I’ve got many disjointed things to talk about and I’m not sure where to start. Eenie..Meenie..Miney..Mo...

Got it. Made a trip to Newcastle yesterday and realised a few things.
1/ My presence was completely unnecessary and I could have as well vegetated here in Ipswich rather than fly out, have two airport meals, nod my head like the thingamabob on the dashboard, participate in a conversation that made utterly no sense and come home dead tired.
2/ BT values the MBA degree a lot, and they hire about 50 MBA graduates each year. *Mental note – can try this option.*
3/ Business (&useless) trips are a great way to find out more about your super-bosses. Like mine loves wine. Is fanatical about golf. Is divorced but seeing someone he newly met. Adores Spain. Wants to do community service.
4/ I realised that if you have an issue, there’s no substitute to a face-to-face meeting. My team (i.e. the project that I’m working on) had some issues with another, and we were neither getting any cooperation from them, nor were we making any headway. It took all of two f-t-f meetings to clear the foul air, gain trust and secure co-operation.

Next, I’m worried about how I’m going to finance my MBA. There’s the collateral-free loan that’s offered by IESE but it covers only the tuition expenses. What do I do about the living expenses?? I don’t fancy touching my savings, and I’m not about to ask my parents for money (that’d be just plain wrong). The only option seems to be to take yet another bank loan to cover my living expenses, and two loans on my head give me very little leeway to take risks. Plus there’s very little that I can do from here. I need to go back to India and see if I can get that stuff sorted out.

Finally, I am through with at least two of the 10 most important things on my To-Do-List-In-UK, one of them being meeting my ex-manager Mike, who also happened to be my recommender. Funnily enough, both he and my super-boss were of the opinion that they always preferred to have only those Indians on their team who had travelled & worked abroad before. The reasoning? That the experience taught them the importance of saying No, as against Indians who hadn’t worked abroad and who fell into the trap of either saying Yes to everything and thereby either failing to deliver, saying Yes to their managers because it was not in the Indian culture to argue with managers (huh??) or having to work their asses off for 90 hours a week to deliver what they had promised. I really don’t know where they got them from. May be I ought to talk to some more people and find out if that’s the general opinion.