My first four weeks at Cranfield

Its been exactly a month since I arrived here at Cranfield. On the one hand it feels like I did the last post only days ago. On the other hand so much has happened since I arrived that it feels like I have been here all the while.

I arrived here on the 22nd of September 2010. My initial idea was to attend the pre-mba maths programme, but I was told on the 21st that I wasn't eligible for the course since I had a fairly decent GMAT score. I had already booked the flight from Karlsruhe-Baden airport to London Stansted, so I decided to nevertheless fly on the 22nd itself. In a way, this turned out to be for the good since it gave me a couple of days to get to know the campus, the surroundings and interact with many others who had already landed arrived on campus.

And what a great time has it been until now! Life at Cranfield started off with the Orientation Week. This is probably the best time one will experience as a complete cohort. As the name indicates, the week was about orienting us in our new environment and was an excellent opportunity to get to know the rest of the cohort. The week is packed with activities and might sometimes even seem a bit overwhelming, but suffice it to say that this is one great week that will stay on my mind forever. It is just amazing how much we managed to get to know each other and how much we achieved as a group in such a short time. And the people who made this so amazing are the students from the last cohort. There are no classes and no professors during this week. Its just us, the newbies, with our guides i.e., the ones who have just undergone the Cranfield experience and who can best explain it to us.
Kudos to Cranfield for devising the orientation week or the O-week, as it is more commonly known. One needs to truly experience the O-week to understand how the mantle of the Cranfield MBA is passed from generation to generation.

There was no time to recover from the O-week. The second week started off bang at 08:45 on Monday morning, the 4th of October (the 'official' start of the academic year), with the lectures. Its just been 3 weeks of lectures but we have covered a great amount of ground in just these 3 weeks. So much so, that the first report submission deadline is already looming close and so is our first WAC (Written Assessment of a Case - more about it once I have personally experienced one).

It had been close to 12 years since I sat in a classroom and one of the fears that I had was whether the lectures would put me to sleep! I couldn't have been more wrong. Each of the lectures, backed with great case studies, has made the class environment absolutely dynamic. I cannot think of any one person in the class who hasn't participated in the discussions so far. And it is also not possible to hide away in the class. Most lecturers cold call on the students and take the pains to ensure that there is a fair balance in the class discussion contributions. No single person is allowed to dominate these discussions.

There is a lot happening already beyond the lectures. Competitions like the AT Kearney Global prize competition, career counselling, workshops for tailoring CVs, applying for jobs (yes, already!), guest speakers and lots more. Different student clubs have already been formed including the consultancy club, the entrepreneurship club and various sports-related groups. But there is one club for which we all automatically become an 'associate member' and that is the 'Social Club'. This is one place which is frequented religiously by the MBAs and as the weeks get tougher, it goes without saying that this will be one club that will rule over all the others - the one club that will bring us and bind us all together.

Cheers!