For fourteen months, academics were largely a backdrop to the other things I was doing.
July 2024 to September 2025... that was the placement committee. Which meant that for the better part of my MBA, my relationship with the curriculum looked like this: walk into class, find a seat near the back, open the case I was supposed to have read the night before, read it now, participate when called upon with the specific energy of someone who has been awake since 3am for reasons that have nothing to do with this course, and then leave the moment the session ended... back to the office, where a recruiter might be waiting on a response, a shortlist might need reviewing, or a slot might be about to get filled. The urgency there was real and immediate. The urgency in the classroom was theoretical, and at best, deferred.
I passed everything. I want to put that on record.
Not always well. But consistently enough that no professor ever pulled me aside to say the thing I occasionally deserved to hear.
The Near-Miss Era
The close calls were a genre of their own.
There was a Tuesday in the second trimester, mid-terms week, placement season running, me in the office since the previous evening… when Tanmay looked up at 8:52am and said “don’t you have a quiz at nine?” I did. I had, in the chaos of the previous eighteen hours, completely forgotten. I closed my laptop, walked to (Exam) Hall 1 at a pace that my pride would not allow me to call a run, and made it in with four minutes to spare, still in yesterday’s clothes, still holding the pen I had grabbed off someone’s desk on the way out.
What strikes me now about that morning is not the running. It is the whiplash.
Ten minutes earlier I had been in the placement office, in the middle of something that actually had consequences... a recruiter call to prep for, a process to manage, decisions that would affect real people’s careers. And then I was in an exam hall, being tested on a concept from a course I had been physically present in but mentally elsewhere. The shift between those two modes of being was instant and total. One moment you are the person holding things together, fielding calls, managing stakeholders, making judgment calls under pressure. The next, you are sitting in a row with your pen and your sheet... quite possibly the only person in the room who has no idea what the question is actually asking, because the last eighteen hours were spent on something else entirely.
I do not say this to diminish the quiz. But there was a particular feeling in those moments... of being yanked out of one world and dropped into another without transition. Not resentment exactly. More like the specific disorientation of someone who has been making real decisions with real consequences all night, and is now being asked to define a term in fifty words or less. The two modes of operating felt like they belonged to different versions of the same person.
I sat down, answered what I could, and handed it in. This worked out. I do not recommend it as a study strategy.
This was not an isolated incident. This was the pattern.
What Happens When You Actually Show Up
After September 2025, something strange happened. The junior batch’s summer placements were done, we signed out... handing the reins to a carefully vetted, capable bunch who I suspect were already itching to get started... and suddenly I had evenings. Actual evenings. No office to go back to, no recruiter calls to prep for, no shared Excel sheet quietly waiting to be broken by someone accidentally deleting a column.
Just... time.
The first few days felt genuinely disorienting. I kept reaching for my phone expecting something to need attention, some fire to put out, some message that required an immediate response. Nothing came. And the absence of urgency, rather than feeling like relief, felt like chaos of a different kind. For fourteen months, the placement committee had been the single organizing principle of every day... my entire sense of structure, purpose, even productivity, had been built around it. Without it, I did not know what to optimize for. The days felt unanchored in a way I had not expected.
I remember opening a case one night in October with enough time to actually read it properly. Made notes. Formed a view. Sat with it for a while. And thought: oh, so this is what this is supposed to feel like.
But there was something else in that feeling too, something I did not immediately name. Among placement committee members, there had been a kind of shared pride in the not-caring about academics... the just-passing, the last-minute reading, the quiz sprints. It was a badge of a different set of priorities, a quiet signal that you had opted into something that mattered more. Choosing, in October, to actually engage with a case... to genuinely sit with the material and form a view... felt like watching something dissolve. Fourteen months of building a certain kind of resilience, a certain orientation toward what was worth your attention, and here I was, drifting toward the very thing I had spent a year deprioritizing. It felt less like growth and more like a slow giving-in.
I got over it. But I noticed it.
The October 2025 to February 2026 stretch was the first time I experienced the MBA the way I imagine most people experience it throughout... as the main thing, rather than the thing happening in the background of the main thing. And the academics, when I finally gave them the attention they deserved, surprised me. They were better than I had let myself believe.
The case method works in a way that is genuinely hard to appreciate until you are on the receiving end of it. You walk in with a view, the professor dismantles it with one question, you rebuild in real time. There was one operations professor who had a specific gift... he would state something slightly wrong and then wait. Just wait. The room would get uncomfortable. Eventually someone pushed back. And then the actual class began.
Despite attending most of his sessions in the first year half-asleep, reading the case in the fifteen minutes before class, I left most of those sessions having learned something I had not walked in with. That is probably the best endorsement I can give a professor.
Writing VLOOKUP By Hand
And then there were the exams.
All pen and paper. Every single one, across every course, regardless of what the course was actually teaching you to do.
I sat for the end-term of a course that had spent eight weeks teaching Excel. Not conceptually... actually teaching it. Formulas, pivot tables, functions, building models from real datasets. The professor was good. I learned things. I used those things constantly in the placement committee’s shared spreadsheet, which was a deeply complex document that had broken and been fixed more times than anyone cared to count.
The exam asked me to write out, by hand, what a VLOOKUP does.
I stared at the question for a moment longer than it required. Not because I did not know the answer... I had typed VLOOKUP probably four hundred times, in anger, in relief, in the specific concentration of someone trying to fix something at 2am. I knew exactly what it did. What I felt, sitting there with a pen, was something between intellectual annoyance and tired resignation. Not outrage. More like: of course. Of course this is how we are doing this.
I wrote it out. Moved on. That is what you do.
I understand the argument for traditional assessment. Foundational knowledge matters. The ability to reason without tools, to actually know something rather than merely locate it... these are worth testing. For conceptual, qualitative courses, a closed-book written exam is defensible. But for a course teaching a tool, testing your ability to describe the tool on paper is a different exercise entirely. It tests memory. It does not test judgment, which is the only thing the tool is actually for.
Nobody raised their hand about this. And I have thought about why. It was not ignorance... everyone in that room understood the mismatch. It was something more pragmatic: a collective, unspoken agreement that this was a ritual to be completed rather than a system to be challenged. The exam existed. The grade mattered. Raising a hand would cost you social capital and change nothing. So you studied, wrote it out, and moved on... which is its own kind of lesson about how institutions work, though not one that appeared anywhere in the syllabus.
The AI situation was stranger still. By second year, AI had become part of how most of us worked... structuring arguments, checking logic, drafting the first version of something before making it your own. And then you would sit in an exam hall and be asked to produce things from memory, in silence, as though the last six months had not occurred. The gap between how we worked and how we were assessed had become wide enough that it occasionally felt like being evaluated in a language nobody used anymore.
The Last Exam
The last exam of my MBA was Digital Marketing. 28 February 2026, final trimester.
It was open book. Which sounds easier until you understand what open book actually means... the professor cannot test you on concepts, because you would just copy the answer from your notes. So instead they test application. Three cases. Real situations. Questions where the answer is not in the textbook because the question is asking you to think, and the notes in your lap are there more as a security blanket than a source of truth.
I had carried in a full set of notes. I consulted them twice.
Sitting in that hall, writing through three cases, I felt something I recognised from the placement committee, from the internship, from most of the situations that had actually mattered in the last two years... that specific state where in the moment everything you are writing seems right, but you cannot quite be sure. The confidence you feel is indistinguishable from the confidence of someone who is wrong but has committed to it. You write anyway. You go with your best thinking and you hand it in and you will not know for a few weeks whether it held up.
Ninety percent of the room was in that state. I was in that state. And walking out, I thought: this is actually the most honest exam I have sat. Not because it was harder, but because it was the closest to what anything real ever feels like.
I handed in the booklet. Walked out into an afternoon that was quiet in the way the campus gets when something is over.
Two years. Fourteen months of the placement committee (and for a brief period, placement controls) running the show, four months of finally turning up properly to the thing I had ostensibly come here for. I paid for an education. What I got was not always the one being delivered… it was messier and more accidental and came from directions I had not anticipated. But it was an education in the fullest sense: in how to hold uncertainty, how to operate inside institutions, how to move between identities quickly and not lose yourself entirely in any of them.
I am not sure I learned what they tried to teach. But I learned what I needed to know, and that turned out to be a different thing entirely.