My first week at XLRI – Vinoo Kurian Thomas

From CareerAnna.com

Vinoo Kurian Thomas, XLRI (2013-2015)

In perspective

The blue frothy waves crashed onto the shore again and again, never ending, never ceasing. I always preferred the solitude of the beach. The Marina beach is Asia’s longest and one of the most famous attractions in the city. Today, to my surprise, I found that I was the only one in the beach. I couldn’t spot a single other soul on the shore. Come to think of it, I could not see anyone else anywhere. Maybe, it’s my lucky day I figured and began to ponder about the many intricacies of the path that I had chosen. ‘Can I get you something sir’ the voice said, measured, smooth, calm. But there was no form to it. I looked around and spotted no one. ‘Sir? Excuse me sir?’ I snapped out of my reverie and found myself bang in the middle of a pretty airhostess’s inquiries on my general wellness state. ‘No, I’m good’ I replied. I would be at 30,000 feet mid-way between Chennai and Kolkata. I was on the way to Jamshedpur, or Jampot, as we lovingly call it. The end destination was XLRI Jamshedpur, the no.1 private B-School in the country.

The long journey

The journey to XLRI had been a long one and I had often dreamed of visiting the campus. I had decided that even if I had converted other institutes, I would make it a point to surely visit XLRI once for an academic or cultural competition. The one thing that distinguished XLRI wherever one goes is the mention of a culture. It is ever prevalent, ever present. XL Culture was spoken of in public online forums and among friends, but no one ever really knew what it really was except the students there themselves. My journey into XLRI itself was a highly comic one involving the only breakdown of my Honda Activa in a 7-year ownership period about 45 minutes before the test and subsequent breakdown of the autorickshaw  I had hired after my scooters breakdown about 30 minutes before XAT 2013. I alone know the story of how I finally managed to reach the venue in time, regain some semblance of composure and get ready to give my all during those crucial hours inside the hall. But I got through. I had a good score and aced my GD/PI stage leading to a direct convert. I was finally on my way to my dream B-School and one of the very best at that. The journey from Chennai, other than for my occasional day dreaming, was fairly uneventful and a quick train hop later I was at Jampot. The immediate impression could be summed  in one word: TATA. The Tata Group ensures that Jamshedpur is never short of anything. It is a beautifully maintained city. As the taxi rolled in to Circuit House Area, I stared wide-eyed like a kid in a candy store. I wanted to assimilate every moment and store in my mind’s hard drive. I knew this would be my home for 2 years. Once at the campus, I signed in to the MDP Residence block as I had arrived a couple of days prior to the official start when students could move in to the hostels. The MDP residence primarily functions as apartments for top executives who come to experience the very best of management education, compressed into a 4-day or week-long event. The facilities were wonderful and I quickly settled down.

The Campus

The next day was mostly spent getting my documents in order. I roamed around the campus a lot, trying to understand the way to and fro different blocks. I spotted Dadu’s which had been around for almost as long as the institution itself. The hostel was maintained really well and to my surprise my room was among the largest in the entire block! Lucky me! The pride forever XLRI store was a definite surprise where one can get branded and quality XLRI merchandise ranging from photo frames to t-shirts. There are two convenience stores, one within campus and other just 2 minutes walk away for the benefit of the students. Overall, I was impressed by the huge expansive campus, with a world class library and fantastic gym. The facilities have all been provided. It is up to the student to manage his time everyday in an optimal manner and develop his own self into a well rounded personality adept at both physical activities and academics. During the first week of orientation here, I often ran into the Jesuit priests who run the college administration. Brought up in familiar waters back in Chennai, I built a good rapport with the priests here who are ever willing to come to the aid of the student community. The next day onwards, slowly students started settling in to the atmosphere. I made a lot of quick friends, thanks in part to our Facebook admits group because of which I already knew a lot of them.

Getting started

The first week comprises of several orientation courses which brought us up to the speed with the case study methodology of learning. XLRI is indeed blessed with departments rich in learned and experienced professors stresses the importance of class participation. The case study method gives a real time experience of the problem in hand, the various options available , helps to create a decision matrix and to choose the best solution to the given problem .Of course one needs to make many assumptions and this helps to enhance learning. My experience has been that since students come from varied back grounds and profile one can learn from their experience and helps peer rating as well.

The Committees

XLRI has been traditionally known for its various committees and the pioneering work they do in their respective areas. There are many to choose from according to one’s ability, skill and aptitude. These provide suitable launching pads for future managers.   There are a number of Committees on campus aimed at fine tuning the leadership skills of students. The few notable ones are

FIRE@X(The Forum for Industrial Relations at XLRI) aimed at bringing about a greater level of interaction between students, faculty and the industry and to create awareness and passion about the field of industrial relations and labour laws.

MAXI(The Marketing Association of XLRI) the oldest committee on campus is designed at popularising the field of marketing at XLRI.

DRACULA (The Dramatic and Cultural Association at XLRI)hosts events providing high quality varied entertainment thereby stimulates the creative potential in the diverse student fraternity on the campus

Welcome

The welcome ceremony on 14^th June 2013 at the state of the art TATA Auditorium that can boast of a fine acoustic system and accommodates 1000 people was a solemn as well as an enriching experience for both students and parent’s community. The introduction of the faculty gave an insight into the diversity and experience  XLRI faculty possess. The address by Fr E Abraham,SJ,  Director was inspiring and thought provoking and outlined  the road map for next two years.

Hectic and fast paced

Life moves at a fast pace at campus .Often 24 hrs is not sufficient to live a day. Yes, here one has to go miles and miles at this speed before one can sleep. I really enjoy this fast pace as there is no single dull moment and there is always something yet to be attempted and completed. Group discussions enhance learning and the joy and satisfaction one get when an idea or suggestion is accepted by the group is an achievement in itself. Of course one learns to accept divergent views and see others point of view.

Home away from home.

One quickly adjusts to hostel life on campus with excellent mess and kitchens with  friendly seniors who are  very approachable and very helpful. Every interaction is enriching and rewarding. The food is tasty and satisfying. The primary lessons of community living by sharing the available resources in this already shrinking universe and brotherhood is rewarding. The motto “ Service before Self” is best learned in such conditions.

Green Campus

Often one hears about ecology and greenery but fails to see these often. A visitor  to the campus is at once thrilled by the sprawling and green campus in the idyllic setting of the Dalma Hills and TISCO. The long sightedness and long term planning of the institution’s founders and their worthy successors needs praise and needs to be emulated. The buildings are not mere concrete monsters but a blend of modern and traditional architecture. Good drainage system is in place to prevent water logging and flooding.

Facilities many

Sir Jehangir Ghandy Library is vast storehouse that caters to the information needs of all and is treasure house of literature related to labour laws and management.

XLRI has many sports and recreational facilities including a multi gym, Badminton, Basket, Football , Tennis , Volley Ball courts and a Recreation and TV Hall.

XLRI has excellent LAN and WIFI connectivity. Undoubtedly XLRI is the most e-enabled business school in our country.

Your Grace is enough

As a devout Catholic I consider myself lucky as there is a beautiful chapel close to my hostel where I can go anytime and spend time in the company of Jesus. Prayer  and worship have come close like never before.  Attending Sunday Mass has also become more convenient

In short Life is good

 My experience is more rewarding as I have a very friendly and helpful room mate. My experience so far has been more than satisfying and rewarding. There are more events I look forward to .One such is the village programme. I have always believed that unless our semi urban and rural population is economically uplifted the battle is not won. Education and health care are the two focus areas where much needs to be done. To eradicate poverty our country should  spend more on these two critical areas. Infrastructure  spending need to be increased so that power and clean drinking water no more remains dreams for our villagers. Management schools have a lot to do in this area as future corporate executives  need to understand where  the soul of India lies .

Vinoo Kurian Thomas is from XLRI 2013-15 Batch and we appreciate him for taking out time for sharing his first week experience at XLRI with all of us.

XLRI - supports home grown entrepreneurs

Excerpt from Business Standard

........ XLRI-Jamshedpur has introduced a deferred placement policy this year, applicable to the 2008 batch of students and onwards.

Uday Damodaran, placements chairman of XLRI, notes: “From this year, we will allow students interested in starting entrepreneurial ventures to take the plunge and push back their participation in campus placements for a maximum period of two years. Our aim is to extend as much support as possible to students who wish to become entrepreneurs. A policy like this will provide students the emotional security needed while taking a risk during the initial years of a career.”

XLRI Jamshedpur has also decided to support a group of six first-year students with Rs 3 lakh for their entrepreneurial venture. These six have decided to start Parichay.co.in, a portal to link tribal artisans with the mainstream market and provide them a platform to reach out to connoisseurs of art across the world.

“As the six students put together the portal and decided on the revenue earning model, we at XLRI thought of supporting them with the initial funds required to put the project in place,” reasoned Madhukar Shukla, faculty at XLRI......

Read the entire article at Business Standard

This is an amazingly supportive set of steps taken by XLRI to support Entrepreneurs who are ready to bring their ideas to life, straight out of campus.

While a lot of Xlers have gone on to become entrepreneurs later in life. - case in point PandiaRajan of IR 84 who was recently in the news - the guys behind http://www.parichay.co.in : Chintan, Darshan, Kaushal, Siddharth, Vikas & Vivek are fortunate to have this kind of support straight out of XL.

Dreams are always bigger and risks are most often lower, when one is straight out of campus. Having the security of being able to come back for regular placements within 2 years and some financial backing from the institute can obviously spur an individual much much higher.

This could be a major step akin to the research grants awarded to students of technical/technological sciences in the US.

XLRI values entrepreneurship and social responsibility. http://www.parichay.co.in is an endeavour that combines both and I wish these xlers all the very best.
Kim

XLRI - First Impressions after a month

http://srikanththunga.com/2007/xlri-impressions

From the blog of a current "junior"

xlri - impressions

Its been a month in Jamshedpur. Its feels as though I have spent almost 4 months here compared to the pace of life I had in blr/IT industry. I quit my work at i2 on May 11th. I had a month before I would leave for Jamshedpur. I spent that one month meeting people, saying goodbyes, having parties, family get togethers etc… Finally, I boarded the train from yesvantpur to jamshedpur on June 11th.

The train journey: I wasn’t able to get a 3AC ticket on the train and hence had to travel by sleeper coach. I met Bipin who was going to join the IR course on the train. We had met each other during the Bangalore freshers meet(which was really good.. met a lot of seniors and a few super seniors also). The train journey was horrible. There was another train derail because of which my train was delayed by more than 8 hours. Instead of reaching at 7pm on june 12th, I landed up in jamshedpur station at 3am on june 13th. Initially we were thinking of staying back in the station till dawn break as we weren’t sure about getting the room keys at that ungodly hour. We took an auto anyways and came to xlri campus at 330am in the morning. Bahadur, the most famous security guard on campus who can always be seen with a bunch of keys in his hand told us our room numbers. He also told us that our roomies had already taken the keys to our rooms. I land at my room to find a note by my roomie, Souvik saying that he is not in his room and to collect the keys from next door people. To my surprise, I find the next door neighbour, Srinivas playing some game on his computer at 4am. I collect the key from him and settle down.

I stay on the 4th floor of the oldest hostel on campus and I have a pretty good view from my window. The floor is above most of the trees on campus and is very airy. The first shock of the morning was sun rise at 5am!!!! The weather was really horrible for the first couple of days/weeks(from a bangalorean’s perspective. Sometimes, I find Bangalore’s weather horrible.). Its raining these days which is good but sometimes it becomes very humid after that which is horrible again.

Another shock was the lack of good coffee on campus

The first day went normally, meeting new people and others whom I had met in bangalore freshers meet etc… There are a lot of people with work ex, but mostly IT work ex. The preparatory classes started. The profs are really good, quite different from my engg experience. The only good place in town is called Bistupur which is more like Gandhi Bazaar of Bangalore. I went into town a couple of times. Its a small decent town. The preparatory classes were good. There weren’t many new things to be learnt other than the basics of accounting. The preparatory part also had films on the history of tatas and jamshedpur.

There are other good initiatives on campus like senior-junior mentorship program where seniors are really helpful in guiding the juniors. There is also a faculty-student mentorship program where any student can approach respective faculty members for any difficulty. Its a good initiative by the administration.

2 weeks breezed by and seniors landed on campus on june 24th. The official classes started for both us on june 25th. Once the seniors came on campus, there were lot of gyan sessions on various things. It used to happen pretty late in the night and for some 2 weeks, we had gyan sessions almost everyday at 10pm. Its part of xl culture and only people who are part of it and who will be part of it will be able to appreciate it. xlers know what I am talking about. future xlers will have to experience it..

The best thing that happened after 25th was the availability of good coffee There is a small place called dadu’s behind the campus which is almost like a lifeline to most people on campus. The coffee/tea/horlicks/sandwiches etc.. are his trademark. As someone said, he is best known for his customer service There is another night canteen which opens at 10 in the night and stays open till 3-4 in the morning when the campus goes to sleep completely

It feels good to be back in college and it also feels a little different after having worked for such a long time. Its very difficult to do arbit CP just for the sake of CP ( a few of them are really good at this. u have to be part of it to know it. )

Last week has got to be one of the most memorable weeks here. I had my placecomm interview(a small disaster), probability test stress buster, first probability test, official freshers party(punch nite), first wasp bite, first honey bee hive destruction, first lazy weekend on campus as more than half of my batchmates had gone on a ngo trip or an adventure trip. The most memorable one has to be the stress buster event conducted by the seniors before the first probability test. It absolutely rocked. To put it in context, probability test is considered one of the most difficult tests to pass on xl campus. There are usually atleast 2 people who flunk in that test. The prof is absolutely superb and teaches really well. But as most people know/realise, probability is probability and nothing can be done to it

For this week, there are 3 tests lined up and a small marketing competition amongst teams made of juniors, seniors of both bm and ir batches.

Its been a little hectic, but its been total fun till now. MBA is something that everyone has to do in their lifetime (or atleast the first month of MBA )

First impressions about the campus : The campus is small but very green and neat. I have seen the IIMB campus and I must say that the greenery beats the IIMB campus. The sports facilities are pretty good. There is a tennis court, proper football, basketball and volley ball courts. I played tennis after a long long time and found out that I have lost complete touch of it. I am planning to pick it up when I come to blr for the term break. The library has quite a few good books.

I have talked about a lot of things other than the main classes. More about this later.

Because of my irregularity in blogging, I am sure I have omitted a lot of other good things. I will try to take each individual threads(hostel life, campus life) of my life in xlri and try to write a blog post on each one of them.

A Small B-School Can Be a Big Plus

Small-town schools offer a lot that big-city schools don't, especially a close-knit community and strong attachment between student and institution

The advantages of going to a large business school in an urban area appear obvious to many applicants. After all, the thinking goes, big cities are where big business is done (not to mention the restaurants, the nightlife, the healthy population of old college buddies to ease the transition).

And a bigger school, it stands to reason, often means more of everything—more resources, more elective choices, more classmates with whom to network, and so on. And while you already know bigger isn't always better, isn't it hard enough figuring out the relative merits of New York vs. Chicago and lecture vs. case method without throwing in a slew of schools in towns you couldn't find on a map?

If that line of thinking sounds familiar—and admissions consultants such as Clear Admit's Graham Richmond say it's quite common—you might want to take a step back and consider that the experience of attending B-school in a town like Charlottesville, Va., Hanover, N.H., or Ithaca, N.Y. has its own upside. While many of those advantages are of the more intangible variety (how do you put a value on school spirit?) satisfied alums say the small-town, small-school experience can bring big-time payoffs.

Just ask Desmond Duncker, a Tuck MBA who wears his pride in his alma mater on his sleeve—or more accurately, his arm—in the form of a three-inch tattoo of Tuck's green-and-white seal. His degree landed him a job at investment bank Goldman Sachs, but even more important, he says, were two years of "unforgettable" experiences.

And if alumni giving rates are any measure, Duncker certainly isn't the only happy Tuck graduate out there. A hefty 65.1% of Tuck alumni donated this past year—more than double the giving rate at most top-ranked B-schools (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/2/06, "Great Gifts Come in Small Packages").

Better Ratios

So what, exactly, is the small school advantage? In a word: community. Students say it's easier to form close bonds with classmates at a small school like Tuck or UNC's Kenan-Flagler, where each graduating class is kept to under 300 people, compared with larger ones like Harvard and Wharton, where the graduating class size is roughly triple that.

David Pyke, a Tuck professor and associate dean who has also taught at Wharton, says smaller schools are more conducive to student-faculty interaction, for the same reason. And while big schools aren't necessarily bad at fostering community, it certainly takes a more concerted effort. That's one reason many B-schools opt for some form of cohort system that breaks down a large class of first-year students into groups or learning teams of a more manageable size.

The more remote locations of small schools like Cornell and Darden can also be advantages—and not just because of the lower cost of living. The lack of outside distractions can give students a chance to immerse more fully in the B-school experience.

"Many of our clients tell us that they view the more rural programs as a chance to actually escape the 'buzz' of cities and the daily grind of the professional world," Richmond says, especially for MBAs who realize that B-school might be their only chance before retirement to live outside a major urban center. "Spending two years in a place like Hanover really gives students the chance to unplug and devote themselves entirely to academic study and MBA community events."

All-Important Bonds

It can be difficult for urban schools to instill a sense of community when students don't live on campus and have all the diversions of urban life, including existing social networks. When students have made the commitment to pack up their lives and move to "the middle of nowhere," they're typically more open to forging new bonds with classmates quickly, in part because they have fewer options.

"It's really hard to disappear into the ether when you're a student here," Pyke says of Tuck. And while some students caution that the lack of anonymity isn't for everyone—imagine every bar in town as the bar where everybody knows your name—it's a lot harder to get lost in the crowd.

Forging a strong sense of connection between students and their school is also important when it comes to the alumni network. Small schools can't compete on size—Harvard Business School has 43,674 living alumni, Darden has 8,001—but alums say the strength of their network more than makes up for it.

"There is no alumni network on earth that is as tightly knit and well-integrated into the school as ours," says Bryan Simms, a senior vice-president at Lehman Brothers and chairman of the Darden Alumni Board and a trustee. "The message to first-years is that when you come to Darden, you're not signing up for a two-year program, you've signed up for a 40- to 50-year relationship with the institution."

In the end, it's important for B-school applicants to understand that choosing a full-time MBA program is about more than your future salary, it's about deciding how you'll spend two years of your life.

Miller is a reporter with BusinessWeek.com in New York.

From BusinessWeek