I did the most foolish thing I could: I tried to answer it.

I spent four or five minutes listing ideas: community centres, redesigning parks, subsidised clubs for the elderly, and even an app I’d rather forget. My partner let me keep talking, which I now realize people do when they’re having fun. By that point, we’d worked through about forty cases from Case Interviews Cracked and the usual smuggled PDFs. I had strong opinions on frameworks, much like people do about cricket. But none of that helped. I knew all about profitability, but I was lost when it came to loneliness.

I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to figure out why, but what I learned turned out to be the most valuable lesson from that whole season.

Most of the time, preparing for a case is about getting comfortable through practice. There’s a framework for profitability, another for market entry, and one for growth. You don’t want to repeat these frameworks word for word since any good interviewer would notice, but they’re like handrails in the background. After enough practice, you stop needing them. The situations start to feel familiar. If costs go up somewhere, it’s probably the supply chain. If revenue stays flat in a growing market, someone else is taking your share. Instead of building solutions from scratch, you’re really just recognizing patterns you’ve seen before, just with different details.

Abstract cases seem to take away those handrails. But here’s the thing: they only seem to do that.

Think about how a typical profitability case works. You start at the top: profits are down. Then you check the first level, which is revenue or costs. Next comes the product line, then the region. Usually, it’s only at the fourth or fifth level that you find the real insight, like noticing that delivery truck use in the north has quietly dropped.

Now imagine the interviewer skips the introduction and just says: our client’s delivery fleet is underused. What would you do?

It feels abstract because there’s no casebook chapter about trucks. But really, nothing new has happened. You’ve just been handed the fourth level of a tree you’ve climbed many times, and now you’re supposed to treat it as the starting point. The structure above is gone, but the habits you’ve built, like starting with structure and following the MECE principle one step at a time, still work. If you can explain falling profits, you can explain empty trucks. It’s the same thinking, just at a different level.

The first thing to do with any abstract case is figure out if it’s really abstract, or just a regular case that’s missing its ladder. You’d be surprised how often it’s the second one. Some prompts do survive the check, like reducing loneliness, improving people’s trust in institutions, or deciding how a country should regard happiness. What makes these hard is not the lack of a framework, since you never were going to have one, but the presence of too many options. You could build parks, subsidise therapy, or ban phones. Every possible answer is allowed, and when all possible answers are given, then no answer really stands out. This is about where I found myself after four minutes of talking.

What I should have done, and what I do now, is pause before answering. Not to avoid the question, but to take a moment to look at it more closely.

An abstract prompt is called that because it doesn’t give enough detail, and each missing piece is a question you’re allowed to ask. For example, who is the client? Loneliness means one thing to a city government, something else to a health insurer, and something different again to a start-up with an app. Once you know the answer, you can rule out half the options. Who exactly is lonely? Is it the elderly, newcomers, or remote workers? Each group faces a different problem, even if we use the same word. What does success look like, and by when? A clear, measurable goal leads to pilot projects, while a vague goal leads to policy. What are the constraints? Is it budget, regulations, or political will? These might sound like bad news, but they actually help by narrowing your choices. And why now? No one suddenly decides to solve loneliness; there’s always a trigger, and that usually shows what the client really cares about.

If you ask four or five of these questions, you’ll see the difference. “Reduce loneliness in a city” becomes “help the city government reduce isolation among residents over sixty-five, using the current social services budget, and show results within three years.” The second version is just an example. The first was only a broad idea.

That’s also what’s expected of you. Most clients don’t come with clear problems. They come with concerns, and your first few weeks are spent turning those into real questions. If an interviewer gives you a vague question, they’re not testing your creativity. They want to see if you can turn an unanswerable question into one you can actually solve. It’s less glamorous, but much more useful.

Once you’ve narrowed things down, what’s left is regular problem-solving, just in a new context. Build a structure, but make sure you get there step by step: identify stakeholders if it’s about who can act, find the root cause if it’s about why things happen, and think about the kind of solution, like prevention versus treatment or incentives versus infrastructure, if it’s about what to do. Say which approach you chose and why, and explain why you’re focusing on a certain area. No one is grading your answer to the loneliness question, since there’s no perfect answer. What matters is that someone watching you go from confusion to clarity would trust you to help them do the same.

I should mention the limits of this approach. I’ve seen people do a great job scoping a question, only to get stuck on the details. I’ve also met at least one interviewer who really wanted a flood of ideas and was bored by my careful narrowing. No method works for everyone. The best thing I found was to spend five minutes each day scoping a tough question without solving it. It feels like cheating, but it’s the whole skill. Try making a MECE tree for a simple, random topic, like why the campus restaurant is always empty, or take a deep branch from a case you’ve done before and use it as a new prompt. That way, you won’t be fooled by the disguise.

As for the loneliness case, a few weeks later, when I was less sleep-deprived, I asked my case partner what the model answer was. He said he had no idea. The prompt came from a casebook with the solutions section missing, and he’d given it to me just to see what I’d do.

It is still the most instructive case anyone has ever given me.

The role runs on sternness. On being short. On a hardness in how you speak to a batchmate asking for something you can’t give, or a junior who has walked up at exactly the wrong moment. Some days it runs on shouting. And here is the part I want to put on record, because it’s the part nobody says out loud: most of the people you are being hard with are your friends. People you’d be gentle with in any other context. The role does not care. It needs the answer firm and the face to match, and it needs that from you whether the person across from you is a stranger or someone you’ve shared a corridor with for a year.

You can’t deliver that if you’re only half in it. I couldn’t, anyway. So I did the one thing that made it survivable... I stopped acting stern and started, for the duration, being stern.

Method Acting a Person I Wasn’t

I don’t know when it stopped being a performance. Early on it took effort. A conscious bracing before a hard conversation, a reminder to keep my voice flat, to not fold the second the person in front of me got upset. A few weeks in, it stopped taking effort. I could drop into that version of myself the way you change into a uniform, except the uniform was a temperament, and it went on faster every time until it was less something I put on and more something I forgot to take off.

That was the trade, and I did not understand it while I was making it. To be good at the role I let the role live in me instead of holding it at arm’s length. Actors talk about method acting as something that costs them, and I finally get why. You don’t build a convincing harder person from the outside. You find the part of yourself that could actually be that person, and you go live there for a while. The problem with living somewhere is that it becomes where you live.

In the beginning, warmth was the default and hardness was the effort. By the middle, that had flipped. Hardness was automatic and warmth was the thing I had to remember to reach for.

Seventeen hours a day, you are that person. And seventeen hours a day, in practice, is not seventeen hours. It’s all of them.

Why the Armor Is There

Before I go further into what it cost me, I owe the role some context, because it would be dishonest to talk about the hardness like committees just decide to be unpleasant for fun. They don’t. The hardness is inherited, and it’s inherited for a reason.

The stories get passed down, batch to batch. I can’t personally vouch for the older ones, but they’re told with enough consistency that they’ve become part of what everyone understands the role to be. Committee members set upon on the walk back to the hostel late at night, when the campus is empty and a bad decision has a face and that face is alone. Placement tents, the temporary ones that go up in peak season, supposedly set on fire after a cycle that went badly, because a tent burns and a market downturn does not. The placement office door, the one made entirely of glass, reportedly belted until it shattered, because glass breaks and the thing behind it doesn’t, and sometimes breaking the nearest object is the only available substitute for breaking the system it stands for.

You hear these before you ever sit on the committee. Everyone does. They work like an orientation nobody scheduled. This is what the role can attract. This is what a bad cycle can do to people. Keep your guard up.

And it isn’t only the dramatic, third-hand stuff. The everyday version I saw myself. Even in a cycle that wasn’t bad... a decent one, honestly, not half bad by any measure... I heard slurs aimed at the committee. Not whispered. I heard people pass judgment on the character of committee members, sweeping stuff about who someone must be as a person, based on nothing they had actually done and everything to do with the fact that they were on the committee at all. Being a member was, for some people, enough. You weren’t resented for a call you made. You were resented for the chair you sat in, and the call was just the excuse.

Once you’ve heard that, the sternness stops looking like cruelty and starts looking like self-defense. If you’ll be cast as the villain either way, you may as well be a competent one. The armor is not there because we enjoyed being hard. It’s there because being soft, historically, got you nothing, and in the worst tellings got you hurt.

You Are Never Off Duty

On paper you’re on the committee during committee hours. The actual rule, the one you absorb within a month, is that you’re on it always, because you’re always being read by people to whom your approachability is a signal.

Cross paths with a junior in the mess, or on the walk back at midnight, or standing in a queue for something with nothing to do with placements, and you cannot be warm. Not because you don’t want to be. Often I did. A committee member who seems approachable in the mess is a committee member who gets approached, right there, over dinner, about a slot or a shortlist that has no business being discussed over dinner. Warmth reads as an opening, so you shut it. You keep the face on. You nod and keep walking and make it quietly clear that this is not the moment, even when you both know there is no moment that would be.

There’s a loneliness in this I did not see coming. On paper you’re one of the most connected people in the batch. You know everyone’s status, everyone’s shortlists, everyone’s disappointments, you’re stitched into the single biggest thing happening in most people’s year. And you spend that year making yourself unreachable, holding people at exactly the distance the information demands. Central and untouchable at once. Those should cancel out. They don’t. That’s just the job.

And it compounds. You get good at holding people slightly away, and being good at it means the instinct stops switching off when it’s supposed to. It doesn’t announce itself. You just notice, later, that the guard you built for a reason is still up in rooms where there is no reason at all.

Getting Out Takes Longer Than You Think

Here’s the part I did not expect. Snapping out of the role is slow.

You’d assume it comes off the moment the day ends. It doesn’t. After hours of being the hard version of yourself, you don’t just walk out of the office and become soft again on the way to the mess. It lingers. The flatness stays in your voice for a while after you no longer need it, the way your ears keep ringing after you leave a loud room. If someone caught me right after a long committee stretch and I was short with them, it wasn’t because I meant to be. It was because I hadn’t finished coming down yet. The role has an exit ramp, and it’s longer than one conversation.

So you learn to give yourself that time. A gap. Some quiet on the walk back before you’re fit to talk to anyone who matters to you, because the person who steps out of that office is not, for another hour or two, someone you’d want answering a call from home.

And Getting Back In Is Its Own Job

The flip side is the part that actually surprised me. Once you’re out, once you’ve properly softened and stopped being that person, you can’t just flick back in when the next demanding day arrives. It doesn’t work like a switch you leave on. You have to commit to it again, fully, from the start.

That’s the strange economy of it. Building the hard self the first time was slow. Snapping out of it is slow. And every time you’ve genuinely stepped out, stepping back in costs the full price again, the same bracing, the same conscious decision to go be that person, because a half-committed stern face fools nobody and holds no line. There’s no coasting. You are either all the way in the role or all the way out of it, and the passage between the two takes real time in both directions. You can’t hover in between and expect to be any good at either side.

I didn’t understand that going in. I assumed the role would become something I could carry lightly, pick up and set down as needed. It never did. It only ever worked when I was completely inside it, which meant every genuine break was a small reset, and every return was a full commitment, over and over, for fourteen months.

What the Role Actually Asks

The committee doesn’t ask you to do a hard job. Plenty of jobs are hard. It asks you to become someone you’re not, well enough that even you start to buy it, for long enough that the buying leaves a mark.

The sternness, the coldness to friends and juniors, the shouting... none of it is optional, and none of it is really about being unkind. It’s about holding a line that only holds if the person holding it doesn’t flinch. Not flinching, all day, every day, means building a self that doesn’t flinch, and that self does not tidily take itself apart when the term ends. It exists in the first place because the soft version, the approachable committee, has historically been treated as prey. Cruel words in a corridor at the mild end, fire and broken glass at the other, if the old stories hold.

I’d do it again. I’ve said that before and I mean it. But I’d walk in this time knowing what I didn’t know the first time. The theatrics aren’t something you perform and put down. You perform them by becoming them, and becoming something, even for a while, is not a thing the rest of your life gets to stay out of. Wear the costume long enough and it stops being a costume. Nobody tells you that going in. It’s just the bill, and it shows up after everyone else has already left.

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.

And yet. The most useful education I got in two years did not happen in a classroom. It happened in a borrowed office that smelled like something had died in the ceiling… because something had, probably, died in the ceiling, with twelve other people, across seventeen hours a day. The learning was a side effect. A significant one.

Let me explain.

First, Com Culture

At IIM Lucknow, there is an unspoken but extraordinarily efficient sorting mechanism that kicks in within hours of arrival. Bengalis find Bengalis. Malayalis find Malayalis. Tamils find Tamils. People from Delhi find other people from Delhi and then subdivide further by colony. It happens without effort, without anyone deciding to do it. You arrive slightly disoriented, you look for something familiar, and community is the most available familiar thing. So you reach for it.

Nobody thinks of this as a choice. It doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like gravity.

The result is that you can spend two years surrounded by people from every corner of India and come out the other side having mostly deepened existing friendships and made new ones with people who grew up in the same city, speak the same language at home, and share the same opinion on which festival food is superior. This is comfortable. It is also a quiet waste of a remarkable opportunity, and most people don’t notice it’s happening because comfort rarely announces itself as a problem.

My own friend group was not entirely innocent of this. Then I joined the placement committee, and the committee had other plans.

Thirteen People, One Very Small Office

The placement committee had thirteen members. Between us, we covered Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and at least one biography so geographically complex it could only happen in modern India. We were also now spending seventeen hours a day together in a borrowed office that was not designed for thirteen people and their various opinions about how things should be done.

The office had a false ceiling. Something lived in it. We were never fully sure what… theories ranged from a rat to a cat to something more philosophically troubling, but the smell made its presence impossible to ignore. Old papers, recycled air, thirteen people, some of whom had not showered in a day or two, myself occasionally included, and whatever was happening behind that false ceiling.

This is the place I spent fourteen months of my life in. The smell eventually became background noise. The false ceiling became familiar. At some point, without noticing, it became home.

During active placement months, placement committee members eat with committee members. Which sounds like a punishment but is actually how you end up with memories of all thirteen of you crammed around one mess table… a table not designed for thirteen people either, a theme emerges, eating at odd hours, sometimes laughing, sometimes in the specific silence of people who have been awake too long and have run out of words but are still, somehow, glad to be there. We also ordered food to the office with some regularity. At 1am, when the process is running and nobody has eaten since afternoon, a shared meal in that office felt like more than a shared meal.

The Excel Sheet Incident. And The Other Excel Sheet Incident. And The One After That.

Here is something nobody tells you about running placement processes: a significant portion of your emotional energy will be directed at a single Excel sheet.

It was a good sheet, technically. Heavily automated. Formulas for everything… candidate status, company status, shortlist generation after eliminating placed students. The kind of sheet that, when it works, feels like a minor miracle of collective human effort.

The problem is that it was accessible to all thirteen of us. Simultaneously. On our own laptops.

Anyone who has worked with a shared, formula-heavy Excel sheet knows where this is going. Delete one row, accidentally, always accidentally, and the whole thing unravels. Shortlists stop generating correctly. Numbers go wrong. Someone notices, announces it to the room, and then begins the mass interrogation: kisne kiya? kyun kiya? Who did this. Why did this happen. Who was in the sheet.

The culprit was always someone in the room. It was always an accident. It took about five minutes to fix. And it happened every one or two days, reliably, like a small recurring natural disaster that we never managed to fully prevent and never stopped being furious about.

The five minutes of fixing were never the problem. What followed was… thirteen people, thirteen completely different ways of responding to the same minor crisis. Some went straight to solutions. Some wanted to understand what went wrong before moving on. Some found the whole thing funny by the third time it happened. Some did not. What struck me, every single time, was how reasonable each reaction was on its own… and how much work it took to land somewhere everyone could live with. Over a deleted row in a spreadsheet. This is what thirteen perspectives actually looks like in practice. It is, in retrospect, the best training I got.

This is when I understood that thirteen perspectives is not a number that sounds large until you are actually in the room.

Adapting. Eventually.

India is a fruit basket… dozens of cultures, each with its own taste, colour, and strong opinion about what fruit is supposed to taste like. The Bengali assumption about directness is not the Rajasthani assumption. What reads as efficiency in one cultural grammar reads as coldness in another. What one person experiences as warmth, another experiences as a boundary being crossed.

I found out that I have a style, direct, moving quickly from problem to solution, that I had always experienced as neutral. It is not neutral. Some people found it useful. Some found it slightly alarming. A few, I suspect, found it both depending on the day and how much sleep they’d had, which during active months was never enough.

The thing about realising this is that realising it does not immediately fix it. You don’t have one uncomfortable moment of self-awareness and emerge transformed. It is slower and more repetitive than that. You misread someone, you notice, you adjust. You misread someone else in a completely different way, you notice that too, you adjust again. This goes on for months. The adjustment is not a switch. It is a gradual recalibration that happens through enough small collisions that you eventually stop making the same ones… and start making new, more interesting ones.

What helps is that you are doing this with people you see every single day, which means the relationship survives the awkward moments because you don’t have the option of avoiding each other. The office is small. Avoidance is not a strategy.

There was a moment, mid-season, when a slotting discussion had gone fully sideways… too many options, too many opinions, the room going in circles. One of the quieter members of the committee, someone I had not previously associated with the word decisive, spoke once. Laid out the logic. Restructured the entire plan in five minutes. The room aligned.

I had been misreading that person for months based on how they operated in low-stakes situations. The pressure revealed something I hadn’t seen. This happened, in different ways, with most of the people in that office. Pressure is a better character reference than any amount of normal interaction.

What the Classroom Missed

The MBA teaches you frameworks. Porter’s Five Forces. Discounted cash flows. Organisational behaviour theories with enough sub-categories to fill a semester. These are not useless… they are useful in the way that a map is useful. They tell you the terrain. They do not teach you how to walk in it.

The committee taught me how to walk in it.

Managing people who want different things simultaneously. Understanding that the most difficult person in the room is usually the most uncertain one. Knowing when to push and when to let something resolve on its own. None of this is in any syllabus. You learn it by being in rooms where the decisions are real and the consequences land on actual people and the clock does not pause while you figure out the right framework.

I learned more in that smelly borrowed office than in two years of coursework. I say this without disparaging the coursework, which was fine and which I mostly completed. I say it because it is true and because I think it is worth saying out loud: the most valuable parts of an MBA happen in the margins, not the curriculum. Not by design. Just by the nature of what the margins demand from you.

The Friends You Couldn’t Have Engineered

During active months, the only people I ate with were the twelve others. The only people I saw, for most of the day, were the twelve others. This is either a recipe for deep friendship or prolonged mutual exhaustion. In our case it was both, which is also friendship, just the more honest kind.

Those twelve people are among the ones I now know most clearly. Not the polished version… the one that existed at 3am when the work was hard and the patience was gone and what remained was just how someone actually is. You cannot find that version at a networking event or a carefully arranged group dinner. You find it by accumulating enough shared hours that the performance becomes impossible.

The com culture will keep you comfortable.

The committee made me plural.

And taught me things no classroom could.

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.