Professor Tarun Jain, Faculty at IIM-Udaipur, was recently voted by the students of IIM-Udaipur as the InsideIIM Professor of The Year! He was kind enough to answer a set of questions we posed to him around his experiences as a Professor at one of India’s top IIMs, teaching some of the brightest minds in the country. Here is what Professor Jain has to say –
What is the best part about teaching these future leaders in your classroom?
I believe learning is a two-way process. Every time I teach a new session, I learn something new from the students that interests me. I believe this highly enriching process is the best part.
Your students have praised you for the interesting ways in which you teach your classes to make studies interesting. How important do you think this approach is for the students to cope with the real world out there?
I teach Operations Management to first-year MBA students. This course is not just about numbers and formulae. In the class discussions, I try to teach the core operations concepts through basic intuitions. It is essential to understand basics as Operations is the core of any business. As future leaders the students will face a lot of unstructured and dynamic problems and this is where they will need to apply their basic intuition to solve them.
Cases, real-life examples, academic models/theories, projects with peers – Which method, according to you, is most effective in teaching your subject to students?
We have to ensure that students should be able to understand fundamentals so that they can apply the learned skills in real life practice. I believe that the combination of various approaches along with the right material is most effective in enhancing this ability.
How has the use of technology transformed the modern MBA classroom?
Technology has enhanced the classroom learning experience for the student. Further, with new technologies, high-quality simulations can easily be designed and utilised in the classrooms. I believe in the future, we will have more video cases, offline video lectures and may be in-class video conferencing with industry experts, which will further make with classroom discussions rich.
How do you feel when you see people whom you have taught become successful in their lives and conquer the professional world out there?
This is the beautiful aspect of the teaching profession. This further pushes us to raise the bar on the quality of content and classroom discussions.
What are the kind of changes/developments that you see in the B-school curriculum in the years to come?
With technology, as the nature of work changes, I believe we will see many changes in the business school curriculum. Recently, there has been enormous adoption of digital technologies and the increase in data backed based decision making in industry. We should see inclusion of courses in advanced data analytics and digital enterprise space.
What, according to you, are some of the qualities that an aspiring B-school student must possess?
Hardworking, being enthusiastic about learning new concepts, humbleness and honesty.
What are your thoughts about InsideIIM’s Professor of the Year initiative?
This a bit embarrassing for me. But I am happy about this kind of feedback from our students. This further motivates us to put more efforts to enhance their classroom experience.
Read all about the InsideIIM Professor of The Year series here.