What a B-School student can do..
My friend Nisha said that the job of a business School should be "helping students improve themselves to such a level that, 'not hiring them fast enough' becomes a threat to the companies. I guess she hit the nail right on the head, pretty much summing up what Business Schools ought to be doing. The moment you hear that kind of a thing, what comes straight to one's mind is the saying that you can take a horse to the water but can't make it drink and rings true. There is only that much that even the best schools can do. The onus of learning, training and finding a job lies with the student. You will probably ask what purpose do the B.Schools serve then? B. Schools can at best provide a platform for that learning. You would have noticed the emphasis all along is on learning not on teaching.
The teachers in B Schools need to grasp the value of this slant towards 'helping' students 'learn' rather than 'teach' otherwise they will continue to be an obstacle in the way of their learning despite best of intentions. Yet I hear a lot of well intentioned, yet unpalatable boast in conversations when members of the venerable fraternity get together in their cabins or at boringly routine get-togethers over tepid tea and the ubiquitous samosas and biscuits, extolling the quality of the lecture they 'delivered' and how well they 'taught'. How such and such a a student would have been struck in finance if 'I' had not forced him take up marketing"; or how "I literally caught him by the ear and made him finish her assignment or else she would have flunked that year..." and it goes on and on interminably. The self adulatory tone sometimes becomes overbearing, to say the least, yet that is the prevailing strain in such mild encounters. The teachers have to learn make themselves less obtrusive and get out of the way of student's learning. This is not to suggest that B. Schools do not need teachers.They do. Only there style of functioning needs to change. There probably is a need to set up training institute to train B.school teachers so that they can appreciate the difference between teaching in kindergartens and teaching in B. Schools.
The reason I am writing this piece is not as much to change the teaching style and stance of the faculty as it is to encourage students acquire the right attitude to learning. They have to some day take ownership of their lives and sooner they take a decision to do so the better. Students have been a victim of a vicious circle. They joined a particular B.school, based on its ranking. They expect to earn large sums of money when placed as an all pervasive impression that higher the ranking of B.schools means higher pay packets for its students has been created by B. schools in cahoots with the media. There is nothing wrong with being able to earn large sums of money but the focus in this has to be on the skills, ability and behaviour of the graduates; not on money. Another thing that's even more damaging and works at a deeper psychological level is the fact that it makes students, who are going to be the decision makers in the business world tomorrow, dependent on the Placement cells to find them a job which they believe the B. Schools have tacitly promised them. This makes very deep inroads into the psyche of the students and leads to their becoming dependent on the placement cells to find them a job and the faculty to 'teach' them. They come in dependent and they go out dependent - exactly the opposite of what any professional school ought to be doing for them. When I ask them why do they think they deserve a seven to ten lakh package, the answer nine time out of ten times is that the ranking of the school warrants that. On probing a little further one learns that the students with higher CGPAs expect higher salaries because they did everything their teachers and their parents 'told' them to do. That is how they slowly become the problem rather than the solution to the problem. They have learnt too well what they have been 'told' to do. They have never been encouraged to think for themselves and take their own decisions.
The students should learn to take their own decisions starting from small things like whether they should attend a particular class or bunk it to what discipline they ought to major in and so on. They should during their stay in the B. school acquire enough self esteem to find jobs for themselves based on their own learning, skills, ethics and confidence. What graduating students can do has been nicely suggested by Charlie Hoehn in his beautiful little e- book, recession proof graduate It is also is a great way to pick a Company YOU want to work for rather than be picked by any company the Placement Cell chooses to bring to the Campus. More on that in another post. Meanwhile read the book.
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