I, The Absolute

Students who come with a clear goal of moving into consulting or finance roles have a relatively easy job of picking up electives. ISB offers a range of electives that enables one to specialize in finance or operations or marketing or leadership & change management or entrepreneurship. One has to major in at least one concentration and maximum two. To major in a concentration, one needs to take at least six topics/subjects mapped under that concentration. One needs to complete sixteen electives to graduate. Having put nine years of workex behind me and having worked in a middle management level, really don’t want to go into jobs which seek narrow but highly specialized skill set. Would rather look at general management roles, if not immediately, at least a year or a couple of years of graduating.

I said the job of picking up electives is difficult or easy only in relative sense. Given an option, I would not like to major in any concentration, but since I need to meet this requirement, I chose to opt to major in “leadership & change management” (LCM). There are quite a few interesting topics under this concentration. ‘Negotiation Analysis’ and ‘Leadership lessons from world literature’ are two topics I look forward to with enthusiasm. LCM will consume six of the choices. I will use the other ten options to cover subjects as Managing IT, Operations Strategy, Consumer Behavior, Strategic HRM, et al.

Electives are fun. For just the simple reason that they are electives and not compulsory. I ‘choose’ the subjects. The rest of the fun comes from the fact that the subjects are quite varied and let me broaden my understanding. There is good amount of learning possible.