By Ashita Singh                                                                                                           One year MBA (IPMX) candidate at IIM Lucknow               

Time is flying by and I can’t believe it’s the last mile already. It is an emotional moment for me as I reach the end of this truly transformational journey that I started a year ago. I have met some wonderful people along the way.

We will graduate in a few weeks from now and suddenly everything will change – a new job, a new city and new people. It’s a bittersweet feeling. As I reflect on the experiences that I had at IIM L, I feel thankful towards all those people who contributed towards my learning both inside and outside the classroom. This article is dedicated to all those people who made my time at IIM L memorable – my classmates, professors, friends and family.

My biggest learning at IIM L was what I learnt about myself. I now understand what all those people meant who told me that IIM will change my life in more ways than I can think of. I walked into IIM L a year ago with the expectation to learn and make myself a better person. The time off from my life-as-usual helped me to introspect and get the clarity of thought that I was so desperately seeking. My thought process and my approach towards situations, both personal and professional, underwent a massive transformation.

I learnt to ask the right questions and base my judgement on a fine balance of facts and intuition. I learnt to handle large amounts of information, deal with stress and keep it together even in excessively frustrating situations. I learnt to appreciate different perspectives about the same problem. I learnt new things about myself. Some are too personal to put down here but I would just say that I feel proud of myself, perhaps for the first time in my life. I am proud of the fact that I gave myself the opportunity to pause, take a step back and reflect on my life, values, opinions and beliefs, to look at the world differently and embrace it the way it is.

I am grateful today for taking the decision to quit my job and to have taken a gamble. There were certainly moments when I felt just the opposite of what I am saying right now. There were times when I questioned my sanity and thought that quitting my awesome job (even though I hated it) and leaving behind my super comfortable life (when I actually had time and money to splurge on myself) had to be the worst decision I ever took. I got frustrated with the extreme academic pressure, the competition and even with the people around me at times. But I realized that even those moments were a part of my learning.

Words can’t express how grateful I am towards my family, specially my parents, for their support and faith in me and for their encouraging words every time I went through feelings of anxiety and self-doubt. They continue to inspire me every day.

I am grateful to all my professors, for showing me how much I still have to learn. Learning from them was a truly humbling experience. I have the deepest respect and regard for all of them and I am extremely grateful for having got the opportunity to form life-long ties with some of them.

I am grateful to IIM L for bringing four most awesome and crazy friends into my life. This last one year would have been much more difficult without you. Thanks for knocking sense into my head when I was going off track. Thanks for pulling me together when the stress was getting too much to handle. I will miss all the madness.

For those of you who feel you still haven’t found what you came here for, I know you are walking a tight rope and it’s getting difficult to remain balanced. To you, I will only say one thing – when you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and just hang in there.

If you are a prospective student reading this, don’t get scared by what I have written. It’s not all serious in here. You will have your share of fun and late night parties provided you are smart enough to manage your ever piling assignments, never ending projects and back to back quizzes. And if you aren’t great at juggling things, worry not – time here at IIM L flies at the speed of light and it will all be over before you even know it!

Ashita Singh is an MBA candidate at IIM Lucknow and a part of the One year MBA (IPMX), Class of 2014. Prior to joining IIM Lucknow, Ashita worked for 6.5 years in Service Management and Product Support in Healthcare IT and Supply Chain Management domains. She is an avid reader, a regular runner, cyclist, and a hard-core day dreamer. She believes the MBA is one of the two things that transformed her life – the other is motherhood. She plans to take 6 months off from work and go on a world tour with her daughter someday. 

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