If you decide you don’t have to get A’s....

“If you decide you don’t have to get A’s, you can learn an enormous amount in college”. Though I wouldn’t want to be inspired by this quote (From the book “My life as a Quant” by Emanuel derman and attributed to the legendary physicist I.I.Rabbi), I cannot but help wish that this was the philosophy followed by all the students in all the premier institutes of our country.

When I came to ISB, I had the notion of not wanting to repeat what we did in our undergraduate course at REC, which was to learn by rot and not understand the underlying principles. We have been, as a generation, lucky to have a booming economy waiting for us engineers to pass out of the college and embrace us in the folds of the IT and ITES sectors. But for these sectors, students passing out of the college without a firm understanding of their respective trades would have found it difficult to get a job.
In ISB, with all the world class professors, it would have been ideal for the students to try to understand the finer aspects of a subject and its application in the real world, rather than to cram for exams at the end of the short term.

Let me clarify. To a great extent, this does happen out here, the learning aspect does figure in the priorities of each and every student at ISB and the institute provides a conducive enviroment for the same, with all the world class faculties, state of the art facilities and an amazing library. The only thing that derails a student from the pursuit of knowledge is the over relevance of grades.
Yes, grades do matter and I don’t deny it.
But if grades matter with respect to how it is going to help a student perform in the campus recruitment process, then the reason for securing the grades deviates from the ideal reason for which it should have been done.I can sense that there are a lot of students in the batch who want to learn the subject rather than cram for the exams, but towards the end of the term, the pressure is so high that you tend to somehow master how to do the numericals rather than to understand why you are doing what you are doing.
Trust me. I did the same for the term 1 eco paper.
Yes, this will help in scoring good marks, but I cannot help feeling that somehow I lost the essence of what the numericals were testing me on, even though I managed to get the answer correct.

The above observations might look weird or abstract to a lot of people, so let me change track and recommend the book by Emanuel Derman for everyone who is intellectually oriented and also to those who are aspiring to work in an investment bank! :) I came across this book when it was recommended by one of my senior colleague when I was working with GS technology. The author of the above mentioed book is famous for the Black-Derman-Troy interest rate model in quantitative finance which he co-developed when he was at GS. In the book, he narrates his experiences as a physicist and then his stint at GS heading the quantitative strategy group.
Happy reading, if you get your hands on the book!!