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Education Plus
STUDENTSPEAK
The profit predicament studentspeak
“How many times have I heard students about to start work for a corporation claim that they will just spend two or three years earning the money they need, then leave and pursue the career of their choice? How many times have I caught up with those people several years later, to discover that they have acquired a lifestyle, a car and a mortgage to match their salary, and that their initial ideals have faded into the haziest of memories, which they now dismiss as a post-adolescent fantasy? How many times have I watched free people give up their freedom?” This is renowned journalist George Monbiot in his careers advice. He then quotes Benjamin Franklin who famously said, “Whenever faced with a choice between liberty and security, choose liberty. Otherwise you will end up with neither.”
Most students are sucked into the economic bandwagon and are gearing up to do the all important MBA. That’s not a bad thing; only most of these people are planning on doing it to escape the captivity of an already existing job or in the hope of landing a dream job that will set them free!
The MBA seems to be the solution to every career dilemma. Parents of children who are pursuing their MBA or have completed their management courses are extremely proud of this fact and widely advertise it as if it were some pioneering achievement.
Undergraduate students talk of their seniors in the IIMs and other management schools with great reverence and in hushed tones as if they were gods. MBA graduates tend think of every thing in terms of a balance sheet. Somehow, their regard for societal values, culture, tradition, art, aesthetics, literature, environmentalism and ecology is greatly diminished after being subjected to one of those gruelling courses.
The central unit of all their thinking becomes the profit of the company. There’s nothing wrong with making money except that you should be able to spend it and live wisely. Sometimes it’s worth thinking about the way the heavily salaried executives spend their money. Most parents who earn six or seven-digit salaries can materially furnish their families with everything they can possibly dream of. But what use is it if your own children are being brought up by maids and drivers? Do you really want a job where you have no time to enjoy your life? Are you prepared to just become another cog in the mighty machine and fall in line and execute orders that you cannot comprehend?
If the answer to these questions is ‘yes’, then the MBA is for you; so that you will be cut and toned down to size ‘C’ (Corporate). Perhaps we never thought about what truly makes us happy and about what really matters at the end of the day. And perhaps it’s about time to start thinking about what we should actually be doing with our lives. But don’t be disappointed if you don’t find any answers right away.
As Baz Lurhmann said in his famous poem, ‘Sunscreen’, “Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year-olds I know still don’t.”
K. S. NIKHIL KUMAR
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