If you are considering applying to the Oxford MBA program but are intimidated about surviving the year with a family, fear not!  It turns out that Oxford is a fantastic place to raise a family AND learn a little about business at the same time (probably even have a little fun too).  There are several reasons I am convinced that this is the best business school in the world for parents to study at:

• The 1 year MBA:  Lets face it… you have a family to support and taking two years to study for an MBA is just not practical.
• The Students:  The average age at SBS is a few years older than most other b-schools.  While there are still probably only another dozen or so students with children, there is definitely a sense of maturity amongst the rest of the class.  I get the impression that people are genuinely interested in how we’re doing and have always been accommodating when working out team schedules.
• The School:  From day 1 the School has made a point to include families in almost every major event.  With even the first hint of a conflict due to a family obligation, the staff has always bent over backwards to work out a resolution.
• The city:  While Oxford is an hour train ride to the city, there is really no reason to head into London unless you are up for some sightseeing.  Oxford has anything a young family could possibly want – parks, libraries, walking trails, playgrounds, beautiful architecture, you name it.  You get all this and don’t have to worry about the noise and crowds of a big city… what more could you ask for
• Europe:  Living only an hour from the airport makes our 3 week breaks all the more enjoyable.  The cultural and educational opportunities of living in Europe cannot be matched in North America.

I would go on but I have my monthly appointment at the pub with the “Old Men and Daddies Club.”

1)      That as per the latest FT ratings, we are now the second best Business School in UK and the sixteenth best in the world.  Yay! Yay! Yay!

2)      Oxford is a cute little town with 800 years of history. That means that the college that you now live in was built when our great, great, great, great, great, greaaaaaaat grandpa was not even born.

3)      Some of the events held at the School allow you to rub shoulders with the best of the Business world. So the next time you run into a snob who boasts about his exquisite knowledge, you can very casually mention what Sir Terry Leahy said to you in his supper or what Roger Carr had to say in his speaker session.

4)      Diversity of the class means one day you sit next to a French Chef who explains how to make pumpkin pudding fantastic and the very next day you will be listening to a life scientist explain strange physiognomic phenomena.

5)      The authors who changed the world are your teachers. Some of the best books such as fresh Lipstick (Linda Scott), how Brands became Icons (Douglas Holt) and Social Entrepreneurship (Alex Nicholls) have been written by faculty members.

Things you would die before you tell anyone about your MBA

1)      That actually when you spoke to that great industry leader, you had spinach stuck between your teeth.

2)      That some of the books written by your teachers are really heavy stuff and you haven’t read them.

3)      That some of your fellow students achievements can sometimes make you feel small. Getting into the Business School was your biggest career achievement so far.

4)      The subject that you just passed has the highest number of distinction holders. (You wonder when they really study when most of the times they are hanging out with you in the Common Room.)

5)      That despite being the best of the best (thats why you are at Saïd after all!), you still have to look for a job, go through the hassles of applications, resumes and cover letters, interviews, case studies and yes, rejections!

The exams here are stressful. In the first 4 weeks of Michaelmas, it seems that the subjects are easy to tackle (specially for people like me who are from quant background), but then suddenly one is swept off the ground in a flood of assignments, and before you know, you are in the middle of the exam preparation week. You take a couple of more days to organise notes, take printouts, finalise study strategies etc. Then once you realise that you have to write 6 papers in 4 days, reality strikes you real hard! The rest is just a long and painful story of endurance, sleepless nights, desperation and iron-clad promises of studying hard the next term right from the beginning.

However, the winter break is sufficiently long to recuperate from the exam trauma. Oxford becomes a very quiet and serene place during off-term times and especially during the winter break. Almost all students either go home or to some warmer part of the globe. Which means that apart from other things, you can go to the most popular movies without booking tickets in advance, or eat out at the most popular joints without having to wait in a queue for nearly an hour, all of which was great for me. This year it snowed very heavy and for a few days Oxford looked like it has been chiselled out of a huge mound of icing sugar. There are a few tall places like Carfax tower, which when climbed, offers a brilliant view of the High Street colleges, the Radcliffe and such. The day after it snowed, we went atop the tower and it was simply brilliant! Highly recommended!!

OK. End of flashback. Back to Hillary Term week 1. This term is particularly known to present exceptional academic and intellectual challenge to the Oxford MBAs. This is the time when you get to do the Entrepreneurship Project. Whats an EP in SBS? Read here. What is interesting, we are being taught very specific tools needed to do the project. As an example, a little while ago, I attended a workshop session by Lucy Kimbell on how to generate and develop ideas at the early stage of planning. These are practical, hands-on techniques that can be used and it proved to be quite effective for my team. Looking forward to more of her sessions.

This is also the term when we start electives. As you would guess, since we choose our electives, there is an escalated level of commitment among the class to learn, which is resulting in very initiated debates in class. I have taken finance II, macro economics and strategy II, technology and innovation strategy as my electives. Let’s see how it goes.

I have a dinner invitation in Oriel College in a while, so have to run off to get dressed in a suit, my host has kindly informed that I cannot enter the Oriel College Hall without being properly dressed. So off I go. Please leave your comments and let me know what you want to hear more about.

Take care!

I attended the careers session on Social Finance, and loved hearing from Rod Schwartz of ClearlySo—an online marketplace for social business. Rod will be co-teaching the Social Finance elective in Trinity term, so it was fun to get a preview of his engaging talks. I also heard from Cecile Galoselva at the Ethical Property Company who talked about her company’s innovative model. In one of the general addresses, Caroline Casey from the organization Kanchi was literally one of the best speakers I have ever heard. I highly recommend checking out her organization if you get a chance.

My personal favorite part of the conference was being a mentor for contestants in the Ideas competition. Basically, budding social entrepreneurs submitted an overview of an idea then finalists were selected to pitch to judges at the end of the conference. During the day, peers and mentors helped them shape their pitch, and at the end of the day we got to see the finished product. There were some amazing ideas such as a new recycling process to make toys and household items, and a charitable loyalty card. The finalists will get support throughout the year to develop their ideas. Later in the year, a final will take place and the winners will get funding from UnLtd and Barclays Capital. 

Overall, it was a great and inspirational day, and one of the many examples of the amazing opportunities happening at SBS. I only wish I had more time to take advantage of them all!

The term certainly flew by quickly – just as they said it would. I remember having just arrived in Oxford (for the first time in 10-years) this past September 24th. As an undergraduate, I had studied abroad here under the tutorial system. But now, as an MBA, I would come to know Oxford in a whole different way.

In the short span of 10-weeks I fully immersed myself in Oxford life. I rowed for my Exeter College Novice B team in the Christ Church Regatta. Before coming here, I would have thought that sounded like some obscure religious ritual. And in some ways it was, because Oxford is crazy about their rowing! I also became Treasurer of the Student Government, and completed my lock on finance by becoming Chairman of the Finance-OBN. My schedule has been so full this past term – not to mention the 6 core courses we all took – that attending the end-of-term Gala proved to be the best way to conclude Michaelmas term. Click on the video below to see some photos from our Michaelmas term 2009 Gala.

“If we cannot make a profit, that means we are committing a sort of crime against society. We take society’s capital, we take their people, we take their materials, yet without a good profit, we are using precious resources that could be better used elsewhere.”
- Konosuke Matsushita(1894 – 1989), Founder of Panasonic Corporation

What makes the Oxford MBA different? Many people try to answer the question; school director in journal interviews, alumni in seminars, and even applicants in admission interviews (how unfair). And yes, your intuition is right; it is damn hard to come up with a good answer without actually doing the programme. But after eight weeks in Michaelmas, the first term, I feel my grab on it.

Asking right questions, not just one, but all possible intellectual questions from holistic scopes is what I learned in past weeks. Although the first term is designed to lay a foundation of business knowledge, lecturers kept asking tough questions. This is to introduce a scene in one of the core courses.

A standing ovation does not come to an end. I even hear some sobbing. Can you believe this? I am in the last lecture of accounting class. Now I recall the professor raising a question in the first lecture, “what is financial reporting for?”, and the class replying in ways that “it is to represent reality in business.” or “it is to perform a comparative analysis over companies’ performances.”

True, accounting can be dull, tiring, and not anything more than arithmetic operations. The professor nodded, “Yes, many business schools teach accounting only by introducing accounting rules and calculating ratios, but not in Oxford. We are going to challenge that idea.”

It was just incredible how quickly we learned. In week 2, those who had never opened Yahoo! Finance started asking right questions in an income statement of Oxford Biomedica, a biopharmaceutical venture hatched in Oxford. In week 3, we learned how to give a double-entry for stock options for executives and discuss dark-sides of it. In later weeks, the topics extended to recording future profits from a palm tree in Malaysia, politics among IASB board members, accounting practices in NPOs, reasons for establishing huge accounting institutions in China…

All lectures, cases, and homework demanded tough critique; “How can we trust the business knowledge we are learning now?” And in week 8, at the very last lecture, the professor is sending us a farewell. “Although it depends on situations,” he said, “account-ING is not just a representation of reality because people make the reality. As a manager, you will have to do some creative accountings in the future. How do you account for your business activity? Please do your good accounting.”

For more than a decade before the business ethics came on top of the must-be-taught list in business schools, the Oxford MBA has taught how good and evil the business knowledge can be. As Oxford intellectuals, we are ought to ask right questions on both sides.

There are two very distinct characteristics that we all seem to exhibit. On one hand, we are competing amongst ourselves to prove how experienced, brilliant and intellectually superior we are from others in the Class of MBA 2009-2010. There are long discussions at lunch time on whether such and such kind of entrepreneur venture of IT can succeed. As if the person him/her self had launched a hundred successful venture of the same kind. It is not uncommon to have a debate over which share is more likely to succeed, with both parties involved offering authoritative statements on the issue . I, myself have been involved in interesting arguments over superiority of partial welfare states (such as United Kingdom) over non-welfare ones (such as United States). Over issues such as price ceilings are never suppose to work and ‘government had to do something about the rents’. It seemed like everyone had an opinion over almost everything and it was must for everyone to express it. And nowhere, is this trait more pronounced than in Oxford Business Networks (OBNs).How ironic, when the whole purpose of such groups is to bring like-minded people together.

Yet, increasingly towards the end, I felt that we all wanted to belong to something and identify ourselves with some sort of that very word called the ‘group’. Why else would people spend two hours of that precious revision week teaching others so that they can pass the exams? Why else do we hold events such as Diwali Bop where ethnic community unite together, but that half the function was organized by non-South Asians? Why else would so many people attend Japanese/ Korean Happy Hour? Why hang out an hour before the exam at Starbucks, when Costa was just across the road? Because we all knew we would find our sub-fusced mates at Starbucks.

The answer occurred to me when we recently became each other’s Secret Santa (we were each assigned a person to give a Christmas present of 5 to 10 pounds. The identity of the Santa was hidden from the recipient). The spirit of Christmas brought back the memories of good times spent with family and friends. Many of us had all come from different parts of the world with a desire to dominate the class. Yet, now that most of us are vacationing and away from college, we miss our friends. Why? Because the sense of belonging has surprisingly turned out to be stronger than we all thought.

I came to the conclusion, that individualism and sense of belonging are both equally important parts of a personality. In some people, one is dominant over the other. Some of our classmates would tell you, that the most important reason for them to join this program was to make intellectual friends that came from diverse backgrounds while they took an year off work. Others will express a strong desire to succeed in a certain field, such as investment banking. But the most important thing is balance, which is quite honestly, hard to maintain. We all want to be successful but professional achievement alone does not equals a life termed as successful. We all need a support network and these three hundred students are where we all draw our strength from.

But perhaps most enjoyable has been my time spent rowing for the Exeter College Novice B team. Along with my fellow ‘boaties’, we row three times a week on the Isis – the stretch of the Thames that meanders through Oxford – sometimes as early as 6am in pitch blackness. Rowing at Oxford is a big deal, in fact, 1 out of 3 students row at some point during their Oxford studies! And although the penultimate manifestation of rowing revelry is the annual ‘Boat Race’ that has been taking place between Oxford and Cambridge since 1859, students of all ages and abilities participate.

New students take warning. When you are invited to a BBQ at the College boat house during ‘Nought Week’ you will be put on an erg machine and tested for 1-minute to see how fast you can row. After wolfing down my hamburger, I managed to get on the erg machine and row about 38 strokes per/minute. Later I found out that this was good enough to put me on the Novice B team. Exeter had four boats this Fall: A, B, C, and D. It works similar for women’s rowing, as well. Most of the graduate students rowed on the C boat.

For those of you already familiar with Oxford you may remember that the School year is broken up into Michaelmas (Oct-Dec), Hilary (Jan-Mar), and Trinity (Apr-Jun) terms. Michaelmas terms is dedicated to Novice rowers; those who have never rowed before. You train all term for the ‘Christ Church Regatta’, which is a 800 meter sprint where you row side-by-side with another boat trying to overtake them. The event takes place over four days (Thu-Sun) – weather permitting – beginning around November 27th. The more ambitious rowers can participate in the warm-up event, called ‘Isis in Winter’, which our crew participated in on Sunday, November 14th. The big difference between the two events is that Isis in Winter is 1400 meters long, and you are only racing against the clock.

If you have rowed in the Christ Church Regatta, then congratulations – you are no longer considered a novice! Now you can go on and compete in ‘Torpids’ during Hilary, and finally ‘Eights’ during Trinity term to complete the Oxford rowing trifecta. But it’s an incredible commitment of time and energy, so maybe I’ll see how my job search pans out before the end of Michaelmas before I decide whether or not to continue on. Although I have lost 10lbs so far rowing, so maybe I’ll stick with it a little longer after all!

As a student at Saïd, one has to be open to new ideas, new ways of doing things. We are often surprised at the level of disagreement only in the end to find out that there was no right or wrong answer. Most discussions end with, ‘it depends’. In many cases, one has to unlearn what we have gained in our pre-Oxford lives, to grasp new concepts. One has to be able to sit through seven hours of coaching plus a two hour networking session all in a single day. So an MBA student has to be a constant bubble of energy.

My intention here is not to discourage anyone from pursuing an MBA. Just that one has to think things through before investing a whole year of time, huge amount of savings and infinite bundles of energy into such a program. I, myself am having a wonderful time learning new things. It’s whole new world at SBS that I am still learning to integrate with my existing one. But yes, everyday is a new beginning. A different challenge each day and a new friend to greet. Are you up for it?