I’ll tell you what I thought an MBA was before I did one.
I thought it was two years of becoming sharper. You go in, you study cases, you argue about strategy in air-conditioned rooms, you emerge with a job that justifies the fee and a vocabulary that justifies the job. Clean transaction. Known outcome. I had friends who had done it. They seemed fine. I used this as my primary data point.
What I did not account for is that the MBA is also, simultaneously, a two-year exercise in discovering exactly what kind of person you are under conditions specifically designed to find out. The cases are real. The arguing is real. The air conditioning is real. But so is the part where everything happens at once and you have to figure out, with no prior data, which version of yourself shows up.
Spoiler: it’s a version you haven’t met yet. You will not always like the introduction.
The Manual Nobody Gave You
You arrive. You have approximately one week of orientation, which is warm and optimistic and features a lot of group photographs that will later be used as evidence that you were happy before you knew what was coming. Then the curriculum starts, the clubs start, the committees start, the networking starts, the case competitions start, and everyone around you appears to know exactly what they are doing.
They do not know what they are doing. You will discover this later, usually at 2am before a group submission, when the person who seemed most competent in week one is now sharing a screen with you going “wait which case is this.”
In the moment, it just looks like everyone received a manual you didn’t.
What nobody tells you is that the Indian B-school system has its own particular flavour of chaos that has nothing to do with the curriculum. Weekly quizzes that materialise with forty-eight hours notice. Exams where the door locks at the scheduled time and five minutes late means you are not sitting it for another ten minutes, full stop, no conversation. Events announced for 10pm that actually begin at 1am… and you attend, because that is how it works here and everyone who came before you attended too. The schedule is a suggestion. The intensity is not.
By week three, the two committees that recruit immediately, Ignition, which is the CR committee, and the placement committee, have already made their selections. Everything else waits until October, a phase called Overtures, by which point you have some idea what you’re getting into. The placement committee does not wait until you have some idea what you’re getting into. This is either by design or a coincidence that works out well for the committee.
I joined the placement committee. I joined it the way you do most things at that stage… form open, deadline imminent, brain not fully engaged. Twenty-two days in. I had told three separate interviewers during admissions season that I specifically did not want to do this. I had been asked at IIM Lucknow, at two other campuses, and I had each time said no with the confidence of someone who had never actually seen the inside of a placement committee. Then the portal opened and I clicked. When people ask why, I have a philosophical answer about staying available for opportunity. The honest answer is that the portal was open and I clicked.
The Cautionary Tale That Didn’t Caution
The selection process for the placement committee is six rounds, the details of which I am not going to share… anyone who wants to know should go through it themselves, which is the correct answer and also conveniently protects me from having to relive it in writing.
What follows the selection is three months that I can only describe as an extended experiment in human limits. I was a junior member in training… learning how the processes worked while simultaneously absorbing a rigorous curriculum that assumed I was paying attention, making friends, which requires presence and energy I was rationing, and sleeping two to three hours a night, which I have since learned is not sleep so much as a brief negotiation with unconsciousness.
And preparing for my own summer placements. I was gunning for consulting.
Here is what that meant in practice. My batchmates were slotting their case prep into the afternoon, into the evening. I was doing mine at 3am, in the gap between committee work winding down and the next day beginning. The campus was mostly quiet. Some others were still up… you are never truly alone in a B-school at 3am, there is always someone else doing something they probably shouldn't be doing at that hour. But it was the specific feeling of being one of the only people awake, trying to diagnose in a MECE way why a fisherman's profits had been declining for three months, only to land, thirty minutes later, on the conclusion that his fishing net was torn.
You are tired in a way that has stopped feeling like tiredness and started feeling like a baseline. You crack the case or you don’t, you sleep for two hours, you show up to class. You do this for weeks. Physically present, spiritually elsewhere. The professors noticed… not because I told them, but because dark circles and the slow involuntary head-nod of someone losing a fight with gravity are a fairly legible signal.
Two professors pulled me aside on separate occasions.
The first taught Behavior in Organizations, which already requires you to be awake and capable of opinions, and I was consistently neither. He woke me up before I could leave one day and said, plainly, that I needed to stop sleeping in class, that he would not be lenient, that in fact he would be stricter. I thanked him. I continued sleeping in his class. I passed.
The second taught Quantitative Methods and had done his PhD from IIM Lucknow. He looked at me one morning with the expression of someone who has seen this particular situation before and said: when I was doing my PhD here, there was a brilliant student who sat beside me. Smart, capable, everyone knew it. But he was repeating the year. I asked him why. He said he had been on the placement committee.
The professor then paused and looked at me for a long moment.
I did not fail. I want to put that on record. I also interned at BCG that summer and got a PPO. The person they were looking at when they told me their cautionary tales was, at that very moment, doing case interview prep at 3am. I don’t say this to be smug… I say it because I think it captures something true about what the MBA actually is: a place where the person most visibly falling apart is not always the person most actually falling apart.
The Brochure Lied. Politely, But Still.
Here is the thing about the MBA that nobody puts in the brochure: the curriculum is not the hard part.
The hard part is managing the distance between what you expected and what you got. You make your MBA decision based on information that is, by definition, out of date. The rankings are last year’s. The salary figures are last year’s. The placement statistics are last year’s. The market is historical data you are using to make a decision about the future, which is a reasonable thing to do and also fundamentally limited, because the future has not agreed to be consistent with the past.
The 2024-2025 hiring market was not what the brochure implied. Consulting had pulled back. Tech had frozen. The post-pandemic boom had corrected in the quiet, efficient way that markets correct… without announcement, without apology, and with complete indifference to how many people had made significant life decisions based on the previous numbers. Companies that used to send twenty recruiters sent eight. This was not an IIM Lucknow problem. It was every campus simultaneously, because macro conditions are not in the business of making exceptions for placement seasons.
But students had planned around different numbers. And when the season arrived with a smaller ceiling than expected, someone had to be the explanation.
I was on the committee. I was available. The math was simple.
The Committee. The Market. The List.
The feedback, in a difficult placement season, arrives in a few formats.
There is the direct kind, which is actually fine. Someone sits with you, explains what they think went wrong, you explain the market, they explain their specific situation, you both leave having said true things that don’t resolve anything. Occasionally their suggestion is genuinely good and you pass it to the next committee. This format is underrated.
There is the indirect kind, which travels. By the time it reaches you it has picked up detail and narrative momentum that the original version didn’t have. You had preferences. You had arrangements. There was a list. There is always a list in these stories. Nobody has ever been able to describe what is on the list, but its existence is treated as settled fact, the kind of thing serious people reference without needing to verify.
The market, which determined more of the outcome than anything the committee did, received approximately none of this energy. This is because the market does not have a room number or a phone number. It cannot be cornered after dinner. It is not available for a conversation where someone can feel heard.
The committee is available. So the committee becomes the story.
I understood this structurally while it was happening… the economics training is useful for exactly this kind of pattern recognition. What I did not anticipate was how strange it is to understand something clearly and still experience it fully. The clarity does not protect you. It just means you can narrate the thing while it’s happening to you, which is its own particular condition… not entirely pleasant, occasionally useful.
What It Looks Like From Inside
What the MBA actually teaches you, I have decided, is that institutions are held together by people who are figuring it out in real time.
This sounds like a criticism. It isn’t. It’s just accurate, and it’s the kind of accurate that changes how you move through the world once you see it. Every process you participate in was designed by someone who had incomplete information about the future. Every rule you follow made sense in a context that may or may not still apply. The people running things are making judgment calls with the best information they have, under constraints they didn’t design, in conditions that are always slightly different from what the process was built for.
From outside, institutions look intentional. From inside, they look like thirteen sleep-deprived people trying to hold something together… which is, in fact, what they are. Knowing this makes you simultaneously more patient with institutions and more useful inside them, because you stop waiting for the system to hand you certainty and you start making decisions anyway.
You only see this from inside. And once you see it, you can’t unknow it, which is either the most or least valuable thing the MBA gave me depending on the day.
Fourteen Months Later
I signed out of the placement committee fourteen months after joining. Three placement cycles. One borrowed office that became, through sheer hours and questionable life choices, something like home.
The day of the final sign-out, I was alone in my hostel room getting ready for the last batch meet, and I felt something I hadn’t expected… not relief, which is what I’d assumed I would feel after fourteen months of two-hour nights and professors treating me as a cautionary tale. Something quieter. The specific sensation of a noise stopping that you had forgotten was there. The calls, the spreadsheets, the negotiations, the feedback that traveled and arrived worse than it left… all of it had been the texture of daily life for long enough that its absence had a shape.
I got a little teary. I am including this because it is true, and because I think it is important to document that the placement committee… an organization that made two professors independently concerned for my academic survival… also made me emotional when it ended. I contain multitudes. Most of them sleep-deprived.
I’d do it again. I know this because I’ve thought about it honestly and the answer keeps coming back yes, which says something about me that I’m still working out.
The MBA, it turns out, is not a transaction. It’s more like weather. You don’t decide what it does to you. You just go through it and see who you are on the other side.
Nobody put that in the brochure. Probably for the best.