment under the spotlight after an advertisement, cups of tea, complaints of bad food and then getting our new books for the next class, saying goodbye to our teachers and going home… ISB Time Capsule ? I want to be back, missing it already !
Yes – completely agree !