domain knowledge needed in business processes

They have arrived. All my efforts to prove sixth sense and the power of will have failed. The summers have arrived. So there I was on a lazy Tuesday when as usual I had finished my daily dose of worrying and cribbing about acads, summers, PPOs , specialization and world peace and had immobilized myself into inaction I was told one of the companies I had applied was visiting the campus the very next day. So there I was cut off from the world, business or otherwise, unsure of what I wanted to do stuck with the prospect of competing with 100 odd the next day with no fore warning. That I didn’t have a mini breakdown then and there is one of the mysteries I’ll never unravel but I did run around and harass enough of my seniors.

The shortlist arrived and there it was ‘dicya kamat’ a cryptic reference to yours truly. So I took out my suit, shirt and a pair of shoes which I swear are 3 sizes smaller than my size. (gyaan: impossible to find size 6 shoes for females in Mumbai, and the size 5 are what I think equivalent to size 3). So I waited for my GD sweating at the possibility of being slapped with a WTO-SEZ type topic. Thankfully the HR read out “5 ways to curb terrorism”. I exhaled and started scribbling on my pad. But my joy lasted for exactly a minute. The moment the GD started it was a vegetable/fish/any other commodity market. All I could do was to watch my points being shouted out by other individuals and getting drowned by others in the panel. Finally I managed to shout down a couple of people and get in a word. The GD ended abruptly and I came out rather shaken.

In another mystery I was shortlisted and there I sat in front of the panel. It was a group interview and I was paired with an industrial engineering guy. The interviewees before me assured me it was a cakewalk and that the 3 words I need to use were ‘domain knowledge’ ‘growing pharma sector’ and ‘business process’. So I made a sentence using these three catch words and fired off. The HR nodded and said if I planned to learn all this in 8 weeks. On my nodding he informed me what I would probably learn in that time would be the location of the jugular vein of a rat. By this time I was turning an unhealthy shade of crimson. He proceeded to ask some academic questions on of all subjects, statistics!! By this time I was deep beetroot and wanted desperately to be outside the door. The final nail in coffin when the IE guy drew a graph to explain the confidence interval while I had beaten around the bush with test of hypothesis. So you would be opening your books the day before exams I guess, the HR smiled. My facial muscles had by then paralyzed into an oh-am-I-dumb-or-what expression. We were thanked (for the entertainment I guess) and left.

The final list was out today. No, there were no more miracles. And yes substantial increase in domain knowledge requires ASAP.