MBA at IIM Ahmedabad – How academically intense is it?

How academically intense is the MBA at IIM Ahmedabad?

You are not going to like this. It is anti-narrative.

I studied at IIMB and that can be taken as a fair enough proxy. The course is a lot of work. An awful lot of work. An awful lot of it is under time pressure. But it is academically intense in a way sitting on a beautiful beach is tough on the eyes.

Now, let me elaborate. Academic intensity is present when you face tough problems that you need to crack to clear a course, or you understand jack about a course that is crucial for your entire degree.

When you need to submit 4 different reports of 30 pages in length in 5 days across 4 courses and topics that you have little idea about, to begin with, stress levels are high but academic intensity is conspicuous by its absence.

If you have to understand Fourier Transform, grasp it intuitively, and prepare yourself for a test that might give students 3 hours to solve precisely 4 questions on Fourier Transforms, that is academically intense. Most of my B. Tech was spent in a haze trying to struggle through one course per term that I had no clue about. This kind of cluelessness makes you question yourself about your basic IQ.

In IIMA or B or C, all you have to do is put together a bunch of reports or a PowerPoint presentation that follows an outline that is a variant of this

1. Industry Overview
2. Key Success Factors
3. SWOT or Porter or BCG matrix or some other fashionable industry-level guff
4. Company Overview
5. Position on the Aspiration-Opportunity-Competency Triangle or some suitably verbose stuff
6. Key Recommendations

Students will have serious discussions delve deep, and then agree on one very important thing after the 3-hour meeting – How to allocate the sections to different group members? After this, there will be another group meeting, where the most intellectually challenging questions will concern font sizes.

IIM graduates are made to sit in an artificial “stress” environment and are pushed to do a lot of things within short periods. Then they are made to believe that if they can do this they can do anything else the world might throw at them. All told this is a useful exercise to create competent and confident managers. But to call this academically intense would sully the good name of academia.

IIMs are B-Schools. The stream called “Management Education” is young (barely 100 years old) and was created out of nothing in a bid to create a pseudo-scientific basis for ideas that were broadly considered “common sense”. There is no such thing as academic intensity in a B-School. This is not to say B-Schools don’t fulfill their purpose. They do. That purpose has nothing to do with academic intensity.