Dirty MBAs; Clean Managers

Almost all my students are business school MBA types; so I may be talking about one specific species. I have one crib against them.   Most look sloppy.  The occasional ones are positively dirty.  

All of them look sleep deprived.  Fifty percent of the men are unshaven.  You walk in to a class of sloppily dressed students and it can be quite depressing. Many T shirts have seen better days.  Trousers are hanging down.  Some wear smelly jackets. The last shower date is possibly lost in the annals of history.  A few wear slippers which even the friendly neighbourhood beggar would refuse to wear.  You get the picture.  The higher the rating of the school,  the sloppier the look.

Look at their pictures when they are in the undergraduate colleges and they seem to look and dress all right.  Look at them after they graduate, they are very well dressed.  I sometimes see pictures of some of my former students on Facebook and I had difficulty reconciling the people in those pictures with my mental map of them when they used to haunt the schools where I teach/taught.

Somewhere after the first term, something seems to happen to the MBA student.  Some sort of metamorphosis happens and the clean undergrad disappears and the sloppy MBA student emerges! Till placement time comes, that is.  If I was a biologist I would almost draw the ubiquitous lifecycle circle. 

I have tried to reason out why this happens.  Could it be time pressure? – but they are under greater time pressure when they are managers. Yet they seem to have no problems getting shaved and putting on nice cloths and reaching on time for the meeting.  Maybe it is shortage of money? – heck, I am not talking about designer wear but a visit to the cleaners two or three times in a term.

The only explanation I have is that they are getting back at us, their professors. The idea being to make themselves as much of an eyesore as they can and so make us suffer. Every assignment, exam, and quizz is met with slightly more sloppiness.  An eye for an eye.....

I have even half a mind to moot an eye sore allowance for professors who have to suffer this. :)

Bala@Jaipur