The onset of the MBA Journey.....

I have put my first foot across the doors of my MBA journey and things seem to be pretty new and different for me. It is the first time I am outside my own country and I feel lost sometimes as it’s difficult to survive in a European country like Italy without having a basic knowledge of their language. I know some basic Italian and am able to manage my stuff somehow.

Getting into an international b-school with a globally renowned program was like a dream come true for me and I came with the intention to extract as much knowledge I can and to transform myself into an improved person both on a personal and professional front. I got admits from two colleges - one from Simon school of Management (Rochester, NY) and the other was SDA Bocconi school of management (Milan, Italy). I had a tough choice to make, but finally after doing some analysis I chose SDA Bocconi over Simon.

The program here is a one year program including internship which makes the schedule quite tough and it’s really hard to cope up. Time is really flying by and I need to catch up as I spent my initial days just roaming around, meeting people and trying to adjust into the new city - fixing my house, my stuff etc. Now I really feel the need to pull up my socks and get into the real world of business. Every other day we have some company presentations and it almost takes up the whole day leaving a very little time to study. The main thing I believe is to prioritize things and make your schedule to be in time for things and not to miss out the important ones. One good thing about the place is that people here are very friendly and by saying this it reminds of a very sweet incident - One fine morning it was raining and I was getting late for school and I dint have an umbrella, so I decided to borrow it from the neighbor.... and in the evening there was a nice new umbrella with a chit on which it was written "A small gift from a sweet old lady who stays next door".... and I felt overwhelmed.......!

Most of the people in class look to be pretty much strong in terms of their experience and abilities, some are bankers, some are consultants...................................... But along with there are many fun people. One more great thing to mention here is the "Apertivo". It’s sort of a party where you just need to pay for the drinks and you get free food.... cool..!!! And every other day we have an apertivo for something or the other and its great fun. About the clubs there are many fun clubs like the Wine club who are most of the times busy in exotic Wine tasting Events, the Motor Club have great events like “the Ferrari driving experience”, “visit to the Maserati factory” etc. I joined the Management Consulting Club with a dream of getting into the consulting industry.

First term really went great and it was the time when everyone was trying to know people, making new friends, feeling the new MBA experience. People were divided into study groups and every group was having group lunches to be comfortable with each other and trying to know each other more than others because those were the people with whom we had to work with. Four of us moved into a really nice apartment in Milan and I loved the apartment, the only thing was that we had to share rooms.

Reaching to the morning 8:30 class was little bit of a trouble to me but I could somehow manage to reach there with my sleepy eyes and hastily dressed appearance. I did not attend the pre courses, so it was difficult for me to break into the groups of people which were already formed from the pre courses. But I had to know new people, new cultures and understand them. This was first time in my life when I came out of India and I was desperate to know about new countries about new people.

There were already many Indians in the class, 13 out of a class of 98 and it was not so difficult to make friends with the Indians though. I already had some because I almost talked to everybody over the phone or chat before coming here. I got some new friends and it was a nice experience for me. Although Milan turned out to be little disappointing as I had a fantastic image of the city in my mind, but it sometimes happens. When we expect a lot from anything, it always turns out to be a disappointment. That is mainly because we raise the bar of our expectations too high. The food was not as new to me as I knew about the Italian food from before but it was really different from what I tried before in India.

I was a little nervous in the beginning as almost all the people including the Indians were all like, they have travelled to different countries and all were like international people and I somehow felt little inferior when I compared myself with the others. But on the contrary it even gave me a feeling of an achiever of being there even though not so high in experience and other things. Honestly speaking I was proud of myself being there. We started going out meeting people, going to parties and always thinking about how to make friends with people from other countries. I was always trying to take the first step to get into the groups, trying to talk to people and things like that. I was worried about class participation, studying hard, attending all the classes and try to get most out of my MBA experience. This was the onset of the new experience of my life and the initial few days of my SDA Bocconi MBA experience…………..