Tuesday, March 20, 2007
a disco with Pam
Whenever there is a chance, two idle people on this earth get into argument on mostly a topic which can ire me...Ofcourse one is me myself and myself(again) and the other is none other than the first uncle of our batch Mr Pammy(pratap)। After a lot of gap in our series of arguments, from 2 days we have been fighting on why MIS. So i thought why not write an article on this॥ So these are my view points about MIS in regard to my career aspirations. Acronym MIS has two long forms.Masters in Information Systems and Management of Information Systems. The simple distinction is tht they r not the same. Precisely Masters in Information Systems is offered by CS schools of the universities. Where as the Management of Information Systems is offered by the BSchools of the universities. Is tht all ??? So as MIS's offered by CS departments tend to be more technical in the sense of CS and MIS's offered by BSchools are more in the application side of IT to managerial problems. I would like to say that MBA with IT specialization is more or less related to that MIS offered by the BSchools. Infact many BSchools offer specialized masters where in u can do Masters in Finance, Marketing, Information Systems etc. You almost take the same courses offered by the BSchools and sometime very much share the same curriculum of an MBA specializing in tht field. Like u may say MBA - IT might be some what similar to MIS of BSchool except tht the requirements and core courses stuff might differ to some extent in these cases.
In MBA mostly people go and do courses in Depth। I dont mean to say courses across the breadth is bad. I mean majority of people who come to do MBA are for career change, moving into higher position. Suppose I wanted to move into a finance domain from IT domain, it would be very advantageous to me if I do an MBA with more courses of finance(this is prcisely wht i call specialization"). This is precisely true and is same with any degree. You always have a set of compulsory courses and then a set of electives. What i mean is if we take a typical MBA gard who happens to take many courses in Systems, his profile of courses(major+electives) will look very much similar to that of courses taken by MIS grads. For example in the MIS prg I am going to take, I will take the same electives taken by MBA grads and economics grads. And I do agree I wont gain much abt other domains other than IT and its applications. Well in my case I really dont want to do an MBA finance, marketin and sales which are more popular TRACKS (taking more electives of finance etc). I guess MIS can be a good option if u are planning to jump into IT domain. Because in the current class of MIS at LSE , there are many doctors, economists and commerce people who are planning to specialize in Information Systems. But I do agree, with MBA u have more scope. So what ever you want to do, study the curriculum and then decide. Ofcourse u can get carried with brand too. If tht is gonna help you what u want to do, then its also a major factor.
I was in the idea of doing MBA earlier in systems alone। So doing an MIS from management dept would be very much in line with wht i want to do. My sole idea of doing some higher studies is to get into WorldBank. I was analysing on ways I can convert my profile to match that of a typical World Bank guys. What do WB need?? they mainly recruit economists and financial experts. But I am really not interested in doing finance as my career. Well WB also recruits rural development experts. Hehehe, this is my focus area. I am aiming for a career where in I can use technology to fight against poverty. Infact I started touring along with my dad on his camps in various districts. The concept of SHG and its strucure and maintenance was really a great thing(I will write a dedicated article on experiences with SHGs). These things were started by my dad during his days in United Nations and his short interaction with Yunus and Sohaib Sultan Khan. Infact some places in Ananthapur have really came out of poverty with my dads initiatives of about 10years. Whenever I go to visit some yester years places where my dad used to work earlier, I get lot of inspiration to do something like him. Its always a funny thing to realise tht my dad was a researcher in Astrophyics during his studies. Now he works for upliftment of real poor. He says he realised tht he should be doing this kind of work sometime in the middle of his pursuit for PhD. He left tht and started preparing for civils and he became a state government officer. Finally, with many experiences and deputations he joined and worked with international organizations. And now he is on deputaion with World Bank as regional project director. As with each experience I unnoticingly developed an interest in his work. I myself was never sure of wht IT can do to me. I was surprised when my dad told me tht they have developed a management informationsystem with performance indicators to evaluate the development of people, manage ones business. He says IT has lot of scope for the devlopment in any respect. So these words have added strength to my determination. I realised tht if u have an aim anything can be mended to match your way of thinking. I started to look in ways where IT can be made useful to lives of people. I like to customize my profile and make myself an expert in developing systems which can be of benefit to poor. I dont know how I can achieve this but you know I am better than many, I am sure of my destination. Path has to follow or I myself will lay a path .
The passion of doing this kind of things is wht I wrote in my applications. I guess I am happy I realised it. So whereever I go, keeping this aim, I would like to customize my profile to do this kind of things. Infact when I was offered Erasmus Scholarship, I was worried I would be moving away frm my dream, but I have found my specialization of life science informatics to be inline with my idea. I want to study this topic in depth and after which I will take a socio economics perspective of this. I have postponed LSE a little later(because of scholarship only). But I guess after I take up LSE after two years I guess I will find more meaning in what I am doing.
# posted by Ravi Shankar @ 11:19 PM 
