Results are out. That time of the year when suddenly life decisions are being made by people who still say ‘worked extremely hard to just pass’ with full confidence. This is the time inter pass students are thinking about what to choose.
If any student is reading this, I have only one piece of advice: choose any stream, just don’t confidently choose comfort like I did.
I chose BCom.
Not because I had a deep passion for commerce. Mainly because BCom had a deep hole of nothingness. It didn’t demand much. It felt like a walk in the park, which is what I mostly did while bunking classes.
The subjects teach you how to maintain accounts. Nobody teaches you how to make that money. They teach you how to make a balance sheet for a company but they never teach you how to make a company. It’s like being trained to manage a kitchen without ever learning how to cook.
Creativity is also limited. Engineering students build cars, bridges, apps. Their projects look like something. Our project? Neatly bound economics theory typed in fancy font.
Recently, I realised something painful. My entire three-year degree is now one ChatGPT prompt. Not even the premium version. Free trial is enough. That’s how advanced technology has become and how outdated my syllabus was.
Then comes placement season. And BCom teaches you one thing very well here, managing expectations.
With BCom, you either get a very small job in a very big company, or a very big title in a very small company. There is no middle ground. You’re either ‘customer support associate’ answering calls for a Big 4, or suddenly ‘area sales manager’ for an insurance company that even Google struggles to locate. In both cases, the job description is the same, convince people of something that even you’re not fully convinced about.
At least engineering and medicine come with identity. If an engineer commits a crime, the headline reads, ‘Engineer arrested.’ Doctor does something wrong? ‘Doctor under investigation.’ There is respect even in the crime.
BCom? ‘Man found dead.’
That’s it. Even the news doesn’t want to associate.
There are no movies on BCom graduates. Nobody is making a biopic saying, ‘He cleared third-year accounts and changed the nation.’ Even uneducated people get biopics because their lives have more to tell. The most famous BCom graduate is Harshad Mehta, and his claim to fame was breaking the system, not using it.
The course itself is like plain rice. You can survive on it, but only if you add something. MBA is the curry. CA is the protein. Family money is the pickle. Without that, it’s just bland and tasteless.
The real problem is not the subjects. It’s the comfort. There’s no pressure, no urgency, no moment where your brain is forced to wake up. You get used to that. Life feels easy. And then suddenly, after graduation, life decides to conduct its own entrance exam, with no syllabus and full negative marking.
That’s when the panic starts.
I’m not saying BCom students fail in life. But BCom fails everybody.
If you’re genuinely interested in commerce and economics, there are serious places to study it, Lady Shri Ram in Delhi, for instance. But that’s one college. We should have banned this outdated course, but instead we now have BBA, which is just BCom in Gen Z clothing.
Don’t do it.
Choose something that pushes you a little. Stresses you a little. Forces you to think.
Because plain rice is fine.
Just not if you’re planning to run a marathon.
Sandesh
@msgfromsandesh
(This comedian is here to tell funny stories about Hyderabad)
(The writer’s views are his own)