Growing up, I told myself one story- I am bad at Math
Growing up, I told myself one story- I am bad at Math.
Everything was fine until high school when Math was intuitive and fun. I was able to understand why was I doing and what was I doing.
But post that, I got stuck in the nonsense coaching class culture where both the teachers, and book authors were just solving problems without teaching any rationality, real world applications or first principles solutions.
All of my teachers were Ex- IITian - very smart but very poor teachers. They had no skin in the game with my success or learning. Coaching culture in India had just started and teachers were suddenly making a great living (thanks to the IIT- JEE preparation culture).
Forgive me if this sounds like a roast of school teachers. I am happy for their success. But my early adulthood education was screwed up because of this entire experience.
Later, I worked for 5 years in corporate with an inner complex that one day someone will find out.
I was thrilled to learn from professors who were finally vested to motivate me and teach basics & applications on statistics, probability. As someone who has been fairly analytical in my craft, that's when I realized I am Not the problem.
During ISB, I gained the courage to clear interview rounds of Mckinsey, BCG because I knew the relevance of the problem and created fundamental steps to solve complex problems- without any fear of numbers !
Today, my work doesn't require me often to solve equations or build analytical models. I may have lost the sharpness, but no body can takeaway what I learned.
And this is the principle reason I am now fighting the conventional education system- 'Made by Academics for Academics'.
Today, many youngsters would want to re-learn and re-imagine the world of numbers if they had some motivation and more importantly, they could build an intuition by working on real world application than theory.
I encountered late in my life that I wasn't the problem.
Sharing this with an honest hope that you realize it too !
If you are interested in learning about GGI's MBA Scholar program, you can learn here.
Author- Shatakshi Sharma, Cofounder Global Governance Initiative, Ex- BCG, Advisor, Tony Blair Institute
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