YOUNG ACHIEVERS
Living out a dream
SHYAM PATWARI
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At IIMB, it’s a heady mix of academic rigour, project exposure and cultural interactions
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For the two lakh-odd students who write the Common Admission Test every year, pursuing an MBA from Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore is a dream.
Having completed two very exciting years of my career living out that dream, I can state for a fact that the experience is truly enriching and lives up to its reputation, and more.
To say that a picture of the beautiful IIMB campus was etched in my memory, on my very first visit, would perhaps be an exaggeration. It was the day of my GD/PI (Group Discussion/Personal Interview), and I remember that it was all about getting an admission, a ‘licence,’ to study here.
Today, after having passed out of the portals of this institution, armed with the confidence to excel in the real world, I feel that I could not have asked for more.
Fruitful
The roller-coaster ride that was IIMB started on day one of the orientation week itself, when our seniors took time out to interact with us, and ended in the “L–Square party” on convocation night. During these two years, I got numerous opportunities to interact and work with some of the best brains in the country; these came in the form of lectures by our faculty, class discussions and project work with batch-mates and interactions with industry experts both during my internship and the live projects that I was part of.
Academic rigour and excellence is in no way the be all and end all of life at IIMs. IIM-Bangalore provides a wide and diverse platform for its students to pursue co- and extra-curricular activities, be it Vista, the nationwide challenge for budding managers, or Unmaad, one of the biggest college cultural extravaganzas in the country, or other national-level events promoting debating, music, sports and dramatics.
I got more than a flavour of this aspect of student life, when I became a part of the Student Cultural Committee and was in charge of organising the “pro-nite” at Unmaad, featuring KK.
I represented IIMB on the international stage at Yale University, U.S., as a part of their first-ever student exchange programme. After my four-month stint at an Ivy League school, I do envy my peers there for having a larger depth and breadth of exposure in terms of the choice of electives.
The plethora of options is a blessing of the University system which enables students to pick and choose electives from various disciplines including Law, Social Sciences etc and work on business plans with students in any field viz. medicine, engineering, etc. In India, the centres of excellence, i.e. the IITs and the IIMs, cater to a particular stream of education and this might be one of the reasons we don’t have as many start-ups as in Silicon Valley.
Fresh look needed
Many of my friends and relatives enquire about salaries one can draw after completing an MBA from IIMB. I would like to use this as a forum to address all the people out there asking this same question, and urge them not to look at IIMs simply as placement agencies.
These true centres of excellence offer so much more than that. Despite being a great believer in statistics and numbers, I feel that it would be extremely demeaning to reduce development of this quality to a mere figure in ROI calculations.
There are institutes which strive to prepare you for life ahead and there are institutes where you live life itself. I am happy to say that, two years ago, I chose one which offered me the latter.
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