Best subjects in PGP1

Today's Operations class was god-level. Students who start twitching and murmuring the second the scheduled 70 minutes of the class are past, today sat gladly even as the clock went about 30 minutes past the scheduled close. Prof Saral, Saralda as we call him, is awesome. He knows his stuff, provides entertainment (including singing to the class!), is responsive to doubts and loves his subject - the ideal professor, in short.

Operations in WIMWI is taught in a two-course series OM 1 and OM 2 in the first and third terms. We had brilliant professors in both and this made the two ops courses my favourites this year. Prof Devanath Tirupati (DT) taught OM 1 and while not as entertaining as Saral, and slightly less approachable, I always appreciated his classes. Operations as a subject too has been the one where I feel I have learnt the most new and rather fascinating ideas and concepts - JIT, supply chains, job shops, process control have all become new additions to my vocabulary, not to mention Saralda's chameleons, cheetahs and elephants! Too bad that ops jobs don't pay so well, otherwise I think that many more people would have opted for those jobs over financial sector jobs.

Human Resources in term 1 is an unexpected course to make to this list of my favourite courses. Didn't expect anything from HR before coming to WIMWI (if I thought about it at all). Prof Maheshwari changed all that. The Cypress Semiconductors case is etched into my memory now. The case went on and on for 4 sessions, if I recall correctly. But at the end of it all, it become clear how every company policy affecting the employees is shaped by and shapes the direction in which the firm heads and how it operates and competes in its environment. The cases in HR were a delight, perhaps because of the insightful and no-nonsense manner in which SM tackled them. He was too tough on students on occasion (including myself once - in the fertilizer case). But I would rather have a painful prof who had significant insights to impart and made arbit CP a risky venture, than students raising trivial/absurd points with the encouragement of the prof, as happened in many other subjects.

Economics - here many people in my section will disagree with me - in the first two terms was very fun too. I loved microeconomics and the precise manner in which the optimal outcomes can be predicted on the basis of simple assumptions of the behaviour and motivations of people. Prof Dholakia is nice to listen to as well, especially since in those days I would come to class prepared and could understand the nuances of what he was talking about. Prof D'Souza took macroeconomics in term 2 and he is the nicest prof we've had this year (along with Prof Oburai in marketing this term). His offhand mentions of all the important people he knew were simply delightfully phrased ("Goa's CM called me, and I asked him, 'How's it going?'"). Macroeconomics is very different from micro - as opposed to the clinical precision of micro, there is bewildering mass of theories and hypotheses floating around in the macro world. Whom to believe - the classicists, Keynesians, moneratists or the Neokeynesians? :) (I am personally inclined towards the neokeynesian school). But both were really good subjects. Economics 3 (about issues of Indian economic development) is probably not-too-bad either, but I haven't read any of the readings well enough to really be able to comment.

A little over a week before PGP1 classes end...there shall be some nice memories (the not-so-nice ones will be blanked out soon enough) of sitting in CR 10 and more recently CR 6 (in the old campus) :)