Past perfect!

At Great Lakes the schedules are so tight that we seldom get more than a few fleeting hours to submit an assignment. One such assignment in Macro Economics that our Prof. gave us the other day involved having to analyse a plethora of raw data regarding GNP, NNP etc from 1950 onwards. There was a total of 456 values that had to be analysed in less than 4-5 hours. 

Naturally, right after class our group (11 of us) sat down to make sense of it all. Now, the beauty of an MBA education is that no one tells you what to do or even what is expected out of the report. We are expected to know what needs to be done and if not figure it out. An intelligent group will be able to, eventually, come up with the solution. At this juncture i think it will be fair to say that our group was never even near the solution :-D

Anyway, 5 minutes into the analysis we started receiving mails from Mr. D which had wierd looking graphs in them. While I ignored the first few, once it became too frequent, I had to ask him "Dude, we know what all kinds of graphs are there... before we use them we need to understand the data" 

"No man, these are graphs of the data set!"

No way! thats impossible! How could he start making graphs when we had not even looked at the data? They weren't even typed in!! 

I did a quick review of the graphs and realised that they actually made sense (well, atleast to my nincompoop brain...). 

I asked him a small question about one of them and he quickly went to work on them. I saw his hands move at such speed that i felt dizzy just looking a them. Within 20 seconds he had another 2 graphs with my clarifications in them. 

I was impressed! Must definitely have been some hi-fi investment banker or someone in his previous life (read before Great Lakes). How else can someone shell out graphs and stats at this speed and accuracy. Great! good for the group... especially since it was macro economics.

I decided to pose the question to him... about his sheer efficiency and mastery of excel... and about his bank.

He replied.. "Oh No.. I was not working with any bank... I've had lots of practice doing this.. I was a PM at Infosys!"

:-S