The Outlier

The continuous buzz, the high strung crowd, the never sleeping campus - ISB! No TGIF, no weekends, just straight days and nights with one random night to party till you drop! This is the life of an average ISB student. And then there is me, the passive MBA student who lives all of this, with just one minor difference.. I don’t get the MBA degree!! Yes, I am the +1 of the high-strung-always-on-the-run ISB-ian! The spouse, the family, the collateral, the Outlier in the random sample!

I am in a hostel though not in the college, I am putting up with the mess food though I am not a student, I seem to know sonite-vodite, studies all night, CFIN 1 &2 , death by DMOP, biases of MGTO, Nash’s equilibrium, Zara’s strategy, FADM & MADM.. Yet I am no to be -MBA!  I am an MBA by induction! And very much like passive smoking, which is as dangerous as actual smoking.. Let me tell you. ..And do believe me when I say so.. Passive MBA is almost as stressful as an actual MBA!

Friday for me is still THE FRIDAY! No office, no work! But being in this battleground of a campus, whosoever I meet, has a whole lot of bottled up emotions .The moment you say Wassup, you are greeted with a despaired story of a student. Some can’t keep track of the assignments, some just can't get along with the study group, some can’t even get hold of the every member of the group, some are sure they won’t get placed, some don’t know what the prof just said and for some it’s just one or two painful word ..”CFIN” “LSCM” followed by a deep and long…..”Yaaaaaaaar”. And there goes my mood from Thank God it’s Friday to Oh No So much stress!!

It is frustrating.. not to be able to follow every new movie release, to go to shopping and keep thinking “I am wasting his time”, to go a dinner with his phone continuously reminding how many places he has/had to be, to take a stroll with your husband and some or the other person commenting on 'How much time he has!' I won’t lie; sometimes I just want to run away!

But then, then there are those oblivious moments, when you sit with a lost ISB-ian friend and tell him 

“Dude, you are in ISB, the best college in the country, if you don’t get placed, then no one in the country is getting placed” or just “You've got to get me in your company once you get placed yaar” or “Hey, I like your dress” or just tease around “Oh so what happened today, heard you still researching about what happened in Marketing class”, "who asked you to take LSCM, Apple jana tha na (You had to go for Apple)” “Aur bano so and so president" or just a small opening statement “Maut(death) by DMOP huh?” … and you see a smile spread on their face, might be because of my  limited knowledge of complex issues or just because they can’t make me understand the gravity of the situation, but that’s that one moment which makes them smile , makes them burst into a laugh, takes their mind off everything and makes them share every funny CP, incident, debate that happened with me!

That is when I realize, why I am here.  I might be get frustrated by induction, I might be feeling out of place at times, I might be feeling more of a wife then I ever did, I might be getting stressed even without getting a degree…but I am something else also; I am a naïve break from something that my ISB friends are working towards and something that keeps slipping out of control every now and then. I am the coffee break, the random stroll, the idiotic translation of every confusing funda, I am the spouse for whom everyone spares few minutes, even if out of respect.

I might be an outlier, but didn't someone tell me once, “Outliers define the pattern?"

Saumya Srivastava, SFA, Class of 2015