When nothing seemed to work, coffee came to our rescue! -By Akanksha Luhadia from IFMR Sri City

It was past six in the morning and we were winding up the last day of our national level fest. All of us were busy arranging transport for the participants, looking for breakfast settlements, and keeping things back in the operations room. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, we received an email from one of our professors. He asked us to make our presentation, 4 days in advance.

Coffee: Our rescue from the arduous task ahead

This left us in a very difficult situation. We had not slept for the last thirty hours, not taken rest for the last seven days and were too exhausted to even think about any work. The mail felt scary as hell, left us all wondering what we would do now? Some were even considering leaving it. I mean, how many marks could we lose? But since we are management students, we took it up as a challenge. This is when coffee came to the rescue. Relying on its ability to keep us awake, we went ahead with it.

The five of us totally drained out, took out our laptops and started reading the requirements of the presentation. We had to make the presentation on an article by Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, on financial dependence and growth and another article by Thorsten Beck on financial growth and fragility of 30 pages. We started reading the article and for the next hour, we were still clueless as to what we have read. The article was so difficult that even in our normal state we would not have been able to make. That day, it was totally beyond our comprehension. Two hours later, we were down three cups of coffee and still wondering what to do next? One more and we had to do something. So, we gulped down black coffee one after the other and devised strategies. Finally, we could complete a major portion of the article.

Equations, equations and some more equations!

We had by now reached the mathematical equations part of the article. We could not make any sense out of it. It went way above our heads. It was like the same thing that happened with us in the 11th and 12th standard. Coming back to the article, somehow we made sense of the equations and headed to the conclusion part. By now, we were bored of normal coffee, black coffee and tea. Thus, it was time for filter coffee, latte and cold coffee to come to the rescue.

With coffee in hand, there was no looking back

We had to give our presentation three hours later. So, we drank two more cups of coffee to stay awake at least until our presentation was over. The presentation began and we completed it. We could answer all the questions posed by our professor. Finally, when we were about to close, our professor instructed all the groups there to ask at least one question.

There were 10 groups and merely looking at their faces we knew that nobody was even slightly interested. The groups started googling the questions and asked out-of-context questions. Though coffee helped us stay awake and complete the presentation, it could not help us now. We dodged some questions, answered others  and somehow the challenge was over. Later our prof came to us and said: “Maybe this article was a little tough for you, I should have given it to the Ph.D. students”.  We didn’t even know if this was sarcasm or something else.

We overcame the ordeal thrown upon us and came victorious. This was a challenge which we wouldn't have thought of, even in our nightmares. It made us strong, efficient and confident that we can do any challenge in any situation now.  Today when I think of it, I feel strong inside. It gave us an opportunity to proudly say that we are management students and we can manage any given situation perfectly well.

This article was submitted as an entry to Become an Author with Dare2Compete.