MBA @ Google

Ever since Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford in 1995 and co-founded Google Inc. in 1998, the world has undergone a revolution in the arena of information search. Learning about anything under the sun and even about anything in the universe not under the sun was never so easy! Google ensures a plethora of hyperlinks taking you to almost any topic you can conjure up in your mind. Any basic research that once required one to spend hours or even days looking up into stacks of library books or bulky encyclopedias’ can be done in minutes on Google. The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In the 21st century, that indeed seems a very noble mission to fulfill! One would really stop to think how MBA was done in the days when there was no Google. For MBA students today, who always have their plates full with ‘too much to learn in too little time’, Google is godsend. Google has become so indispensable that it has practically become a ‘verb’ in the student community. “I’m googling on hedge funds.” “Did you google on the company profile for our project?” “Oh! Hurry up, just google it!” As one of our professors famously advised, “Before you ask the teacher, ask Google!” Add to Google Web Search a huge basket of products including Gmail, Gtalk, Youtube, Blogger, Orkut, Picasa, Docs, Chrome and we realise Google Inc. practically runs our lives.

However, the human race is always under the risk of becoming a slave to machines, and our own creations come to torment our lives. As Nicholas Carr states in his famous article ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, “Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.” And in student life, where reading is indispensable and the quantum to be read is infinite, we have become a restless generation with the concentration span of a butterfly, hopping from page to page. Technology invariably has its limitations and that is where the human mind gifted with incredible power comes into action. But with a mind that is plugged into Google, it’s hard to see the bigger picture without unplugging it first.

The information on Google is not always academically rich or even correct. It’s ironical how easily we mistake telltale facts on internet for the truth. Moreover, Google, on its part, cannot answer everything. How many times have we spent long frustrating hours on the internet, entering all thinkable keywords on our adorable search engine, only to get hopeless links page after page? A lot of unnecessary information makes the entire activity tedious; add to it the distractions galore from our own tendencies to have multiple windows open at the same time, ‘buzzing’ with activities like unnecessary gossip on instant messengers and social networking sites, just to satiate our bored minds with empty entertainment. It’s as if our generation has run out of time – to create, to reflect, to inspire, to experience the joy that comes from creative satisfaction.

We no longer have the patience to prepare high quality (read ‘original instead of plagiarized’) work, to verify the online information we blindly trust, to do anything other than quickly ‘Google it up’. No wonder B-Schools today are churning out corporate employees, not entrepreneurs! Today, the “copy- paste culture” is taking its toll on the MBA student community. It’s as if we are a conduit between ‘gyaan available on Google’ and the assignments/ papers/ reports/ projects/ presentations to be submitted. Our creative inputs are bare minimum and revolve around putting the information together in a readable/ presentable format. How many times have we sat down to reflect over the subject and look at it from a new perspective, one that Google doesn’t remotely convey?

Are we really focused on learning? The students simply create a rehash of the information, opinions, judgments, beliefs and predictions available on the internet and begin to believe “this is how it is”. It’s as if everything is external – what had to be said/ discovered/ invented has been said/ discovered/ invented – and internal insights don’t matter anymore – not of an MBA student at least. Sadly, in this pursuit of fast information at the click of a mouse, fresh viewpoints are not generated, intuitive understanding is weakened, learning takes a backseat and most importantly, creativity is lost. While it’s smart to embrace the new trends, it’s imperative to retain the old-world charm as well. The good old days when one sat with a pen and notebook, contemplating deeply for long hours, drawing interferences and analogies, fostering new ideas and letting creative insights flow out seem a reverie of wisdom. Life is not always about shortcuts and “quickly getting over with everything we do”.

It’s about enjoying the journey and making a difference with our intellectual contributions, and not getting so bogged down by the sea of information that we are always in a rat race to catch up with the world. While Google connects us to the world, it mustn’t disconnect us from our own selves. After all, as we come to rely more and more on Google for our understanding of the world, it’s our own intelligence that fades into the background.

Mehak in two words is an efficient multi-tasker. Doing her Maths (Hons) from D.U. has made her quick with numbers as well. The best Class Representative that IIFT Kolkata could ever get, this girl is forever ready to take on more responsibilities, CICT to be one of them. Her good communication skills have won the hearts of all kinds of audiences, be it for an informal skit or for class presentations. When she gets time off from her CR-ness, she is asked to write articles for various kinds of magazines.