Freshies and Stalies : The MBA Junta

Now this subject has been done to death in many articles and blogs, so i run the risk of repeating the oft-repeated stuff. Still i'll try and give it a different perspective.

The average B-School Junta can be divided into two groups- freshies and work-exies (lets call them stalies for ease of use). Now each of the group behaves in a predictable manner (except for a few glorious exceptions). Let us consider the freshies first .

Freshies behave just like their name- very fresh. They bring fresh ideas to the discussions. Of course, being fresh does not necessarily mean useful. So, these guys are always very eager about things. They like to participate in the class as much as possible and more often than not end up asking questions which any self-respecting MBA student wont be caught dead asking. They try to hog all the limelight by sitting in the first two rows, which perfectly suits the rest of the class. They are the pets of Profs for all the donkey work that they are willing to do. They are the life of any project group. In an MBA institute "life" of the group is a wicked way of humoring the guy willing to slog for the whole group. These Freshies are also obsessed with grades and are usually the first one's to know about any grades that have arrived. They usually dont drink or smoke and consider anyone touching these things as untouchable. Their reportoir of curses is severely limited and this hampers their ability to effectivley communicate their frustration with a staly who dares to shirk his group duties.

As with any population, exceptions galore. These "exceptional" freshies do everything opposite to a normal freshy. They spend most of their time sleeping on the back-benches. They rarely do any work and dont give a damn about grades. They are looked upon by other freshies as somewhat of a disgrace.

Now, coming to the stalies. Stalies have more than a year of work-experience. And in their opinion, it gives them an undenaible right to pass opinions on everthing related to placements, jobs or companies. They usually categorise things in two categories- things that used to happen at their place of employement and things that did not used to happen at their place of employement. And god save you if some event is even remotely similar to a category 1 event. You then have to suffer through a long and boring description of the staly's exploits at his place of employement. Stalies dont believe in slogging for the group projects as they already consider themselves to be managers and are content with "managing" the project. Stalies can be observed at all times giving loads of unwarranted gyaan to a faithful freshie or reliving those gloriouos days of employement with their fellow stalies. For some strange reason, Stalies are also very obsessed with grades and manage to defeat Freshies in thier quest to be the topper. Stalies also belive that hobnobbing with the Profs will somehow increase their stature in the Institute.

Exceptional stalies are those wonderful creatures who behave just like a fresher. These guys are the most obsessed with grades. They slog the maximum and sit on the first bench. Somehow, They manage to beat freshies in asking silly questions during the class.Looking at them will give you an impression that they have not yet graduated, leave alone having a work-ex.

To those wondering to which group i belong, well , I leave you to make a few guesses !!