Post by:
Ajay Mehta
MBA 2011
General MBA focusing in Operations and Business Strategy
MBA Council, Operations Club

The Final Year Begins

This is actually my first attempt at a blog and I’m a little nervous on what will come out. Perhaps I should relate it to business school…

ONE MORE YEAR! Being back in Boston is, in a way, comforting...I have a set schedule of classes, get to catch up with classmates I haven’t seen in a few months, and no early morning commuting through Chicago traffic. Another plus is that I no longer have to sleep in a hotel which I did for my summer internship. My back feels great.

This leads me to my summer internship which was with the Canadian National Railroad in Chicago, IL. The internship was a great experience which allowed me to really test some of the skills I had gained in my first year. I was tasked with reviewing a system that the CN used to sort cars in classification yards. After surveying the system and what the competition was doing, I wrote a paper concluding my results and directing the company in the right direction. Writing this paper was a tough task, but using business terms and tools gave me a completely different outlook on how I should write the paper. I caught myself using business jargon and making multiple SWOT diagrams to convey my points. I realized that I was relying on some basic marketing principles which without an MBA would have made my viewpoint very narrow. I also needed to quantify the suggestions I was giving my superiors, and by creating a financial analysis I showed them how the suggestions I was making would save the company money in the long run. These tools, as simple as they seem are not common place for most people. I truly saw the value of getting an MBA and being able to convey these figures clearly and successfully. I used terms and catch phrases which really helped quantify the decisions that company executives outside of the engineering department would be making. In return, my recommendations were taken seriously and will be used to calculate the railroads yard budget in the following years.

With that I conclude my first blog entry…stay tuned for more.

About the author:

Ajay is a full time MBA student focusing on operations management. His professional experience prior to BU was with Union Pacific Railroad in Houston, Texas, where he managed a signal maintenance work group. Ajay spent his childhood in Jackson, Mississippi and left to pursue an engineering degree from the University of Iowa. He likes summer, basketball, and listening to his iPod.