Sunday, March 14, 2010

Muse: Finani

10 easy steps to completing an assignment in corporate finance

Step 1:
Receive mail about assignment. Look around for more people to crib to about the incessant workload. Mark it as starred and promise yourself to look at it soon.

Step 2:
Morning of the day before the assignment is due, talk to people and nod along when they say 'It is going to be a long night today. It is quite difficult'. Promise to start by afternoon itself so you can sleep early in the night.

Step 3:
Wake up from your long afternoon nap and tell yourself that you needed the sleep to be alert and work on the assignment all night.Get yourself some snacks. Afterall, you need the energy to work all night. Chat for a while over coffee.

Step 4:
Read the assignment once and exclaim loudly to no one in particular that the analysis needs to be done for your peer company too. Feel free to add expletives of your choice to this step.

Step 5:
Read class notes furiously and try to see if any familiar words correspond between yours and his.
Try to interpret your sleepy handwriting to figure out what exactly you meant when you wrote those words.

Step 6:
Officially give up on figuring out the assignment on your own and start pinging everyone on your gtalk furiously to figure out if they have figured out what to do. Ideally in this step, there will always be a few souls who have figured it out and will tell you what to do.

Step 7:
Start the assignment with all intentions of doing it properly and pore over annual reports hoping that the necessary question is irrelevant to your company

Step 8:
When sick of Step 7 [hint: words will start blurring in front of you and Microsoft word will be a distant white haze], start writing random answers and somehow aim to complete the assignment.

Step 9:
Send shoddily done assignment and hope your roll number is not picked by the random number generator. As you go to sleep, Promise to start early next time and do full justice to the assignment.

Step 10:
Next assignment arrives in your mailbox. Repeat Steps 1 through 9.