And Life goes on…
Reetu Gupta, TMMBA Student
We are almost at the end of 2nd quarter. I can’t believe it. Time flies no matter how busy life is.
Actually 2nd quarter wasn’t so bad. I went back to watching “Lost” live on TV. It may be because after 1st quarter, you become a more seasoned student. You learn better time management tactics. You also learn how to skim instead of reading and trying to retain everything. You learn to compromise on quality when you have four different assignments due within a week’s period. These may sound like bad things but if you are a perfectionist like me, believe me, these habits bring you closer to reality.
Anyway, one thing to remember is that you don’t get discount in life just because you are in TMMBA program. Life’s ups and downs still happen. Nothing stops in outside world even if you lock yourself in a classroom. At the very beginning of 2nd quarter, my family got hit by recession lightening. My husband’s company shut down and he lost his job. Now I had one additional assignment of helping him find a job and keeping his morale up. My 5 year old got prescribed with eye glasses and gave me first shock of parenthood. My company announced a pay cut and let few people go. In a nutshell, these were hard three months that hit me and my family close.
Interesting part was, TMMAB helped me maintain my sanity. It helped me in some very unique ways. I contacted my classmates and alumni for my husband’s job. I was glad to see that finding a job for my husband became a group project. I have never so much support from so many people. In addition, knowledge I gained in corporate finance and accounting, I immediately applied to personal finances. I was able to maintain my cash out flow with only 45% cash inflow. Using newly acquired Marco Economics skills I was able to read various indices and was able to set my expectations accordingly. “Green shoots” in economy gave us hopes and labor index monitoring told us it may be a while when labor market improves.
I think going through an MBA program during a deep economic recession made it very fruitful and interesting. It’s perfect combination of theory and its use in practice. I think it was a once in a life time opportunity for me. Not that I’m crazy about economic recessions but if I was going thru MBA in a normal timings I probably wouldn’t have been able to appreciate the gravity of management skills.
