Fourteen months later, after many a sleepless nights, hundreds of words from inward looking business school application essays and a 94% percentile GMAT score, I had the MBA admissions offer letter from one of the three schools on my list. While the collection below can never do justice to the months before business school admissions, nor to the unreal 15 months we spent on campus in New York at Columbia, it should provide a flavor (perhaps a snapshot) of the MBA education that changed my life.

Starting from my original business school application essay, I jump quickly to five pieces I wrote for the business school students’ magazine, a MBA faculty interview and a list of free online finance courses showcasing the course work we took. This salad bowl of memories is followed by an overview of my graduate course work as a Finance and Entrepreneurship major and a short sampling of class projects submitted by my project groups during the MBA program at Columbia Business School.

Business School Application: Motivation

Business School Application Essay

Business School Memories

MBA Guides: Business School first year, first term: Case Hell

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: Dear Mom and Dad or the MBA contract market

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: The fine art of case analysis

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: The mid life crisis at 28

MBA Guides: Business school first year, first term: Drama in Real Life

Business School Resources

Online Corporate Finance: The story behind the resource, the free finance courses and solved cases.

Business School Faculty Interview

MBA Guides: Business School first year: Professor David Biem on investment banking, business school, ethics and academia

MBA course work overview

MBA Guides: My MBA Finance course work at Columbia Business School

MBA Sample projects

MBA Guides: Corporate Finance Training – Advertising strategy for an e-education portal

Master Case: Credit Process: Baldwin Piano

Master Case: Corporate Finance: LLC or C-Corp

Online Finance – Good and Bad bosses – A review of leadership trends across the decades

The water came at night in Nowshera.

Not silently like a thief, nor on tip toes, but with all the ferocity of a moving sea mixed with the weight of mud, stones, trees and swept away dreams. 2 am at night, all you could do was wake up and run. But unlike a tidal wave that comes in, takes what it needs to pacify an angry God, and goes, the water in Nowshera kept on coming. Days later when the flooding stopped, like an unwelcome and over bearing guest it stayed. And it brought company with it to keep away the boredom of lesser lives it haunted; misery, hunger and silence.

You could change the name of the city and repeat the story throughout the length of the mighty Indus. By the time you would reach Sind and Thatta, the late night rush to safety, the breaches in river embankments and the loss of life, livelihood and loved ones become one practiced orchestra. No audience except the three that water brought with it to Nowshera; misery, hunger and silence. No post performance celebration other than the one where millions of souls slowly start re-threading their lives, one battered tin clad suitcase at a time.

With the water slowly receding the relief mosaic across Pakistan is looking more and more like a drive in movie in an endless loop across multiple time zones. Upnorth, we need food, clothing, medicine, water purifiers and shelter. Down south, we are still waiting for Thatta and nearby cities and villages along the Indus Delta to take on the first wave of flood waters.

The widespread devastation and damage to infrastructure has added a new dimension of difficulty to relief efforts. And so if you can’t find food or support in the enclave over run by mud that you used to call home, you walk to the relief camps being set up near larger urban centers.

A school for children now houses 30 families and 150 kids. It is not women and children first. The men have opted to stay behind to guard livestock or land for in the chaos caused by a raging river there is more room for tragedy, robbery and outright villainy by your fellow beings. Possession is nine-tenth of law, especially if thy neighbor has been claimed by the rising waters of River Indus.

A white collar family is not used to handouts or being treated as landless destitute. But the tragedy that is unfolding across Pakistan across millions of lives, hundreds of cities and thousands of camps is just that.

You may have escaped the water; but will you ever escape the fate and the company the Indus brought with it.

Misery, hunger, death and silence.

How different are these kids from my kids, this family from my family, this room from my room.

Mosharraf Zaidi articulates what all of us are feeling right now in his Foreign Policy piece on Why doesn’t the world care about Pakistan. In his powerful words

“There’s a degree of truth to all these explanations. But the main reason that Pakistan isn’t receiving attention or aid proportionate to the devastation caused by these floods is because, well, it’s Pakistan. Given a catastrophe of such epic proportions in any normal country, the world would look first through a humanitarian lens. But Pakistan, of course, is not a normal country. When the victims are Haitian or Sri Lankan — hardly citizens of stable, well-government countries, themselves — Americans and Europeans are quick to open their hearts and wallets. But in this case, the humanity of Pakistan’s victims takes a backseat to the preconceived image that Westerners have of Pakistan as a country.”

“Pakistan is a country that no one quite gets completely, but apparently everybody knows enough about to be an expert. If you’re a nuclear proliferation expert, suddenly you’re an expert on Pakistan. If you’re terrorism expert, ditto: expert on Pakistan. India expert? Pakistan, too then. Of South Asian origin of any kind at a think-tank, university, or newspaper? Expert on Pakistan. Angry that your parents sent you to the wrong madrassa when you were young? Expert on Pakistan.”

A country that has been familiar with the plight of refugee camps since the start of the first Afghan war of 1978, we have seen our fair share of misery of displaced people and natural disasters. The earth quake, the Swat and Waziristan IDP crisis and now the floods. Children waiting for their time to use water, men fighting over food for their families.

Mosharraf calls it a case of “Pakistan Fatigue”. The world is tired of helping us out every alternate year and as before the burden of feeding Pakistani families in need, the burden of doing the heavy lifting to help each other out is on us. Don’t trust the headlines about the dollars of aid and the sophisticated politics behind the headlines; take and give away whatever you can to whoever is trying to arrange a relief effort. Clear out your closet, clean up your wallet, skip hosting that Iftar, your budget for new clothes for the three days of Eid, or your plan for the lavish feast on the first day of Shawal. This is the month of giving, so give. That family in Nowshera is really not that different from our families at home.