About learning and unlearning at b-school

 

You need to unlearn a lot at b-school, they say... couldn't be truer! And the biggest unlearning is in the area of humility and modesty about your achievements! Yes... how else do you think you can stand out in a peer group of all-life toppers, Mastermind Quizzers, Engineering 10-pointers, multilingual experts, triathlon champions, Olympiad winners and the like?

And the manifestation of this unfortunate reality shows itself in all its grandeur in that work of art that every b-school student is expected to create - the Resume : that short, most sacred document to be crafted  with love, care, blood and tears - that one page that stands testimony to a life of splendid effort! I doubt if a Wordsworth or a Shakespeare would have given himself with such utter dedication to any work of literature!

The  Resume writing game is not for the scrupulous.. this is not a game for non-conformists or (worse!) those skunks that still have enough humility left in them to downplay achievements. Your life at b-school is expected to have steeled you reasonably well for this highly evolved form of writing.



So, folks... let me treat you to a sample of this sub-task of resume writing called "bullet-pointing".

Background: A bullet point is a statement of considerable, quantifiable, unique achievement, worthy of perusal by the powers-that-be.

The catch:It is to be not more than 2 lines in length.

The loophole: Font, unspecified.

So how does the average IIMBiite approach this problem? Just make a Strategy framework,with Inputs, goals and output.  Roughly translated, it means you gotta plug in facts about yourself(creditable or otherwise), play around with it, add accepted jargon and numbers, and hey presto! you gotta brilliant bullet point!

Sample this:

Fact: I'm hopeless at reading poetry. My friend wrote one and I took 6 seconds to understand each line.

Playing around: Read it a second time, take only 3 seconds per line, get somebody to appreciate you!

Jargon: "acclaimed", "exceptional", "turnaround" etc.

Also do: Read the Power Verbs pdf, and show the point to a few seniors

Output:

• Demonstrated high potential for critical appreciation of applied orientations of human thought, achieving 100% decrease in turnaround time

More facts to be bulletized soon!

 See what I mean??