Is it worth fretting over the "CAT results"?

The day when thousands of young Indians have their hearts in their mouths has arrived. The result day; the day when the CAT roars for a few and purrs for the rest is here. The day happens to be the 11^th of January this time around and again it’s time for the sluggish IIM website to go into an overdrive. The likes of PaagalGuy would also be having a tough time managing the (much welcome) traffic.Students in the final year of their college, loads of young employees in IT companies (who consider themselves trapped and maybe rightly so) and people across the diaspora have burned the midnight lamp to see their names in the top percentile today. A staggering 2.04 lakh people applied for the CAT and around 1.85 lakh took the exam. Looking at this number, I was just thinking as to how many people aspiring for an MBA degree have even thought about starting up?

I agree that an MBA degree doesn’t mandate one to start up a business and that an MBA is basically required to manage a business, whomsoever it belongs to but I’d also like to believe that a person with an MBA should be the most likely to startup.

But contrary to this belief, what I’ve seen over the past few years is that a fresh engineering (most likely) or a designing graduate is more likely to start a business as compared to an MBA guy. In a 2011 survey of second-year entrepreneurship students at the Harvard Business School, 70% said that they’d wait one to seven years before taking up a project and out of this 70%, many of them drop the plan along the way. And this stat or number is likely to be similar anywhere else as well.

What I’d like to purport over here is, that an MBA degree sometimes subdues the enthusiasm of a person. Maybe this is a good thing resulting out of ‘maturity’ but many brilliant ideas also get caged up into a cubicle because of this. And this is the reason why we usually see a flurry of startups from the fresh breed of graduates (with sometimes outlandish ideas) but this is what keeps the scene so much more dynamic. So, if the CAT roars for you, good. If not, even better! Go out and spread your wings. What do you have to say?

-Jubin Mehta