Business Process Outsourcing

What is BPO?
Business Process Outsourcing-
BPO is defined as the long-term contracting of a company's non-core business processes to an outside service provider to help increase shareholder value. Cost savings are naturally a major incentive but advocates claim that strategy is also an important consideration.


According to research carried out by CFO magazine and AMR Research:
68.3% of companies already engage in some from of business process outsourcing
63.6% foresee their firm's overall use of outsourcing increasing
45.1% periodically assess the ROI of BPO arrangements
"Outsourcing has moved up the food chain" according to Frank J Casale, CEO of The Outsourcing Institute, a New York based professional association of more than 26,000 outsourcing executives. "It is no longer seen solely as a cost-cutting measure, a last ditch attempt to save money and perform financial triage"


Why outsource IT?
*Cost effectiveness
*Improved customer service
*Focus on core business
*Reduce corporate overhead
*Capitalise on technological advances
*Insufficient resources
*All of the above?

Cheaper, better and faster technology has resulted in some of the key drivers of IT outsourcing costs dropping drastically in recent years. Some companies are paying as much as 80 percent less for mainframe usage than they were five years ago and 72 percent less for servers, according to data drawn from customers of Compass Group, a global benchmarking firm.

However, the people responsible for creating this progress have become more expensive every year, with the average cost per IT worker increasing nearly 12 percent over the past five years. For example, putting a real person on the other end of the help-desk phone line has become much more costly - almost 16% more between 2001 and 2002 alone.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Great Indian Dream

Yes, an interesting article.
It was originally published in the New York Times. Here is the unabridged version of the same.

The GREAT INDIA DREAM (Thomas. L. Friedman)
Note: Thomas Friedman is an influential and award-winning(that includes a Pulitzer too) American journalist.


From New York Times

Nine years ago, as Japan was beating America's brains out in the auto
industry, I wrote a column about playing a computer geography game with my
daughter, then nine years old. I was trying to help her with a clue that
clearly pointed to Detroit, so I asked her: ''Where are cars made?'' And
she answered, ''Japan''. Ouch.
Well, I was reminded of that story while visiting an Indian software design
firm in Bangalore, Global Edge. The company's marketing manager, Rajesh
Rao, told me he had just made a cold call to the vice-president for
engineering of a US company, trying to drum up business. As soon as Rao
introduced himself as calling from an Indian software firm, the US
executive said to him,

''Namaste'' - a common Hindi greeting.


Said Rao: ''A few years ago nobody in America wanted to talk to us. Now
they are eager.'' And a few even know how to say hi in proper Hindu
fashion. So now I wonder: If I have a granddaughter one day, and I tell her
I'm going to India, will she say, ''Grandpa, is that where software comes
from?''

Driving around Bangalore you might think so. The Pizza Hut billboard shows
a steaming pizza under the headline ''Gigabites of Taste!'' Some traffic
signs are sponsored by Texas Instruments. And when you tee off on the first
hole at Bangalore's KGA golf course, your playing partner points at two new
glass-and-steel buildings in the distance and says: ''Aim at either
Microsoft or IBM.''

How did India, in 15 years, go from being a synonym for massive poverty to
the brainy country that is going to take all our best jobs? Answer: good
timing, hard work, talent and luck.


The good timing starts with India's decision in 1991 to shuck off decades
of socialism and move toward a free-market economy with a focus on foreign
trade. This made it possible for Indians who wanted to succeed at
innovation to stay at home, not go to the West. This, in turn, enabled
India to harvest a lot of its natural assets for the age of globalisation.

One such asset was Indian culture's strong emphasis on education and the
widely held belief here that the greatest thing any son or daughter could
do was to become a doctor or an engineer, which created a huge pool of
potential software technicians. Second, by accident of history and the
British occupation of India, most of those engineers were educated in
English and could easily communicate with Silicon Valley.

India was also neatly on the other side of the world from America, so US
designers could work during the day and e-mail their output to their Indian
subcontractors in the evening. The Indians would then work on it for all of
their day and e-mail it back. Presto: the 24-hour workday.


Also, this was the age of globalisation, and the countries that succeed
best at globalisation are those that are best at ''glocalisation'' - taking
the best global innovations, styles and practices and melding them with
their own culture, so they don't feel overwhelmed. India has been naturally
glocalising for thousands of years.

Then add some luck. The dotcom bubble led to a huge overinvestment in
undersea fiber-optic cables, which made it dirt-cheap to transfer data,
projects or phone calls to far-flung places like India, where Indian
techies could work on them for much lower wages than US workers.

Finally, there was Y2K. So many companies feared that their computers would
melt down because of the Year 2000 glitch they needed software programmers
to go through and recode them. Who had large numbers of programmers to do
that cheaply? India. That was how a lot of Indian software firms got their
first outsourced jobs.


So if you are worried about outsourcing, I've got good news and bad news.
The good news is that a unique techno-cultural-economic perfect storm came
together in the early 1990s to make India a formidable competitor and
partner for certain US jobs - and there are not a lot of other Indias out
there. The bad news, from a competition point of view, is that there are
555 million Indians under the age of 25, and a lot of them want a piece of
''The Great Indian Dream,'' which is a lot like the American version.


As one Indian exec put it to me: The Americans' self-image that this tech
thing was their private preserve is over. This is a ''wake-up call'' for US
workers to redouble their efforts at education and research. If they do
that, he said, it will spur ''a whole new cycle of innovation, and we'll
both win. If we each pull down our shutters, we will both lose.''


New York Times

Been there , Done that --Interview Questions

A friend of mine recently gave her interview at ISB.These are the questions that were posed to her. The

*Tell us something that you have not written or missed in your application.

*What will you learn at ISB and not anywhere else?

*What if you do not get in?

*Justify your career moves till date.

*Future Goals and how ISB fits into it.

*Which two companies you would like to join after ISB(Other than ur present employer) and why and how will you position yourself?

*Why do u think ur company (an IT one) has been so succesful?

*Give me an example where u showed leadership skills?

*Do u know the courses that ISB offers? Faculty at our place.?

* Any questions?

Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful people

1.Be Proactive: You take the responsibility for our own behavior. You don't blame circumstances, conditions, or your conditioning for your behaviour.You choose your response to any situation and any person.


2.Begin with the end in Mind: You can visualize the future that you want to achieve. You have a clear vision of where you want to go and what you want to accomplish. You live your life according to some deeply held beliefs, principles, or fundamental truths


3.Put first things first: You live a disciplined life. You focus heavily on highly on important but not necessarily urgent activites such as " building relationships, writing a personal mission statement, long range planning, exercising., preparation --all those things we know what we need to do ,but somehow seldom get around to doing, because they aren't urgent" .You say no to things that seem critical but are unimportant.


4.Think Win/Win: You have an "abundance" mentality. You believe there is plenty for everybody. You don't believe that one persons success requires another persons failure. You look for synergistic solution to problems .You seek to find solutions to problems. You seek to fins solutions in which all parties benefit.


5.Seek first to understand , then to be understood: You listen with the strong intent to fully ,deeply understand the other person both emotionally and intellectually. You diagnose before u prescribe.


6.Synergize: You are creative. You are a trailblazer and a pathfinder. You believe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You value differences between people and try to build upon those differences. When presented with two conflicting alternatives, you seek a third, more creative response.


7.Sharpen the saw: You seek continuous improvement, innovation and refinement. You are always seeking to learn.

Beyond the Edge

Reprint of an article ‘Beyond The Edge’ from a Pakistani Newspaper,“The News International” dated December 14, 2003, written by Masood Hasan,a Lahore-based columnist and a well-known journalist.

The sight of Indian actress Urmilla on the rooftops of the old city of Lahore is a sight for sore
eyes any time of the day. This week another 270 delegates from India (among which are
Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi), are expected to cross over into Pakistan.

As both countries take a series of steps, gingerly to start with, there is just that little light at the end of the dark and endless tunnel that has held us "prisoners of our own
device" as The Eagles put it in the famous number Hotel California. Will these measures lead to peace is a question for which even Tauqir Zia has no answers. All we can do is hope, pray and contribute in whatever way we can to normalise relations and bury the many hatchets that we have brandished for the last half-century.
Travelling last week on the Wazirabad-Sambrial road towards Sialkot, the
potholes and bumps on that narrow ribbon strip road began to revive memories of long forgotten journeys made on that same road. I could have, after a few violent and rib-shaking miles, sworn these holes and craters were the same when one was in Kindergarten. Nothing seemed to have changed except that the dust was thicker, the pollution dismal and the people in numbers too large to comprehend. Perhaps in most of India, the situation is not very much different and our much-touted smirking observations that India has huge problems, might have given us years of self-induced smugness, but things across the divide are changing at a speed that baffles the mind. Some years ago, an Indian said to a Pakistani, "It is true we are both in the gutter. The difference is, we are looking at the stars. You are looking at the gutter."

Many of us associate India’s new progress with its IT revolution and it is
partly true.

* Indian companies like Moser-Baer located in an equally unknown Noida are now the world’s third largest optical media manufacturer and the lowestcostproducer of CD-R exports? Only Rs 1,000 crore ($ 200 mn) — Indian rupees I might
add. This firm sells data-storage products to seven of the world’s top 10 CD-R producers.

*There is another unknown. Tandon Electronics. Its hardware exports are Rs 4,000 crore ($ 800 mn). There is more depressing data, all of it quite true and impartial.

* 15 of the world’s major automobile makers are obtaining components from Indian companies. This business fetched India $375 million last year and in 2003 the number will be $1.5 billion. In half a decade, they will reach $15 billion. Hero Honda with 17 lakh (1.7 mn) motorcycles a year is
now the largest motorcycle manufacturer in the world.

*The prestigious UK automaker, Rover is marketing 100,000 Indica cars made by Tata in Europe, under, wait a minute, its own name.

* Bharat Forge has the world’s largest single-location forging facility. It produces 120,000 tonnes per annum and its clients include Honda, Toyota and Volvo among others.

*Asian Paints now owns 22 production facilities over 5 continents and is the market leader in
11 of these countries. Hindustan Inks has the world’s largest single stream fully integrated
ink plant of 100,000 tones per annum capacity and 100% owned subsidiaries in USA and
Austria.

*Essel Propack is the world’s largest laminated tube manufacturer with presence in
11 countries and a global marketing share of 25% already.

*Ford has just presented its Gold World Excellence Award to India’s Cooper Tyres. Other industries are winning equally prestigious awards all the time. While on cars, Aston Martin has contracted prototyping its latest luxury sports car to an Indian-based designer and is set to produce the cheapest Aston Martin ever. Suzuki, which makes Maruti in India has decided to make India its manufacturing, export and research hub outside Japan. Hyundai India is set to become the global small car hub for the Korean giant and will produce 25,000 Santros to start with. By 2010 it is set to supply half a million cars to Hyundai Korea. HMI and Ford India are leaping ahead, posting astonishing results in the global markets from Brazil to China.

*The Indian pharmaceutical industry is blazing ahead too. At $6.5 billion and growing at 8- 10% annually, it is the 4th largest pharmaceutical industry in the world. Its exports are over $2 billion. India is among the top five bulk drug makers and at home, the local industry has 2 edged out the MNCs whose share of 75% in the market is down to 35%. Trade of medicinal
plants has crossed Rs 4,000 crore ($ 800 mn) already.

*As for technology, India is among the three countries that have built supercomputers on their own. The other two are USA and Japan. Not a bad club to be in, is it? India is among six countries that launch satellites and do so even for Germany and Belgium. India’s INSAT is among the world’s largest domestic satellite communication systems.

Here are more depressing facts.
*India is one of the world’s largest diamond cutting and polishing centres.
About 9 out of 10 stones sold anywhere in the world, pass through India.
With China, India’s arch enemy, trade has grown by 104% in the past year
and in the first 5 months of 2003, India has amassed a surplus in trade close
to half a million dollars.

* In the recession-hit West, Indian exports are up by 19% this year and the country’s foreign exchange reserves stand at an all-time high of $82 billion. India is dishing out aid to 11 countries,
pre-paying their debt and loaned IMF $300 million!!

And since we think banning fashion shows is the way ahead, it might be interesting to know that Wal-Mart sources $1 billion worth of goods from India — half its apparel,
GAP about $600 million and Hilfiger $100 million.
These success stories are not propaganda and haven’t happened overnight or
by good fortune.

The Indians have the same bureaucracy and many of the politicians simply play politics, the infrastructure creaks and poverty abounds, corruption flourishes and there are huge pockets of inefficiency and walls that block meaningful progress. Sure, it has an army that is not
bursting with power-grabbing and subjugating its people every few years,
but India’s success can no longer be denied and the gap between us and them
grows wider by, if I may use my childhood idiom, leaps and bounds. What
makes them tick?

The answers are not simple and require great space and analysis by minds far superior to that of a weekly hack, but Cost and Brains are two factors. Add to that, a determination to rise above what faces you everyday, a vision of the stars as the man said. India provides IT
services at one-tenth the price.

No wonder more and more companies are basing their operations in India. An Indian MBA costs $5,000. An American MBA $120,000. Development of an automobile in the US costs $1 billion. In India, less than half. A cataract operation costs $1500 in the US. In India, $12. Bypass in the US anywhere up to Rs 6 lakhs ($ 120,000). In India, it is Rs. 40,000 ($ 800). Over 70 MNCs have set up R&D facilities in India in the past five years. 100 of the Fortune 500 are now present in India vs 33 in China.

*Intel’s Indian staff strength has gone up from 10 to 1,000 in four years.
*GE with a $60 million invested in India employs 1,600 researchers, while it has only 100 in China.
With better systems comes efficiency. The turnaround time in Indian ports
is down to 4 days from 10 and its telecom infrastructure in 1999 provided a bandwidth of 155 Mbps. Today, it is 75,000 times more and with fibre optic networks in 300 cities, it will change the face of business. Mobile phones are growing by about 1.5 million a month. Long distance rates are down by two-thirds in five years and by 80% for data transmission. The facts go on and on.

So what are the answers? They lie in the way we look at things, our discourse, our vision, our ability to look ahead and our desire to genuinely put our country on the right road. The people of the subcontinent are naturally talented and bright. When will we unleash the great potential of our people that lies dormant, crushed by the forces of evil that stop our
progress for their personal agendas?

---masood_news@hotmail.com

Research at ISB-A Question answered by Dan

Q)In most of its external communication ISB has been putting a lot on emphasis on being a research focussed Institute. What are the current research projects being undertaken at ISB. are the current batch of PGP students also a part of these research projects?

A)Don't forget that the ISB is still a growing institution, and as such is still in the process of recruiting permanent faculty. And as you probably know, permanent faculty is where any school's research comes from. Given that, I know that several of the permanent faculty members here are engaged in research, though I don't know what the focus of their research is.

Interview with Fakir Chand Kohli- The father of Indian IT revolution
The Hindu Business Line
28 January 2004

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"We missed the industrial revolution due to reasons over which we had no control. Today, there is a new revolution - the revolution in information technology, which requires neither mechanical bias nor mechanical temperament. Primarily, it requires the capability to think clearly. This we have in abundance. We have an opportunity to participate in this revolution on equal basis - we have the opportunity even to assume leadership." - from a speech by Mr F. C. Kohli of Tata Consultancy Services, at the annual convention of the Computer Society of India in 1975.

TCS is the oldest and the largest software company in India. Under the leadership of Mr FC Kohli, TCS had spearheaded the pioneering efforts in creating a globally recognised brand for the Indian software.

Excerpts from the interview with Mr Kohli former Deputy Chairman of TCS:

How has the growth of the software sector been?
We are moving up the growth ladder. The software industry is growing at 20-22 per cent per annum. There are two kinds of software - one is the lower-end, and the other, higher-end. We do a lot of lower-end software - BPO and all that - in this country and we need it. It generates employment and brings in foreign exchange.

But companies such as TCS are moving on to the upper-end, which is more complex - more mathematics-oriented, more business-oriented and computer science-oriented.

Have we missed the bus on hardware?
Yes. IT is both software and hardware. But now some of us are talking about how we can catch up. We missed out because of government policies. I say that hardware needs the same kind of entrepreneurship that we have in software.

Has listing of software companies on the stock exchange made any difference to the sector's growth?
No. It is not because of listing of companies in the stock exchange that the business has grown. It is just that the business has been growing. Don't forget that even today India's software business is not more than 2 per cent of the world's software.

Do we need to focus on products now?
How can you focus on products when you don't have experience? If you are manufacturing based on reverse process and buying technology from outside, then how do you make a product? First you design some manufacturing software and this has to be first used in the country itself right. We have already produced good banking (software) products.

Do you think we should have focussed on markets other than the US?
We could have. But the language skills are lacking. We have been making software for English-speaking people. How many people with Japanese language skills do you have today? When you train people in other languages you will be able to explore other markets, but not today.

What has been the impact of the backlash in the US and elsewhere on outsourcing contracts coming to India?
This has not become a big issue. Show me one instance where it has. I do not think there is a real backlash; if there was a backlash, business would go down. You saw the Infosys results. They are a public company and recorded 28 per cent growth, and this result is better than last year. Losing a client is a part of the business risk. Remember the software industry is growing at 20-22 per cent, and that is good.

Job resentment? Well, if people are going to lose jobs, won't there be resentment? This is a part of the business process where some people lose jobs and some don't. Look at your own country and don't get carried away by what happens in Indiana.

Look, we have already established the India brand; we have now to market it more aggressively, and develop software in other languages and also learn how to develop products.

Does inexpensive labour give Indian software firms an edge in pricing products?
How can you call it cheap labour when no software engineer gets less than Rs 5 lakh per annum? And, internationally, a labourer who works in the automobile sector or operates a power loom also gets the same benefits, doesn't he? And nobody sells software because of the billing rates. It is the quality and character of the software that determines the price. It all depends on how you market the product. The biggest shortcoming in India has been marketing capability.

What has driven the success of TCS?
We were very clear about our vision and I had outlined it in my address to the Computer Society of India during my presidentship in 1975. I had said then that this is the technology in which we can not only hold our own but also excel and become world leaders.

TCS was the first to come here (software services) and this helped to sort out several problems. The perception in some quarters within the country itself was not positive. It took three years for us to get our first computer for our (software) centre ready.

Many people say TCS has missed the IPO bus...
TCS will never miss the bus. I mean, it will go public sometime, but when it goes, it will get its value. After all, value has been put on what profits are made, what your business is, how many good managers you have, and so on.

TCS is the leader; there is no question about that and will remain the leader.

How do you view the competition from China?
The Chinese have gone basically for hardware and they are also in software because they have five times more computers today than we do. So, you see, what they have done is written software for their own purpose; for their agriculture, education, e-governance, health care and transport. But that is written in Mandarin and Cantonese, which cannot be sold abroad. But they have used that for their manufacturing process and that is why over the past ten years they have become leaders in all kinds of manufacturing, including electronics.

Last, year they made $30 billion through computer hardware. We, in India, have all the time been harping on software for exports. Don't the 1 billion people here need software? And look at how we are progressing. China is adding 10-12 million computers a year and, of that, 8 million are made indigenously. And you are pumping in two million and all two million are imported. So you mean to say software firms need to start looking at the domestic market more seriously?

We have a big market and we have to work on developing it. The Government also needs to have focus and the problems are immense, with nearly 18 languages here. China has it good with just two languages.

Finally, you export only those items that are used extensively in your country. Your own country becomes the testing ground. It is true for hardware, any hardware manufacturing, even for shoes, and the same is true for software.

Also, tomorrow we will need a lot of software to push this country. Look at the railway reservation system; you can make reservations on the Web. Earlier, it was a ticket printing system and computers were not being used effectively. The issue is, if you are serious about it, you can apply computers to get lots more benefits, and the same is true for education. What we can and need to do is use computers to improve literacy. India is a much bigger market than any other market

A list of few lectures at ISB

Customer Focused Product Planning - Seenu Srinivasan (Stanford)
Advertising - Ajay Kalra (Carnegie Mellon)
International Finance - K John (NYU) & Ananth Sundaram (Thunderbird)
Commercial & Investment Banking - Greg F Udell (Indiana)
Information Technology Infrastructure - Saby Mitra (Georgia Tech)
Managing Strategic Partnerships - Phanish Puranam (LBS)
Economics of Strategy - Ram Shivakumar (Chicago)
Strategic Profitability Management - Bala Balachandran (Kellogg)
Logistics & Supply Chain Management - Narendra Agrawal (Santa Clara)
Capital Raising Strategies in Corporations - NR Prabhala (Maryland)
Negotiation Analysis - Madan Pillutla (LBS)
Creating Value from Technology: IT-Enabled Services and Strategies - Ravi Aron (Wharton)

Why ISB

From Ramki, class of 04

How does ISB stand as an MBA giver in india. Does it have the same
value to a person in india like value kellogs or wharton has to a person
in the US ?

Well, ISB’s brand equity is going up. We are three years old. Two classes of alums are in the industry and have been fairly successful. Proof being that most of the recruiters have come back to campus. The exciting thing about it is that you get to shape the future of a b-school. At the same time, many recruiters as well as academicians do consider us to be up there among the best in India. ISB is a slightly different value proposition due to its one year program and diverse, experienced student body. We still have to improve in areas like permanent faculty and research. But that will happen over time. At present, the visiting faculty make this place a dream come true. I do not know if I can compare the value it adds to Kellogg or Wharton. I though about answering this point but could not come up with a convincing answer.
For anyone to be convinced about what ISB is, it will help a great deal if you can make a short trip to Hyderabad, visit the campus and talk to the students. You should consider doing so.

COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS

1. Why MBA..Why now ?
2. Describe yourself in 1 word, 1 sentence
3. If you could have your choice of any job, what would it be and why?
4. Why do you want to go into this field(specialization)?
5. What are your short and long range goals and how do you expect
to achieve them?
6. What does success means to you? How do you measure it?
7. What motivates you?
8. Do you plan to further your education after an MBA? Yes, to what extent?
9. Who is your idol?
10. What have you done to improve yourself during the past year?
11. If you could relive the last X years, what changes would you make?
12. Tell me about your greatest achievement and greatest disappointment?
13. What are some of your weaknesses?
14. Tell me about the best and worst bosses you have ever had why do you say so?
15. What constructive criticism have to received from employees?
16. What else do you think i should know about you?
17. Tell me about yourself.
18. Why do you want to join here? Or what about our college interests you?
19. Do you prefer to work by yourself or with others?
20. What are your career goals? Or what are your future plans?
21. What are your hobbies? And do you play any sports?
22. What have i forgotten to ask?
23. What qualities do you think will be required for this course?
24. What can you contribute to the college?
25. What do you know about this college?
26. What interests you about our course?
27. What can we (the college) offer that your some other college cannot offer?
28. You have not done this sort course before. How will you cope/succeed?
29. Why should we select you?
30. What do you like and dislike about the course/college?
31. Why did you choose a career in … ?
32. Why are you changing careers (if u are intreseted)?
33. What do you think of the last college you were in?
34. Explain the organization structure in the company you worked in and your job profile?
35. What would your ideal college be?
36. Are you considering any other colleges at the moment?
37. How would you describe yourself? / how would others describe you?
38. Do you consider yourself successful?
39. What was your greatest success? How did you achieve it?
40. What has been your biggest failure?
41. Are you a leader?
42. How do you handle criticism?
43. How could you improve yourself?
44. What sort of manager are you? / what makes a good manager?
45. Do you work well with others? Or are you a loner?
46. Do you need other people around to stimulate you or are you self-motivated?
47. Are you accepted into a team quickly?
48. Can you act on your own initiative?
49. How do you run a meeting?
50. Do you know how to motivate other people?
51. Are you competitive?
52. Are you aggressive?
53. What do you dislike doing certain jobs?
54. Can you work under pressure?
55. What are your career goals?
56. What interests do you have outside academics/work?
57. Are you too young for this course?
58. What will your referees say about you?
59. Why do you want to do an MBA?
60. What do you think you will need to get through these two years?

Your qualifications
61. What can you do for us that someone else can't do?
62. What qualifications do you have that relate to the course?
63. What new skills or capabilities have you developed recently?
64. Give me an example from the past where you've shown initiative.
65. What have been your greatest accomplishments recently?
66. What motivates you?
67. What have you been doing since graduation?
68. What qualities do you find important in a coworker?

Your career goals
69. What would you like to being doing five years from now?
70. How will you judge yourself successful? How will you achieve success?
71. What type of position are you interested in?
72. How will this course fit in your career plans?
73. What do you expect from this job?

Your work experience
74. What have you learned from your past jobs?
75. What were your biggest responsibilities?
76. What specific skills acquired or used in previous jobs relate to this position?
77. How does your previous experience relate to this position?
78. What did you like most/least about your last job?
79. Whom may we contact for references?

Your education
80. How do you think your education has prepared you for this course?
81. What were your favorite classes/activities at school?
82. Why did you choose your major?
83. Do you plan to continue your education?