I must make a confession! Throughout my NITIE life I was of the opinion that MBA was merely an exercise to segregate the smart ones from the lot and B-schools are merely providing placement services to students and selection services to companies. But I WAS WRONG !
As much as MBA studies seem useless and hot air while you are in the institute - their impact is visible only after you join the industry. I always felt that engineering had a more 'learning' content but MBA too has a lot of content. I have been spending time doing information audits and helping the financial audit team at KPMG as an IRM expert (?? IRM? Expert?) since the past 3-4 days. The reason why I could solve their issues, more than my knowledge of systems, was my knowledge of business. It is the business knowledge acquired during MBA that helped my relate which IT system could and in what manner and to what extent affect the financial statement of the company. Terms like BOM (Bill Of Materials) which the Audit team did not understand were clear to me. My knowledge of accounts helped me talk to the auditors in their language - General ledger, journal entry etc etc.
NITIE especially is known for the process knowledge that it imparts to its students. To many, this is just the knowledge of Operations management but in reality this knowledge pertains to how the businesses operate in totality - the concept of holistic education and cross functional pedagogy is becoming clearer. My perception that all this are mere jargons has undergone a 180 degree shift in the past 5 days. If you know how the industry operates as a whole you can better appreciate the role of one function or just a small process in the complete matrix. You can also take a bird's eye view and run your vision miles ahead envisaging the effect that the performance of the process in question will have on macro business environment.

The bottomline is MBA helps !! MBA is really a useful qualification . . . . Cheers to NITIE!!