gaurav200x
Gaurav Mittal
The B-school fix
Blood, sweat and cheers to make the grade for the programme
Your senses are on high alert at these exalted institutions of higher learning. The air is of anticipation, the smell is of brain sweat, the taste is of imminent success and the feel is of damped down power. The image? Richie Riches with dollar signs as eyeballs!
We are talking B-schools and the business graduate. The two bywords that the Indian psyche believes are its birthright, like vaccinations. Have child? First dose: school, second dose: graduate, booster dose: MBA. The escalation of B-schools in India proves this: In 1991, the All India Council for Technical Education approved 130 MBA institutions with 12,000 seats; today there are more than 950 AICTE-approved institutions spewing forth more than 75,000 graduates a year. Outside of the US, India records the largest number.
The mad rush for a graduate degree is understandable. Come placement time, tier-1 institutions net average annual placement salaries of Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh, and in exceptional cases even beyond that figure. This is the allure for the 1,50,000 and more who sit for the Common Admission Test (CAT), Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP), the XAT (conducted by XLRI) and other state entrance tests. Aspirants naturally view B-grads as walking dollar machines.
Add to that the importance of having such a degree in India, an emerging economic global power. Industries like retail, pharma and software are experiencing unprecedented growth. "There are huge demands at the entry and middle-level and quality supply is small. Even faculty is in short supply," says M. Rammohan Rao, dean of the high-end Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, which was in the news last year for the highest annual placement salary offered: Rs 1.04 crore.
International offers, too, are pouring in as India is viewed as a highly talented, professional, English-speaking, young knowledge pool. "We are unlike Japan, China or west Europe, where the demographic profile is skewed towards the senior citizen," says Suresh Vishwanath, professor and chairman of academics, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, which climbed to the no. 4 slot (behind IIMA, B and C) among B-schools this year, according to a survey conducted by an Indian business magazine. Indeed, the Indian B-grads' time is now.
There is an aura that surrounds an MBA, one that shrieks money and power. This is the kick for every impressionable undergraduate and the reason for the bull run for the Grail.
But how many 20-to-30-year-olds strike the pause button and question what the course is about? Has she the aptitude to be a manager? Is he ready for the two-year rigour? Is the course a hype? How does the course shape you? Should you go by what the market wants or what you want?
Fifty per cent of students do not have the aptitude for an MBA, says Arun Mudbidri, director of SIBM. "With no aptitude, what happens to your life after MBA? You won't enjoy what you're doing," he says.
Those smitten by the MBA bug must research before joining the bandwagon. Friends who are working give you leads, seniors at institutions give you a window to the course; tap institution sites and the alumni. You need to be absolutely sure you want to do it.
Assessing one's strengths and weaknesses is the next step. Abhilasha Kannan, an engineering graduate at SIBM, says it is all about your 'skill set'. "If you don't match up to it, then forget it," she says. The skills? Multi-tasking, assertive, pro-active, number-crunching ability, social dexterity, creativity ....; certainly not for a laid-back person.
Students who are already enrolled have absolute clarity of purpose. Aparajita Mitra of SIBM, with a degree in biochemistry, did not want to pursue pure sciences for her postgraduation. "The kind of skills that I have, the person that I am, I knew I would be better off getting an administration degree," she says.
The entrepreneurial pull urges some to the programme. Others who are fighting monotony at their jobs want to bring clarity to their career, maybe even to make career shifts.
Mudit Mehta, 22, an IIT Delhiite in his second year at IIM Bangalore, warns: "Talk to people; the picture I had before the course and now are quite different." He is what you would call a 'pedigree' with the desired credentials-the right letters after his name and the bonus of being on the director's merit list at IIMB. Once Mudit found that his interest lay in business, he opted for an MBA. Instead of attending coaching class, he took the mock CATs (a shorter module), because of his highly-developed analytical skills. But, for others there is a warning from Mitra: if you don't go for coaching, it will take you longer to prepare.
Preparation starts a year ahead of the tests, and don't forget the foundation that you must build up over a two-year period by reading the right material. The last three months, follow the nose-to-the-grind regimen as you hone your data interpretation skills. "Even if you attend coaching classes, keep an open mind because the questions are not predictable," says Mudit. "Basically, it is time management. Also, get feedback before you choose your coaching institute."
Amit Agrawal, director of coaching institute Time in Ahmedabad, says students who are ready to work for long hours can make it to the top 30 B-schools. "Unfortunately, some students think preparing for CAT is like college study. It can't be cracked by studying for 15 to 20 days," he says. As Professor Ramnath Narayanswamy of IIMB puts it succinctly: "A typical student has two points of anxiety-his entry and exit from B-schools."
Abhishek Ruwatia decided that he would appear for CAT during his BCom., knowing that very few make it in the first attempt. "I got the interview call, but was not selected," says the 22-year-old from Kolkata. After graduation, he worked for a year with GH Financials. "I studied two hours a day for five months. And, it certainly wasn't glamour that attracted me to IIM," says Abhishek, who is successfully lodged at IIMA now.
Sarang Kulkarni, 20, is attending coaching classes to appear in CAT. A student of BCom. at Ahmedabad, Sarang sees only a 40 per cent chance of clearing it this year. Well aware that his brother-in-law, an IIMA pass out, gets a hefty salary, he says: "If I do not make it to the IIMs, I will try other B-schools. If I do not clear that, I will go to Australia."
In its chequered 28-year history, CAT (based on the US model and designed by IIM) has set the benchmark for other national tests. While it tests the qualitative capabilities of a prospective business student, other essential skills are ignored. "Creativity and capacity for lateral thinking are close to zero in CAT. In Stanford [the US], selection tests are wonderfully designed to promote core values," says Narayanswamy, who shows a "healthy disrespect" for selection norms.
Apart from IQ, there are EQ and SQ levels to determine, say faculty. The emotional quotient is "the ability to articulate oneself to oneself", "self-realisation", team-building and empathy; and the spiritual quotient: "when we sense there is an invisible order in visible order. At that time there is negation of the ego. You cannot be a good manager without being a good human being," says Narayanswamy.
Students of Sadhana Centre for Management & Leadership Development (SCMLD), a two-year-old institute in Pune, call it the "higher order purpose". Their day begins and ends with yoga; the curriculum includes 10-day meditation camps encouraging silence, and students sweep the streets on ?occasion! "It changes our attitude to life. It humbles us, we open up to ideas and all that rebellion and aggression disappear," says Jaspreet Kaur and Vedanth Vikram, in their second year at SCMLD.
ISB, on the other hand, takes GMAT scores (average was 575 in 2006) for selection, which is not, in itself, a foolproof assessment of the student. "Aptitude towards management and leadership is not easy to assess," says Rao, an IIMA alumnus. "Our 418 students need analytical, interpersonal and decision-making skills. We can evaluate some of these through the GMAT and the rest through interviews and work experience." Director of IIMA Bakul Dholakia's analogy best describes the requisites of an aspirant. "It is like performing a complex surgery," he says. "You need very good reflexes, quick recall value and intuition. You get very little time to respond."
The lucky few who win the race... congratulations! Your work starts now. Let the advice of Sangita Gupta, first-year student of SIBM, sink in: "The work you put in during the course is double what you did to get into a good institute." The course is demanding, study is unquantifiable and hard work is the creed. Those who think it is 'fun' drop out mid-course. As one focused Pune student puts it: "I think of myself not as a human being, but a brand. How will I promote my brand?"
The pluses: you hobnob with the best minds in the industry in India and abroad, and your peer group is the best in India. Divya from SIEMSCOM, Mumbai, finds the course challenging when she sees her friends understand absolutely abstract concepts. "These are the people who make the class nervous initially, and later, very interactive," she says. Forget your family for the first year. The good news is that in the second year, you actually get to smell the flowers. At least a whiff. If the two-year programme is tough, consider ISB's 51-week executive course, with just a week's holiday in the year. "It's a bit of a strain, but the corporate world is also demanding," says Rao, brushing off the query. "I term it catching up with the pace."
Narayanswamy sugars the bitter pill: "An entrant has a lot of stars in his eyes but we've got to give him a lot of bad news." Like having to follow a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule regularly.
But who's complaining? Not the highly-charged students who know that they are the creme-de-la creme of the student community. Some may even have the 'holier than thou' chip on their shoulders. Recalls Vishwanath, an XLRI alumnus: "I may have displayed a shade of arrogance when I joined XLRI. But I soon realised that my colleagues were just as good or better than me. It was a powerful driver."
The advantage of having an MBA is that it's a career launcher, it gets you immediate results. "You cut ranks to get to the middle level," says Priya Mohan, a chartered accountant at ISB. "One day I want to be my own boss. An MBA is the means to that end; it powers your expertise."
The pay-offs are great. Mudit, who already has a job offer from a multinational bank, found that with a technical background, an MBA opens up a lot of options. However, there are MBA techies who rue losing touch with technology once they get into administration.
Kavita Doshi, 23, who worked at L&T and General Electric before opting for ISB, enjoys the experience her peer group brings to the classroom. "At work, I saw colleagues taking a longer time to graduate to their roles. An MBA is a fast-track up the corporate ladder," she says. Sitting beside her at the self-service dining area, which displays a choice of cuisines, are Vishesh Rajaram and Arvind Ambo. Rajaram, 23, a chartered accountant, was credit manager at ICICI before he joined the course "for an insight into overall managerial information". Today, he has a clearer vision about his career. Ambo, 27, a sales and marketing professional, admits that the course is worse than what he thought it would be. "Age is not so much a barrier, if you give and take," he says. "It is such a high-pitched course that you are lost without experience."
The basis for the hectic schedule is to groom the student for the high-pressure corporate culture but it doesn't always work that way, says Priya. "During the course, your responsibility is only to yourself. But at work your decisions will impact real people." A debate rages on whether experience should be a criterion for admission to B-schools. If you are experienced, you can draw parallels from industry, is the argument. Most faculty pump for experience, saying such students appreciate what they get and their questions are more searching.
"In the US, an MBA is done after 8 to 10 years of experience," says Narayanswamy. "Here we have greenhorns, largely engineers, with no knowledge of the real world. They are high on aspirations, not necessarily on capability." However, some faculty suggest students with work experience are like hard clay, it's a little difficult to mould them into a new shape. Some corporates, too, prefer to work with fresh minds.
ISB stresses on an average experience of five years for a reason. "We bring in students with diverse experiences," says Rao. "That way, classroom discussions throw up different points of view. There is not always one solution to a problem; there are different ways to approach it. Whereas for a fresh mind, anything that is said is imbibed."
During the course, every move is geared towards the day the corporates drop in-when your worth shows dividends in rupees or dollar terms. The system breeds it into the student that placement is big time. From the second year on, the student is groomed for it, if he hasn't clinched a job already after the summer internship in the first year. IIMs and other tier-1 institutions become happy hunting grounds for companies. If in tier-1 colleges, the pressure is on landing the right job, in tier-2 institutions, the pressure is more on landing a right job with the right package.
But should every action be geared towards the 'P' word? Mudbidri's advice, particularly for entrepreneurs: don't run after the job, but after the customer. "Find their need; your creativity and understanding will help you succeed," he says. Apart from high salaries, factors like location, growth prospects and creative freedom should sway your choice.
With little difference between the IQs of the top 240 students in a batch, how do corporates make an informed choice?" "What is important is the student's attitude, self-control, social skills, team work and leadership traits," says Vishwanath. "An organisation looks for a student who can fit into their culture. They also look for the differences between a manager and a leader." This is also when grades, internship experience, project and relevant work experience count.
Six months into his first job, former SCMLD student George Mathew, who was recruited from campus by Crisil, weighs his education with IIM: "IIM gains you the entry point," he says. "But once you are in an organisation, everything depends on sheer performance. I am in the process of training new IIM entrants, so it is a total turnaround. It's the attitude and knowledge you bring into the organisation that count."
With so much dynamism in business today, B-schools are constantly evolving their curriculum and adding to their knowledge resource. New electives are added, others dropped, while fine-tuning is through interaction with industry and visiting faculty from India and abroad. The mad scramble for MBAs has induced colleges reputed in Commerce and Science streams to offer MBA courses. Like Christ College, Bangalore, which has academic collaboration with the Central University of Pondicherry, and two American and one British universities.
Specialisations are a core area as well. Finance and marketing are the big lures with human resources not far behind. But sometimes you have to take the long road to realise your true calling. "I started my career in HR and switched to marketing to finance to a teaching job," says Vishwanath.
The positives of the MBA programme are vast. Students say it "prepares you for life". It gives you confidence and clarity and hones interaction skills. The 'can do, will do' attitude blooms. Says Anirbhan Basu of Symbiosis: "During the first few weeks of MBA, I found that the world was full of people like me, most of them even better. It was an unnerving experience. It made me gear up for a tough future very fast. I evolved from a good team player to a great one. An MBA humbles you. You evolve to have sponge-like qualities to absorb knowledge, skills and information."
It is the faculty that help make it happen. "Students are rough diamonds, all we do is cut and polish them," says Vishwanath. But Dholakia's words linger longer: "An MBA has to continuously perform to earn his salary." The hard work, it seems, is never over.
With Nandini Oza/Ahmedabad
Source : THE WEEK
- Litta Jacob/Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad
Your senses are on high alert at these exalted institutions of higher learning. The air is of anticipation, the smell is of brain sweat, the taste is of imminent success and the feel is of damped down power. The image? Richie Riches with dollar signs as eyeballs!
We are talking B-schools and the business graduate. The two bywords that the Indian psyche believes are its birthright, like vaccinations. Have child? First dose: school, second dose: graduate, booster dose: MBA. The escalation of B-schools in India proves this: In 1991, the All India Council for Technical Education approved 130 MBA institutions with 12,000 seats; today there are more than 950 AICTE-approved institutions spewing forth more than 75,000 graduates a year. Outside of the US, India records the largest number.
The mad rush for a graduate degree is understandable. Come placement time, tier-1 institutions net average annual placement salaries of Rs 5 lakh to Rs 10 lakh, and in exceptional cases even beyond that figure. This is the allure for the 1,50,000 and more who sit for the Common Admission Test (CAT), Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP), the XAT (conducted by XLRI) and other state entrance tests. Aspirants naturally view B-grads as walking dollar machines.
Add to that the importance of having such a degree in India, an emerging economic global power. Industries like retail, pharma and software are experiencing unprecedented growth. "There are huge demands at the entry and middle-level and quality supply is small. Even faculty is in short supply," says M. Rammohan Rao, dean of the high-end Indian School of Business, Hyderabad, which was in the news last year for the highest annual placement salary offered: Rs 1.04 crore.
International offers, too, are pouring in as India is viewed as a highly talented, professional, English-speaking, young knowledge pool. "We are unlike Japan, China or west Europe, where the demographic profile is skewed towards the senior citizen," says Suresh Vishwanath, professor and chairman of academics, Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune, which climbed to the no. 4 slot (behind IIMA, B and C) among B-schools this year, according to a survey conducted by an Indian business magazine. Indeed, the Indian B-grads' time is now.
There is an aura that surrounds an MBA, one that shrieks money and power. This is the kick for every impressionable undergraduate and the reason for the bull run for the Grail.
But how many 20-to-30-year-olds strike the pause button and question what the course is about? Has she the aptitude to be a manager? Is he ready for the two-year rigour? Is the course a hype? How does the course shape you? Should you go by what the market wants or what you want?
Fifty per cent of students do not have the aptitude for an MBA, says Arun Mudbidri, director of SIBM. "With no aptitude, what happens to your life after MBA? You won't enjoy what you're doing," he says.
Those smitten by the MBA bug must research before joining the bandwagon. Friends who are working give you leads, seniors at institutions give you a window to the course; tap institution sites and the alumni. You need to be absolutely sure you want to do it.
Assessing one's strengths and weaknesses is the next step. Abhilasha Kannan, an engineering graduate at SIBM, says it is all about your 'skill set'. "If you don't match up to it, then forget it," she says. The skills? Multi-tasking, assertive, pro-active, number-crunching ability, social dexterity, creativity ....; certainly not for a laid-back person.
Students who are already enrolled have absolute clarity of purpose. Aparajita Mitra of SIBM, with a degree in biochemistry, did not want to pursue pure sciences for her postgraduation. "The kind of skills that I have, the person that I am, I knew I would be better off getting an administration degree," she says.
The entrepreneurial pull urges some to the programme. Others who are fighting monotony at their jobs want to bring clarity to their career, maybe even to make career shifts.
Mudit Mehta, 22, an IIT Delhiite in his second year at IIM Bangalore, warns: "Talk to people; the picture I had before the course and now are quite different." He is what you would call a 'pedigree' with the desired credentials-the right letters after his name and the bonus of being on the director's merit list at IIMB. Once Mudit found that his interest lay in business, he opted for an MBA. Instead of attending coaching class, he took the mock CATs (a shorter module), because of his highly-developed analytical skills. But, for others there is a warning from Mitra: if you don't go for coaching, it will take you longer to prepare.
Preparation starts a year ahead of the tests, and don't forget the foundation that you must build up over a two-year period by reading the right material. The last three months, follow the nose-to-the-grind regimen as you hone your data interpretation skills. "Even if you attend coaching classes, keep an open mind because the questions are not predictable," says Mudit. "Basically, it is time management. Also, get feedback before you choose your coaching institute."
Amit Agrawal, director of coaching institute Time in Ahmedabad, says students who are ready to work for long hours can make it to the top 30 B-schools. "Unfortunately, some students think preparing for CAT is like college study. It can't be cracked by studying for 15 to 20 days," he says. As Professor Ramnath Narayanswamy of IIMB puts it succinctly: "A typical student has two points of anxiety-his entry and exit from B-schools."
Abhishek Ruwatia decided that he would appear for CAT during his BCom., knowing that very few make it in the first attempt. "I got the interview call, but was not selected," says the 22-year-old from Kolkata. After graduation, he worked for a year with GH Financials. "I studied two hours a day for five months. And, it certainly wasn't glamour that attracted me to IIM," says Abhishek, who is successfully lodged at IIMA now.
Sarang Kulkarni, 20, is attending coaching classes to appear in CAT. A student of BCom. at Ahmedabad, Sarang sees only a 40 per cent chance of clearing it this year. Well aware that his brother-in-law, an IIMA pass out, gets a hefty salary, he says: "If I do not make it to the IIMs, I will try other B-schools. If I do not clear that, I will go to Australia."
In its chequered 28-year history, CAT (based on the US model and designed by IIM) has set the benchmark for other national tests. While it tests the qualitative capabilities of a prospective business student, other essential skills are ignored. "Creativity and capacity for lateral thinking are close to zero in CAT. In Stanford [the US], selection tests are wonderfully designed to promote core values," says Narayanswamy, who shows a "healthy disrespect" for selection norms.
Apart from IQ, there are EQ and SQ levels to determine, say faculty. The emotional quotient is "the ability to articulate oneself to oneself", "self-realisation", team-building and empathy; and the spiritual quotient: "when we sense there is an invisible order in visible order. At that time there is negation of the ego. You cannot be a good manager without being a good human being," says Narayanswamy.
Students of Sadhana Centre for Management & Leadership Development (SCMLD), a two-year-old institute in Pune, call it the "higher order purpose". Their day begins and ends with yoga; the curriculum includes 10-day meditation camps encouraging silence, and students sweep the streets on ?occasion! "It changes our attitude to life. It humbles us, we open up to ideas and all that rebellion and aggression disappear," says Jaspreet Kaur and Vedanth Vikram, in their second year at SCMLD.
ISB, on the other hand, takes GMAT scores (average was 575 in 2006) for selection, which is not, in itself, a foolproof assessment of the student. "Aptitude towards management and leadership is not easy to assess," says Rao, an IIMA alumnus. "Our 418 students need analytical, interpersonal and decision-making skills. We can evaluate some of these through the GMAT and the rest through interviews and work experience." Director of IIMA Bakul Dholakia's analogy best describes the requisites of an aspirant. "It is like performing a complex surgery," he says. "You need very good reflexes, quick recall value and intuition. You get very little time to respond."
The lucky few who win the race... congratulations! Your work starts now. Let the advice of Sangita Gupta, first-year student of SIBM, sink in: "The work you put in during the course is double what you did to get into a good institute." The course is demanding, study is unquantifiable and hard work is the creed. Those who think it is 'fun' drop out mid-course. As one focused Pune student puts it: "I think of myself not as a human being, but a brand. How will I promote my brand?"
The pluses: you hobnob with the best minds in the industry in India and abroad, and your peer group is the best in India. Divya from SIEMSCOM, Mumbai, finds the course challenging when she sees her friends understand absolutely abstract concepts. "These are the people who make the class nervous initially, and later, very interactive," she says. Forget your family for the first year. The good news is that in the second year, you actually get to smell the flowers. At least a whiff. If the two-year programme is tough, consider ISB's 51-week executive course, with just a week's holiday in the year. "It's a bit of a strain, but the corporate world is also demanding," says Rao, brushing off the query. "I term it catching up with the pace."
Narayanswamy sugars the bitter pill: "An entrant has a lot of stars in his eyes but we've got to give him a lot of bad news." Like having to follow a 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. schedule regularly.
But who's complaining? Not the highly-charged students who know that they are the creme-de-la creme of the student community. Some may even have the 'holier than thou' chip on their shoulders. Recalls Vishwanath, an XLRI alumnus: "I may have displayed a shade of arrogance when I joined XLRI. But I soon realised that my colleagues were just as good or better than me. It was a powerful driver."
The advantage of having an MBA is that it's a career launcher, it gets you immediate results. "You cut ranks to get to the middle level," says Priya Mohan, a chartered accountant at ISB. "One day I want to be my own boss. An MBA is the means to that end; it powers your expertise."
The pay-offs are great. Mudit, who already has a job offer from a multinational bank, found that with a technical background, an MBA opens up a lot of options. However, there are MBA techies who rue losing touch with technology once they get into administration.
Kavita Doshi, 23, who worked at L&T and General Electric before opting for ISB, enjoys the experience her peer group brings to the classroom. "At work, I saw colleagues taking a longer time to graduate to their roles. An MBA is a fast-track up the corporate ladder," she says. Sitting beside her at the self-service dining area, which displays a choice of cuisines, are Vishesh Rajaram and Arvind Ambo. Rajaram, 23, a chartered accountant, was credit manager at ICICI before he joined the course "for an insight into overall managerial information". Today, he has a clearer vision about his career. Ambo, 27, a sales and marketing professional, admits that the course is worse than what he thought it would be. "Age is not so much a barrier, if you give and take," he says. "It is such a high-pitched course that you are lost without experience."
The basis for the hectic schedule is to groom the student for the high-pressure corporate culture but it doesn't always work that way, says Priya. "During the course, your responsibility is only to yourself. But at work your decisions will impact real people." A debate rages on whether experience should be a criterion for admission to B-schools. If you are experienced, you can draw parallels from industry, is the argument. Most faculty pump for experience, saying such students appreciate what they get and their questions are more searching.
"In the US, an MBA is done after 8 to 10 years of experience," says Narayanswamy. "Here we have greenhorns, largely engineers, with no knowledge of the real world. They are high on aspirations, not necessarily on capability." However, some faculty suggest students with work experience are like hard clay, it's a little difficult to mould them into a new shape. Some corporates, too, prefer to work with fresh minds.
ISB stresses on an average experience of five years for a reason. "We bring in students with diverse experiences," says Rao. "That way, classroom discussions throw up different points of view. There is not always one solution to a problem; there are different ways to approach it. Whereas for a fresh mind, anything that is said is imbibed."
During the course, every move is geared towards the day the corporates drop in-when your worth shows dividends in rupees or dollar terms. The system breeds it into the student that placement is big time. From the second year on, the student is groomed for it, if he hasn't clinched a job already after the summer internship in the first year. IIMs and other tier-1 institutions become happy hunting grounds for companies. If in tier-1 colleges, the pressure is on landing the right job, in tier-2 institutions, the pressure is more on landing a right job with the right package.
But should every action be geared towards the 'P' word? Mudbidri's advice, particularly for entrepreneurs: don't run after the job, but after the customer. "Find their need; your creativity and understanding will help you succeed," he says. Apart from high salaries, factors like location, growth prospects and creative freedom should sway your choice.
With little difference between the IQs of the top 240 students in a batch, how do corporates make an informed choice?" "What is important is the student's attitude, self-control, social skills, team work and leadership traits," says Vishwanath. "An organisation looks for a student who can fit into their culture. They also look for the differences between a manager and a leader." This is also when grades, internship experience, project and relevant work experience count.
Six months into his first job, former SCMLD student George Mathew, who was recruited from campus by Crisil, weighs his education with IIM: "IIM gains you the entry point," he says. "But once you are in an organisation, everything depends on sheer performance. I am in the process of training new IIM entrants, so it is a total turnaround. It's the attitude and knowledge you bring into the organisation that count."
With so much dynamism in business today, B-schools are constantly evolving their curriculum and adding to their knowledge resource. New electives are added, others dropped, while fine-tuning is through interaction with industry and visiting faculty from India and abroad. The mad scramble for MBAs has induced colleges reputed in Commerce and Science streams to offer MBA courses. Like Christ College, Bangalore, which has academic collaboration with the Central University of Pondicherry, and two American and one British universities.
Specialisations are a core area as well. Finance and marketing are the big lures with human resources not far behind. But sometimes you have to take the long road to realise your true calling. "I started my career in HR and switched to marketing to finance to a teaching job," says Vishwanath.
The positives of the MBA programme are vast. Students say it "prepares you for life". It gives you confidence and clarity and hones interaction skills. The 'can do, will do' attitude blooms. Says Anirbhan Basu of Symbiosis: "During the first few weeks of MBA, I found that the world was full of people like me, most of them even better. It was an unnerving experience. It made me gear up for a tough future very fast. I evolved from a good team player to a great one. An MBA humbles you. You evolve to have sponge-like qualities to absorb knowledge, skills and information."
It is the faculty that help make it happen. "Students are rough diamonds, all we do is cut and polish them," says Vishwanath. But Dholakia's words linger longer: "An MBA has to continuously perform to earn his salary." The hard work, it seems, is never over.
With Nandini Oza/Ahmedabad
Source : THE WEEK
