I Received “Above and Beyond” Award From GE Power - Abhishek Sheth InsideIIM’s Best 50

"I belong from a middle- class family living in a small town Godhra, Gujarat. I did my schooling in one of the government schools in the state board medium. Then I got a scholarship based on my merit to pursue my electrical engineering in one of the prestigious colleges of the state, where I got campus placement in GE Power (General Electric). After three years of service, I decided to join IIM Nagpur (2018-’20) for MBA, a specialization in Finance. I describe myself as a dreamer and lifelong learner who follows "work is worship" principle in life."

Name an instance where you wanted something and went out of your comfort zone to achieve it OR Tell us the biggest risk you have taken so far in your life.

"I have faced the most significant challenge during my previous job at GE Power(General Electric) in the form of a site emergency. And SNAP 2017 (MBA entrance test for SIBM Pune) was just a few days away. I was working on many steam power plant projects as an electrical design engineer and one of them being the Nabinagar plant in Bihar. There the site team was facing an array of technical issues. As the department representative, it was my duty to rectify those issues. The SNAP exam was just seven days away and I was given ten days window to resolve the issue. Obviously, I could not give any wrong excuses to my team for not being able to visit the site during that moment. Therefore, I made up my mind and immediately travelled to the site to get on the mountainous task to analyze the concerns. After a series of meetings with the customer, site manager and commissioning team, I devised an action plan and started working on it, day and night. I bridged the gap between design and implementation and rectified confusing instructions in six days and reduced the project cost. As a token of appreciation from my manager and site team, I received an “Above and Beyond” award. That was one of the crucial experiences I had where I learned to manage both my personnel and professional responsibilities together."

When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.

"Recently, during my MBA campus placement, I helped one of my classmates to finish his presentation for the company interview, keeping aside my essential work. In my MBA college, there were two sections in my batch. I had hardly talked to him during my MBA, and at that time I was working on my own project. The task that he mentioned would have easily taken five hours and it was already 9 PM. Since he needed help with it, I decided to sit with him and work. I made his presentation based on the problem given by the recruiter and helped him in preparing the speech too. It made me warm and fuzzy. It also reminded that sometimes, it's your time and effort, the matters more than other monetary stuff."

Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?

"I believe during this age most disagreements happen with parents. Just after finishing my MBA, my friends had decided to go on a trip to Goa. My college finished on 6th March 2020 and we planned a trip from 9th March 2020 to 14th March 2020. Obviously, when we planned the trip, the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic was null in India. As soon as we finished our final exams, we started getting calls from our parents to cancel our trip citing the pandemic issue. We were also aware of the critical situation we may face during the trip considering the spread of the Coronavirus. But inside our heart, we all badly wanted to go to Goa as it was my last trip with my b-school mates. This was a  much-needed after the long and tiering MBA journey. Since at that time India was not even close to the fifty cases mark and there were zero cases in Goa. So, we decided to convince our parents, giving them all kinds of assurance of our safety. I even bought a mask and sanitizers to show them and assured them that in any kind of critical situation, I will immediately leave the place. After two days of convincing, they somehow agreed and gave permission. We enjoyed the goa trip and then we reached our home safely. I agreed that the situation could turn out another way too, but I believe that somehow God helped us."

What is the one thing you can claim to have some level of expertise or depth of knowledge in - it could be anything - a subject, a sport, a hobby, a venture, an initiative which has led you to do deep work in that field?

"Well, I feel that, during my under graduation, I was pretty good at electrical engineering, mainly in subjects like power systems and system protection. During the third year of engineering, I and one of my colleagues decided to go deeper into these subjects to solve one of the widespread problems faced in India related to electricity distribution which is power theft. Even today, in some of the regions of our country, this problem exists. So, we formulated a system to resolve this problem and tried to build a model based on that. We visited various experimental labs of the state, government agencies and other colleges for presenting our idea and in search of suitable equipment to prepare the model. But unfortunately, even after working hard for almost six months, we could not prepare a successful model. Then we decided to make a technical research paper on our proposed model. After multiple rejections, we finally succeeded in publishing our research paper at the IEEE International Conference. Within nine months of starting the research, we become so involved in the topic, that we were able to present our findings as a research paper in the IEEE conference. That was one of the topics where I got a chance to go deeper and study it."

If 10 Million Dollars (approximately INR 75 Crores) is given to you to use it any way you deem fit what would you do with this corpus?

"I will be really a fortunate person if given this much amount of money amid this critical situation. I always believed in earning money based on my talent and skills. I would donate the whole amount for the betterment of my countryman by transferring it to the PM care fund. I can wait to earn this much amount of money, but the affected people will not be able to wait until then."

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