VII Semester

Seventh semester certainly had very interesting mix of electives. It was a difficult choice for many. And I too managed 4 credits with one being a investment banking! My electives:
SDM (Sales & Distribution Mgmt.),
IBFS (Investment Banking & Financial Services),
BSCM (Business Sustainability & Carbon Markets)
& ATSC (Applied Theory in Strategy & Competition)
All 4 credits were satisfying (atleast for me:), as I attended almost all classes of these class-based learning courses & there was a good learning in each class!

IBFS was an insightful subject but was as tough as it could be. It taught us the concepts of rights, IPOs, LBOs, debt financing etc that we found very intriguing in our lives. Prof. Mishra had a great control over his delivery topics & was upto speed from the first class itself. His two classes together were real exhausting, I ate an extra samosa in the break every time!

BSCM as a subject really moved us, shook us & got us thinking in the direction of sustainability. I could never have taken the topic so seriously had it not been a credit course! Prof. Sushil was amazing (infact the best Prof I had studied from), he taught us from the heart! Some great concepts of sustainable development that would go a long way in shaping us.

The various closes & spins were mastered in SDM, now we know what techniques the salespersons use on us. Prof. Kumra was at his best with his real life experiences of teaching us the sales techniques.

WMP Class 13

"WMP" Class 13

We devoted a Saturday for our profile & class photos. Our whole WMP13 batch was in formals, in our dashing blacks. The class photo was fun as it was the first one to be clicked and people kept joining in till the last click! And this photo "WMP" took an hour to be clicked, we, managers, had little sense of creating artistic patterns but hats off to the photographer who held on!

Our exam timings finally got reinstated to the evening timing that was the unanimous choice of our batch, thanks to the WMP Chair for the same!!


Some other highlights of the semester:

• IIML Manfest 11 - a mega annual event held @ lucknow
• IIML International marketing conference - biggest marketing conference of IIML - till date all thanks to Prof S B Dash
• The placement of electronic IIML hoarding (thanks to the conference)
• Farewell to the senior batch 
• Prof. Anadi Pande's wonderful guest lecture for ATSC

Fifth Semester

This semester was the last-semester-without-electives i.e. after this semester our class would be broken into sub-classes and merged with the other section after their choice of elective subjects. Birds of same feather would flock together!

Thankfully this semester, we were free from the calculators (aka our bulky financial calculators) as we had theoretical subjects like - International business environment (IBE), Strategic Management-I (SM), Management of Information Systems (MIS) and Marketing Management-II (MM). And almost all were interesting (:) with MM & IBE leading the pack. SM got interesting only after we requested for a faculty change (in fact this was a memorable sem also because the students were listened, we requested for a faculty change and it happened promptly). In the snap below, we can be seen participating in the Starbucks case with our teams participating in understanding components of value chain:

Prof Amita conducting groups for Value-Chain discussion

There was an interesting thing to note this semester. Students attended the class with more sincerity of the faculty who were relaxed on attendance. When teachers are great, students automatically attend classes.

We spent an enormous amount of time on the email-chain for selection of electives for the next term. To the extent, that people got fed-up and stopped checking those threads. It was the immense patience of the CRs and to name a few - Nilabha & Shivashish who co-ordinated well to finalize a list on electives.

Some more highlights:
- Strategy course done justice by Prof Amita
- Guest lecture (Use of MIS in Social Cause) - http://cgnetswara.org
- Prof Wadhwa & the 2.5 mark daily quiz!
- Bikramjeet (our capable CR and a great friend) left the course for a handsome overseas opportunity
- And the ANNA campaign!!

First summer break

After having slogged for almost an year juggling with office and a demanding MBA program finally holidays were here. Yuppie! We had made so many programs but finalized only one - the relaxation event:)

Luckily, I had a not-so busy office too so I felt really relaxed.

The importance of Saturday's was realized in this summer break. The weekend looked real big. It was as if prisoners were let loose for a month and they had gone berserk with their freedom! In fact, the average heartbeat rate decreased - yes (no kidding) I could feel it!

But IIML had ingrained the habit of reading and working hard that after 2 weeks of holidays I took up a project to (long aspired) development of an Android application. The idea in mind was to develop an application that would keep you away from the disturbing SPAM messages. After few weeks of effort "BLOCK SPAM SMS" was developed and is running successfully on thousands of Android phones. The best part is - it is being used more abroad than in India.


As the summer break was closing towards an end - I felt the dreaded feeling of no holidays for an year occupied the mind..