Trust me when I say this, and I am not being the least bit cheesy – XLRI has been a dream come true. After two years of preparations and interviews and results and the vicious cycle all over again, there came a day when I had finally made it to this premier institute. I was the ‘bright kid’ all over again and it felt good to see so many friends and acquaintances and long-lost kindred souls coming out of their cocoons to congratulate me on this feat. For the first time in my life, I made an internal attribution (sorry about Organizational Behavior creeping in to this article but I can’t really help it). It had, after all, taken a lot of perseverance to keep holding on to this dream.
After I had settled in and was just discovering the place with my new-found friends and batch mates, there was this one time in the first week where I just stood outside the gates and stared long and hard at the words – “XLRI Xavier Institute of Management”. It was surreal. I was finally a part of the famous, and rightly so, ‘XL Culture’. I’m writing this after having completed a month and I could say this with complete conviction – my life has turned upside down. I barely find myself without a book or an article or a presentation or some other reading material. There’s always a test to prepare for, an assignment to complete, a meeting to attend, and never enough sleep.
But at the end of every day (I frankly still don’t know when my day begins or ends), when you are surrounded by friends, tired of the endless writing and reading and trying to understand, and you go down to Shyam’s for a plate of cheese maggi and see the sun come up over the hills and the river, the world seems all right. Being here makes you want to eXceL, to be better, to try harder. There is so much pressure to prove yourself but at the same time, having made it to an institute of this league gives you enough confidence to believe you are up for any challenge life throws at you.
Even though it’s just been a month, I already have so much to take away from here. I have made friends who are just as crazy as me and laugh at the silliest things when everything is so darned serious. I have this amazing batch of seniors who have proved to us time and again just how cool they are. I have a great set of professors who make it a point to drive home the fact that lectures do not HAVE to be boring.
In short, I have had an amazing, tiresome, crazy four weeks living the XL Experience and I’m not nearly done yet. I look forward to every one of the remaining 51 weeks.
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