Houghton Street musings

Student no. 200620078:
I must have been one of the first ones to apply. To be precise I must have been the 8th to apply for 2006 /07. My LSE student number reads 2006-2007-8 …. It is an easy number to remember. I was registered with LSE as a successful applicant holding an unconditional offer, was way back in January 2006. What they saw in my career and academic profile, I still cannot understand !!!

Studies was not really my cup of tea … not really after 13 years since I last gave an Exam. I should say I was driven by desperation and circumstances.

I have a bookworm for a husband who at that time was pursuing his executive MBA from London business school. He (owing to his study and work overload…I am told) never took notice that a wife existed at home, except when the toilet paper ran out in the loo.

Routine work was getting on my nerves and with no personal life whatsoever; I was not sure where my life was taking me. I knew I wanted to get out the rut of clearing 1000s of emails pouring into the bottom less pit called the inbox over weekdays as well as weekends.

Hubby dear suggested I study for a part time CIPD certification to keep myself ‘occupied’. I was surfing the internet for CIPD certification and related courses when I chanced upon this dual degree being offered at the London school of Economics. It promised a CIPD and a Master’s degree in an year’s time.

LSE seemed too posh for my ambitions and I was sure I wasn’t going to get an admission there. I did not even speak about it to anyone fearing they would mock at me aspiring to study at my age, and that too at the London School of Economics. I submitted the application very discretely and could not believe myself when I actually got an admission letter within a month.

I was about to turn down my admission when I saw there was a chance to defer it by another year. I applied for the deferral citing monetary reasons and sure enough they granted me the deferral. By then, I had another year to think it over, except that I had to pay up £500 as the deferral amount. I waited till the last day to actually pay up the amount, as I had not decided if I really wanted to do go in for higher studies. For one I felt I was too old and two I was not sure if this was what I wanted to do …

I chanced to meet up with Anita, a long time friend and ex-colleague who was taking a career break at that time. She was thinking of pursuing higher studies and said she was thinking of applying to LSE and King’s. It was almost June of 2006 by then and she was not sure if she stood a chance for that academic year.
I let her know that I had got my admission at LSE ( and if I could, it should not be difficult for her at all) and was thinking of deferring it by a year. She applied at LSE as well as King’s and got admission offers from both, chose LSE for obvious reasons and joined the HRM program in 20062007.

I was still undecided, at least now I had someone whom I knew, who would take the road before I was going to take it. I was still caught up in the rut of meaningless work, but the fact that there was an exit at the end of a definite period was a big consolation.

The first few weeks at LSE:
LSE is an embodiment of certainty. It has seen thousands of students each year, year after year. The processes are very streamlined, the yearly routine is very predictable so much so that its timetables to the exact dates are published till 2012. Even the London 2012 Olympics may not be able to boast of such certainty…

You get your LSE student ID cards standing in with about 1000 others who have been allotted that slot based on their surnames. Your e-mail id gets activated and you get a pamphlet during your induction telling you how to activate it … you have to be too much of an idiot or an illiterate to have missed out on any procedures.

The induction happens in a huge theatre with Howard Davies the Director of LSE welcoming everyone with his wise cracks and British humour and this routine gets repeated for three sessions in exactly the same manner. I am not sure if he cracks the same jokes about the French in every session. (Can someone check that out for me please…) Coming to the point, if you have missed one induction session at the peacock theatre, you do not have to fret and fume, you can attend another … if you haven’t attended any of them doesn’t matter... listen to the pod cast at http://www.lse.ac.uk/.

If you thought LSE existed at Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, then you would be wrong.
LSE exists at http://www.lse.ac.uk/.


Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE just happens to be a quaint old set of buildings on the banks of the Thames and besides the BBC which gets the greenest university award when there are hardly any trees anywhere in the vicinity.

I did not stay in the halls. Maybe I missed out on London night life and the student life, as much as the others did.

Student’s union and the ‘Societies’ at the LSE:
LSE Student’s union representatives are far more active than anyone else at LSE. They take an year off once they get elected and get paid for that sabbatical year. All year they keep themselves busy with student union activity. Any 21 year old with political ambition aspires to be a SU member. (Benazir Bhutto, started her political career as the first elected general secretary of the Oxford University Student union.)

Student union are into everything, ranging from taking a stand about the occupation of Israel by the Palestine to organizing free pedicure and manicure during exam times, they have all sorts of activities. More about the friendly SU, later on...

They also organize the fresher’s fair.

At the fresher’s fair one gets bombarded and introduced to countless ‘societies’ ranging from Anti-bush, anti American society to Humus eating society.

There are many that can attract your attention and get you interested especially with the chocolates, bags and other freebies that they offer . But one needs to be careful about one’s interest. One way to make sure you do not get carried away is by not carrying enough change with you. Especially not the one pound coins. There is a one pound joining fees that you cough up before you officially sign up for a society.
It is not the one pound joining fees that you need to cough up to register yourself with the society, but the barrage of e-mails that you suffer from over enthusiastic society members throughout the year that you need to be careful before you sign up for a society.

I had always wanted to learn SALSA and so I signed up for the LSESU dance society, Only to discover that SALSA society was exclusive and distinct from the rest of the hip-hop, belly dancing, ball room dancing, bollywood dancing and other dancing fraternity. They would not give me my one pound back and would not stop sending me mails about change of venue for belly dancing and ball room dancing classes. I paid up another one pound and joined the SALSA Society later on… I have now managed to learn a few decent steps in SALSA without stepping on my partner ‘s toes …

And then there was WIB, a society of which I continue to be an inactive member, whose e-mails I trash promptly as they arrive every weekend. I joined them because they were giving away a free red ladies umbrella for every member who paid a pound to join. It was a rainy day, I was not carrying an umbrella and I thought that was good value for money, only to discover that evening standard, were giving away free umbrellas that evening if one brought their newspaper for 50 p.

Women in banking (WIB) society, consists of very smart and ambitious 19-20-21 year old undergraduates who are all poised to become the future CEOs of Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse and Lehman brothers when men start getting pregnant.

I attended their AGM. It was interesting. I walked in when two young Economics and management students were making their election speeches for the post of general secretary or treasurer that was being contested. The contest was getting too hot, as much as the room was getting crowded by what seemed like a few young good looking men who I suspected had walked into the wrong meeting. By then the speeches had been made and the contestants were being asked questions by the audience. It was then time for the voting. The voting was by show of hands by all those present at the AGM and were presumably the ones who had paid a pound to join WIB society. The lady who won the hotly contested post of general secretary hands down, that afternoon at the AGM had about 90% of the men in the room who voted for her by show of hands. That is when one learns that behind every successful woman there are indeed several men. (No pun intended)

Freebies, Freebies and more Freebies:
To this day, the WIB umbrella continues to occupy space in my handbag and has been my saviour in the rainy days. That was the first of freebies at LSE.

Just about all the big employers dole out freebies at Houghton Street on almost every weekday as part of ‘employer branding’. Financial Times (FT) gave out free newspapers on Mondays; Deloitte had a free smoothie drop on Tuesdays and so on.
I don’t think I ever paid a penny for any of my stationery requirements as a student.
HSBC gave highlighters for freebies at a career fair, Standard chartered went one up and gave a three in one highlighter in the same career fair. Cadbury Schweppes had the most attentive audience at the career fair, no marks for guessing what they gave out as freebies.
Folders, marker pens, free sandwiches, krispy crème donuts, smoothies, sling bags, free wines, jelly beans and even free condomns.

Well it was not DUREX, but the LGBT society that gave out free condomns at Houghton street when they were celebrating the AIDS awareness week or some such thing. LGBT for the uninitiated stands for the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Society which is adequately funded (even in times of sub-prime crisis) by many employers including KPMG as a part of their commitment to promote and attract a diverse workforce and to be an ‘equal opportunity’ employer.

‘If you wanna have a shag, then make sure you take this bag’ … shouted the most enthusiastic salesman that I have ever met. He was trying to sell free condomns to every embarrased student who was trying to walk past him at Houghton street. You see, in a highly competitive environment like LSE, that is a very good work experience to put on one’s CV.

Houghton Street was like the Gaza strip… you could not pass by Houghton Street on a weekday without a freebie being pushed across your face. Even a hardcore sucker for freebies was spoilt for choice. There are times I chucked the jelly beans from Accenture for a smoothie from Evening standard.

It was the best of times … and then came the worst of times …

One Monday morning, WIB society sent out an apologetic mail saying that due to unavoidable circumstances, the Citigroup chocolate tasting session was postponed until further notice. That was fine with me, I was anyway putting on too much weight.

I did not see it coming. Some intelligent finance, management and economics undergraduates who actually read those free FTs saw it coming. And true to their predictions, from then on Houghton Street only got quieter as the term progressed.

Just like the foot and mouth disease or the bird flu that one hears of but never really gets to see, there was too much of a talk about this thing called the ‘sub-prime’ crisis that seemed to be rampant in some other continent.

The free FTs were full of them. And then it stopped. The free FTs, if you get what I mean.

Sub-prime affected Houghton Street for sure. As the next term came by, the freebies at Houghton Street stopped.

Intrigued by why it was called ‘sub-prime’, I looked up the internet to upgrade my general knowledge and more importantly sound like an intelligent post graduate from the London school of economics. I gathered it had something to do with housing mortgages and bankrupt Americans not able to pay up their mortgages, but how it came to be called ‘sub-prime’ and why it should affect Houghton street freebies is still beyond my comprehension.

There were opinion polls and wise men (and women) from LSE and the financial district across the Thames was making news with their predictions about the woes of those sub-prime fellows.

One nice employer that used to distribute stress balls before the exams at Houghton Street as an innovative exercise of ‘employer branding’ stopped it this year. I am told all the stress balls got consumed by the employees before it reached LSE.


To be continued … I am curently stressed with my disseration deadlines...