PGPX Survival strategies!!!

With the term 1 and a 20% MBA under my belt, I think it is time that I documented for posterity, some of the PGPX survival strategies that I have learned so far. Without further ado let me get straight into it.

Deemphasizing grades: The PGPX game doesn’t even start unless you have this strategy firmly in place. And if you are one of those souls, who have trouble doing this, then I have only one advice for you. Please log off and start hitting the books right away, because it is never too early with Term 2 classes starting tomorrow.

Social Loafing (SL): Now that you are still with me, let me share with you the most powerful tool that is available to PGPX-ians, in acing their course and graduating with flying colors. If not for this strategy, PGPX would not have been an option for lesser mortals like me. For the uninitiated, SL is where you ride off on the effort of people of your syndicate group, who are more motivated, hungry and thirsty than you are. Yes, knowledge is what I am talking about and if these dear friends of yours happened to exit at my point above, then your case looks all the more promising.

Skimming: Now SL may work sweetly for group activities. But, how about all those long winding Harvard cases and tones of other reading material that you have to pre-process, to even get to a point where you can confidently attend your classes? This is where I prescribe skimming, to all those folks out there, who value their time enough to not spend it on reading things, which you are most likely to forget anyway, even before you hit the next page.

Skimming is an extreme art form, where you read the first and last line of a paragraph and anything else that might be written in bold to make sense of what the hell the author is talking about. And if you are the kind who believes in marginal utility, you can also pay attention to whatever that might be written in the margin or whereabouts as bonus material. But please make sure that you move on fast, completely ignoring any tables, figures, graphs or any other attention grabbing devices that the author might have put in to block your progress. Any slip up here and you will soon get trapped and will be forced to read each and every line in that page, chapter and sometimes even the whole book, and still end up as an utterly and thoroughly confused soul, with all your earlier productivity gains thrown out the window. I am telling you, the god isn’t in the details on this one and it ain’t worth the effort.

Class Participation: Now that you have done enough SL and ‘assimilated’ all the reading material and everything, it’s time to take your game to the center stage, the class and earn brownie points or what we call in technical terms as the class participation points. But remember, here you have to take things a little easy as it is a hotly contested field as I explained in one of my earlier posts.
http://biju-blog.blogspot.com/2007/04/new-party-cpiim-launched-with-much.html
Some of the profs are also very aggressive and a small misstep here can get your whole ass’imilation’ exposed.

The trick here is to hold it in for the initial 5-10 minutes and try to be a good listener. If you find this difficult, imagine as if you are the speaker and others are there just to hear you speak. Before you get started, the initial 5-10 minutes is for the rest of the folks to tell you what they would like you to speak about. Once you get a hang of this you can come out swinging. And it doesn’t matter whether you have anything to say or not. The most important thing is to stake your claim to fame by raising your hand or whatever else that catches the prof’s fancy and gets you the air time. And if you can work big-sounding but hollow words like apriori or dual slack into your talk, then you will be cooking with gas in more ways than one.

In the unfortunate event of your mind drawing a total blank at the inopportune moment that you are picked, there are always ways to score through unconventional ways, by opening with Sir, I have a question and proceeding to use any of the following tried and tested methods:

Can you explain that last sentence again? - This classical ploy draws its effectiveness from the inherent assumption that you have understood everything except the last sentence and you have also very effectively relinquished the mike and bought yourself some more time to play yourself back into the game.

Can’t there be a third option? - This is surprisingly strong because of the general rule that most of the time debates happen when there are two plausible options. But you got to be careful with this one because it can boomerang on you and you could end up working on the nonexistent third option yourself, right there, at a very short notice.

To be Continued…