Friday, October 01, 2010

Fitting in..

One of my many learnings at INSEAD has been that I am definitely more interested in the technical aspects of finance and economics than the average MBA. Most of my classmates hate the math, and rightly focus on getting the business insights which they can then apply to the “real world”. I am a proud exception who thoroughly enjoys playing around with all the equations and numbers.


Initially, I felt quite odd and attempted to fit in by trying to be more MBA. Any such illusions were shattered, as I once found myself conducting a finance tutorial to a class of 40 students desperately trying to prepare for a final exam. After this incident, I spent the next few weeks with the nickname “Professor”.


Eventually, I accepted my strangeness and even resorted to attending some of the Ph.D seminars on campus where I could find others like me. Today, I attended a seminar titled “Friends in High Places”. It covered a fascinating piece of research which explored the impact of social networks (college alumni networks, seating proximity in the Senate) on the voting behavior of individual senators. I enjoyed the entire presentation and was mesmerized by the techniques used to leverage a complex database to extract some fascinating insights.


Over lunch, I was excitedly describing this research to 2 MBAs. They were extremely unimpressed and insisted that the research was doing nothing but proving the obvious, which it clearly was. My protestations as to the unique methodology and the potential future research areas it opened, failed to impress them in the least. Their conclusion from the conversation was that most academics spent their lives sitting in their cubes and proving the obvious using obscure techniques. Try as I might, I could not disagree. :)


That incident however, reminded me of a conversation I had had with a Ph.D student just earlier that day. We were talking about the Finance recruiting opportunities which an MBA opened up. He was telling me his views about how most MBA Finance roles completely lacked intellectual challenge and were in reality, extremely well-paid, glorified clerk jobs. Try as I might, I could not disagree. :)


Two sets of people, from two different worlds, inhabiting the same campus. And never the twain shall meet.


7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Cheap duh -- you are a wannabe PhD grad student :D

7:27 AM  
Anonymous Golu said...

Actually I will disagree with this statement to some extent - "Their conclusion from the conversation was that academics spent their lives sitting in their cubes and proving the obvious using obscure techniques." There are academicians doing brilliant stuff and for the lack of a stronger word, I would call it ignorance to make a statement that people are simply proving the obvious.

First of all, research has a bit of obscurity and open-ended feature to it. Nash's game theory, I believe, found recognition only years later. I know of people in my area proving obscure stuff 30 years which went on to become the pillars of today's technology since now we have the required computing power. I think one thing that we are expected to learn in a scientific setting is that NOTHING is obvious until proved theoretically or empirically. The proof may be simple, but it needs to be demonstrated nonetheless. Also, I'd rather not get into the argument that some of the greatest works are those which are seemingly so obvious but just required brilliant minds to show it to everyone.

Now, on a related note, I could also argue that MBA students typically get placed by the end of their first year or the beginning of second year (or so I believe). It is quite difficult to comprehend what could have changed so drastically across a year to increase your payscale 10-100 fold. But my failure to comprehend this should not lead me to saying that they are overpaid clerks either. I feel that would be equally insulting to MBAs and quite ignorant on my part too to make a statement without appreciating the finer nuances.

I think both genres of people have their places. The supply-demand principle works pretty well, which is why we still have PhDs and MBAs being churned out ... which is why we still have companies and governments investing in academic research and we still have companies paying MBAs huge salaries.

A fair comparison between MBAs and PhDs, would be to compare the contributions of the best in both fields. Due to the better payscales that both MBA and PhD offer (well PhDs will typically make less than the MBAs due to the supply-demand of the jobs), there is without a shout of a doubt an overwhelming saturation of MBAs and PhDs. Hence, if you were to look at the average PhD candidate, he/she might not be producing something revolutionary. There lies the problem in analyzing and comparing both populations. To me that would seem only "obvious" :D

Also, on a final note, Duh..I believe that the stuff you saw is indeed cool stuff. It is possible that the speaker presented analysis on such databases so that it could be appreciated immediately by the audience. However, very similar techniques have been used for extremely 'relevant' tasks such as analyzing gene expression data. Such techniques are also leveraged by zynga to find out who are the powerful players in farmville and how they must be retained in order to ensure that the player base increases. There is a lot of scientific and commercial use for such techniques and I share your enthusiasm for them :D

To conclude in the words of McCartney, the best way to go is 'live and let die'.

8:02 AM  
Anonymous Subbu said...

Can toootally imagine Duh being a math 'Professor'. It is never too late to change tracks :)

9:18 AM  
Blogger Roman said...

Golu...I think Duh means Phds in MBA! Even then I disagree!

9:41 AM  
Anonymous Golu said...

No ro ... he was talking about PhDs and MBAs on the same campus.

10:16 AM  
Blogger Karthik said...

Golax - you clearly took the blog too seriously. It was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. :) And the point was more about the different perspectives that people have on the same things.

It is nice to blog again. Had been a while since I completed a blogpost.

K

8:59 AM  
Anonymous Golu said...

Well, when you touch a few sensitive topics and yourself 'do not disagree', I find it hard to let such things go by :D Plus as I said, the perspectives that people have are perhaps skewed. But I guess that is something that is not going to change for long.

10:56 AM  

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