In our list of India's Best 50 - the 50 Most Employable Students from the Class of 2020-22, we feature MBA students who have walked that extra mile and done that little more to stand out! One of those featured in today's story, Amal Shaji, has shown an incredible amount of passion to achieve his true potential. Read on and find out his story!
The following are Amal Shaji’s set of responses to a questionnaire floated amongst MBA graduates to determine the top-50 Most Employable MBA Graduates of the Class of 2022. Amongst the massive number of entries and responses being evaluated, Amal's story and profile stood out. Here's his story in his own words.
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.
The most important instance where I went out of my comfort zone was during the selection of my college for UG. Based on the ranking of my State Engineering Entrance examination, I could have opted for any course in any college. There was a college closer to my home which was ranked 4th in the state and had a good reputation in my area. Hence, that was the first choice of my parents. I also had a scholarship with a 100% fee waiver from this college. I could have studied at the comfort of home as a day scholar. However, I did not want to settle for something less than the best I could get based on my rank. I wanted to study at the state-run College of Engineering, Trivandrum, which has a great history from 1939 and is consistently ranked 1 in the state. My parents were reluctant to allow me to move to a hostel when there was a good opportunity for me to study from home, citing security and financial reasons. I tried involving highly educated relatives from my family in the discussion and pitched the benefits of my choice. Later, they finally agreed as I was 100% ready to take up the financial and security risks they cited and live away from my family. Now looking back at my journey till now, I feel I would not have been able to make it this far had I not taken that decision back then. I believe that was a key decision which I took in my life which turned out well. Studying with better talented peers invoked competitiveness in me and helped me to dream high. I could get placed at Mu Sigma from CET, and my life there prepared me to pursue MBA.
When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.
During our summer placements in December 2021, I was fortunate to get placed early on in the process. Being one of the first few to get placed, I initiated a buddy programme to help others to get placed. I formed a telegram group with two other students, and we collated the shortlist details and created a spreadsheet with the details of the shortlist for each candidate at the candidate level and the company level. We started adding more members to the group as soon as they got placed, and by the end of the first day, we had a good team ready. We then assigned the group members as buddies to the unplaced candidates. Each buddy was asked to contact their assigned candidate and help them to prepare for the interview with company information, schedule management, and, more importantly, keeping up the confidence level and motivation of the candidates. Each buddy shared the company information in the group as well. I acted as a coordinator by collating all the information shared and distributing the same among all the buddies. By the end of the first day, I personally called up each unplaced candidate to check on their morale, motivate them and to offer any additional help that they required. We continued this buddy programme until everyone was placed. This initiative of students helping their fellow classmates was highly praised by the whole institute community.
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
During my work experience as a Decision Scientist with one of the leading pure-play analytics firms, I led a team working on a critical project with a large US airline firm. Our leadership team was continuously monitoring the updates as it was a pilot project. Before I had joined the team, they had tried a few machine learning methods that did not work well. Almost at the same time, there was a change in the reporting manager as well. I quickly took hold of the project and started exploring new ways to achieve the objectives. I was able to come up with a few heuristic approaches that we could potentially try out. However, the new manager insisted on applying only machine learning models. I, on the other hand, was sure that applying machine learning models was not the immediate next step based on my understanding of the data and the results of previous attempts. Due to my manager's reluctance to proceed with my idea, I took it up as a challenge.I pitched my idea with the leadership team in the next meeting. I had prepared well and I was able to effectively answer all concerns raised in the meeting. Thus, I could convince our senior management team about my approach. Later, the management head decided to proceed with my approach to solve the client's problem. The client also really liked the approach that we pitched. We worked hard as a team to execute the idea with the help of other data analysts. The results of the project were promising and the client was very happy with the results, asking us to expand our approach to a few other domains as well. Thus, the pilot project was converted into a retainer with additional billing for my firm.
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?
Business AnalyticsBusiness Analytics was a new term to me when I joined Mu Sigma as a Trainee Decision Scientist. Mu Sigma opened a new world in front of me, took me through various aspects of Decision Science, and gave me expert knowledge in the domains of Business Analytics and Machine Learning.Business Analytics is all about driving insights through mining and playing around with data using which companies can make informed decisions. Presenting the right information in the right way is also a key skill required for a Business Analyst. Dashboards help to narrate stories from data in a presentable way. I was able to learn and get hands-on experience on multiple dashboarding tools like DOMO, PowerBI, Spotfire and Tableau. I could execute analytics projects with numerous Fortune 500 firms using these tools. I was also invited as a speaker to an Organisation-wide session on Dashboarding using Spotfire. That was an excellent platform for me to share my learnings with my peers through a hands-on working session.I often wondered, What is Machine Learning? when I read about the topic in newspapers and online articles. Being a Mechanical Engineer by education, the term was very unfamiliar to me. I learnt the basics of Machine Learning from the training sessions at Mu Sigma. I used my time outside office hours to read up on online material and do mock projects. I also took courses with the internal Mu Sigma university to learn from experts in the firm. All these efforts became fruitful while working with a US medical device manufacturer on a project to forecast the demand for their transport network. It was a short proof of concept project where we had to showcase our expertise. The project had limited data, and forecasting was required at multiple levels. In two weeks, I had trained and tested 24 ARIMA models to forecast the required metric for the client. The client was delighted by the quick turnaround and high accuracy which their internal teams were not able to achieve. Later, they requested me to take a working session on ARIMA and gave an appreciation note to our team for our proof of concept. Artificial Intelligence is my new area of interest. Extending from my interest in machine learning techniques, I have now begun to learn and explore the field of AI. To quote the words of one of our Professors, AI might not replace managers, But manager knowing AI might replace the managers who don't.
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 have a few long term plans centred around agriculture and farming which I plan to pursue post my retirement from corporate culture. If I am offered 10 Million Dollars today, I might consider pursuing a few of my ideas at a larger scale now. One of my ideas is to set up an agriculture-based firm in my village by creating a network of rural farmers, providing them access to the national and international market, and enabling the sharing of resources and knowledge. This idea is inspired by the Amul model. The mission will be to bring together farmers who cultivate at their individual capacity to a common platform and improve the economic value of their products by selling directly to buyers bridging the intermediaries. Also, such a network facilitates the sharing of knowledge and resources, which eventually helps in improving productivity, thereby lowering the cost of production. The major driving force to this vision is my interest in farming and my intent to give back to society. Bringing together the current fragmented groups of farmers requires time and requires a good amount of investments in terms of time and money (60 Cr).
The rest of the money, I want to use for the upliftment of my village. Currently, the people of my village are facing severe threats to their land and agricultural products due to frequent elephant raids. The compensation given by the government is very marginal, and elephant passing has become a severe threat to peaceful life in the village. The wild elephant population is uncontrollably increasing in my area and has gone beyond the capacity of the forest land. Hence the only solution possible is rail fencing across the forest borders to prevent the elephant passing.
However, the Government is not taking this up due to budget constraints. Hence, I would like to sponsor this as part of the initiative of my agricultural firm. The expected budget is around 12 Cr for 8 kms based on a project taken up at Wayanad District of Kerala (1.5 Cr per km)
Agriculture Firm: 60 Crore in TotalBreakdown of budget
Stage 1 at my Home town
Infrastructure for Market: 1 Cr
Green House Farm set up: 1 Cr
Financing Services for farmers: 1 Cr
Modern Farming Equipments: 2 Cr
Transportation Utilities: 1 Cr
Employee Salaries: 0.5 Cr
Marketing Expenses: 0.1 Cr
Office utilities and Administration:0.4 Cr
Total: 6 Cr
The next stage involves the expansion to 13 other districts of Kerala with a budget of 52 Cr (4 Cr per district)
Read the stories of the other Employable Graduates here!