In our list of India's Best 50 - the 50 Most Employable Students from the Class of 2021-23, 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, Amit Ranjan, has shown an incredible amount of passion to achieve his true potential. Read on and find out his story!
The following are Amit Ranjan’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, Amit'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.
I, working as a consultant for Auctus Advisors, and my client was the MD of a thermal power plant. We suggested an improvised bidding strategy for power exchange for the client. The client gave their go ahead for conducting a pilot and offered me that he is willing to absorb losses up to Rs 50 Lakhs if our strategy turn a loss. During that meeting, only I was present from Auctus' side and I accepted the challenge. By far, this was the biggest stake of money that someone has entrusted me with.I informed my Manager and Partner about it and they supported me on it. I devised the bid strategy and sent it to their bidding team. Their internal bid team were touching ~90% of the potential. Our strategy was to get it to ~95-98%.On first day, I could only get to ~80% of the potential. This came as a shock to me, as I had backtested my strategy and it worked well. I didn't wanted to make the client underperform or worse lost the money. I looked at my strategy, I re-did all the data analysis, checked all the data sources, and I found that there was nothing more that I could have optimised. On day 2, I was able to achieve ~98% and for the next week I was able to achieve ~97% avg. Finally, my strategy paid off and the client adopted my strategy going forward.
When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act?
I was the student member of the disciplinary committee of IIT Kanpur in 2018. There was a ragging issue which surfaced on campus and 12 students were rusticated, ~10+ students were suspended for 3 years. The administration denied hearing and statements from the victims. These students came to me to tell their side of the story as to what happened on the night of incident. They asked for help to put forward their point as the administration has been harsh to them already.These students relied on me to raise their concern in the committee and represent them at the Academic Sentate. I advocated their concern in the academic senate and the disciplinary committee was able to reduce the punishment award for all of them. Rusticated students were re-instated, suspension was reduced to 1 year or 6 months.
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
My client was a thermal power plant and my project involved earning enhancement for the client. On this porject, I was working with various stakeholders from client's side. As part of my team, we built a digital tool for the client to enhance earnings. However, due to a regulation change, version updates to our digital tool were expected by clients. We were thinking whether to fetch information related to a particular cut-off number before midnight everyday by ourselves or should we ask the client to input it before midnight everyday. This cut-off is published by Regional Load Dispatch Centres (RLDC) every evening for the next day.I believed the clients employees should be assigned the task of inputting this cut-off number as it would free us from any error that may creep in. It may also save us in case the servers of RLDCs goes down. However, my team and my manager believed we should build a tool which should automatically fetch this cut-off figure and update in the platform. Looking back, I believe that it was the better way to go and my suggestion was not customer centric.
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 that has led you to do deep work in that field?
I am an aviation enthusiast and I have worked for clients in the aviation sector as well. I can say that I possess some level of expertise in the aviation sector, in particular about Airports.
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 would use this corpus to open a startup. I am working on a startup idea about a hyperlocal travel app which would improvise the local travel for any user. My startup idea crowdsourcing travel networks of unorganized sectors such as the e-rickshaws and Auto plying on local routes. I also intend to further improve upon the local travel on metro, buses using AR/VR technology and 3D mapping.
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