Our ‘Marketing I’ exam was about math; our Operations exam was about math & statistics; our Investment Analysis was again about statistics, excel and math. Mind you, they were supposed to test our knowledge of something else. Now I am going through it all over again. Fixed Income. I have some idea of the concepts thanks to my experience in banking. But to no avail. I could not solve a single problem till I lost my sleep and googled hundreds of related pages. In the process, got tempted to buy all the books on fixed income just to understand what this symbol φ means. Even at the cost of repeating myself, I will dispense this – I am the kind of the guy who is comfortable most with words and least with equations. The idea is best captured in the concept of “poet” well explained in Snapshots from Hell . Now that I am already entangled in this labyrinth of equations, who else can I blame but myself? It was indeed my, cannot think of a better word what with the pain i went through today, sin to have picked up a course which deals with strange notions of kappa, lambda, and gamma.

However, much to both my amusement and chagrin, my IIT and CA friends – from a different world than I come – are grinding their books to understand what iota to the power of iota is. Because DB is coming to campus to pick up a guy who knows ‘which Greek letter to the power of which’ will generate higher profits on the trading floors of London or New York.

PS: Considering that the exam tested less of investment skills and more of math skills, I was not appalled to see my marks in the Investment Analysis exam. For the record, I registered my worst ever performance at ISB :-))