Campus Life At SJMSOM, IIT Bombay | All You Need To Know

Nestled amidst a canopy of trees to your right as you enter the IIT Bombay campus, the School of Management is as much of a serene, dainty place as it is full of life and activities. Once I set my foot into the place, I realized I would absolutely fall in love with it by the time I graduate in two years.

SJMSOM has a lot to offer for talented minds to prosper, no matter where the talent lies. If you’re wondering what options we have for bookworms, we have a library at the college for your immediate reference, as well as the bigger IIT Bombay central library nearby for you to explore the hundreds of thousands of options there. If your interests lie in sports, you can make full use of the world-class facilities available for almost any kind of sport you want to try. Are you a fitness freak? The well-equipped gymnasium is one of the places you could be at. The swimming pool is best-in-class and has coaches in case you want to learn the skill from scratch. What if you are more of a nature person? The huge lush green campus is right there, flanked by lakes and surrounded by hills, for you to walk, jog, cycle, or just sit there and admire the beauty of it all. You name it, we have it.

A major advantage of SJMSOM is the excellent and diverse peer group that you get here. Within a few weeks of starting college, I saw some of my classmates winning corporate competitions of prestigious brands. Plenty of opportunities are present for you to showcase your best or hone your skills till you breakthrough. The sportspeople in my batch participate regularly in various competitions, both inter-IIT as well as intra-IIT, and win laurels. SJMSOM itself organizes an annual sports fest where students from B-schools located all over the country participate and fight to win the top spot. We have marathons and biathlons organized in and around the campus from time to time for you to participate and challenge the fitness freak within you.

The location of SJMSOM being in Mumbai comes with its own perks. We are able to get top industry leaders from every niche industry that you could think of. In the last version of our business fest called Avenues, we hosted people from diverse backgrounds like industry stalwarts such as Niranjan Hiranandani and Harsh Mariwala to celebrities like Nandita Das. The college also conducts industry interaction sessions regularly for you to interact with people who are excelling in their fields and get motivated. The rolling seminar series called Continuum, which encompasses major fields such as consulting, finance, operations, marketing, systems and HR, hosts speakers from the industry to share their valuable experiences and tidbits on various topics, followed by interaction with students. The insights we gain from these sessions give another dimension to the theory we learn in class and give a wholesome understanding of how knowledge is being applied practically in the corporate world to excel. A helpful tip here - if you are listening attentively and quote one of these speakers at an interview of yours, it indeed counts as brownie points. Nothing proves your point better than real-life examples which back it up.

The faculty at SJMSOM are top-notch, regardless of the field they are in. They are eager to guide you and help you learn not just through theory, but also by doing projects and presenting case studies which enhance the learning. Besides the obvious lectures, there are numerous clubs and teams at college for you to get involved in depending upon your interests. The clubs include ones for operations, marketing, finance, consulting, systems, entrepreneurship, HR, cultural and sports. Students also get to be a part of various teams including admissions, creatives and PR, Avenues (the b-school fest), international relations and alumni relations, among others. Another valuable opportunity is getting to be a part of the various clubs at the IIT level. There is no dearth of opportunity for you to shine and contribute to the diverse learning experience.

The student life at IIT Bombay is something you would not want to miss. You get to be involved in a wide range of activities if you wish to. From being a coordinator at Mood Indigo, the continent's largest college cultural festival, to being a part of various other fests such as tech fest, social fest, E-Summit, and whatnot, you get innumerable experiences, each different from the other. The eventful days pass by in a haze, with equal amounts of fun and hard work put together. There are plenty of opportunities to network with people in the IIT Bombay ecosystem and make the most of it. These are some of the many things that make studying at SJMSOM a unique experience by itself.

With so much going on in the campus, let’s see how a typical day at SJMSOM looks like. On a weekday, you wake up in the morning, and rush for breakfast at the mess and then to the college for lectures if you're in the morning batch. The perk here is that you'll be back by lunchtime. The afternoon batch gets to relax and attend lectures after lunch. In the evening, you have many commitments, either for work with your club, or team, or corporate competition group, or assignments group, or just your friends pulling you to go out with them. At night, you could go for a walk around the campus which falls quieter than usual, though you'll notice that IIT Bombay never entirely sleeps. Weekends are very eventful with either industry interaction sessions lined up, or workshops being conducted, or other events such as sports. This is the time you broadly plan out the activities for your club or team and have meet-ups with everyone involved. Very rarely, you will get an entire weekend off to relax and do nothing if you wish. No matter what, life at SJMSOM will keep you on your toes almost all the time, till you graduate as a noticeably better version of yourself compared to the one that joined.

The life at SJMSOM is one epic journey right from the start, and one must gear up in practically no time to deal with it. The culture here does not let you slack off; you grab every opportunity and persevere and work hard at each aspect until you become better at it. This college gives you the best of both worlds - you get the multi-cultural lifestyle of Mumbai and, nested within it, the serene ecosystem of IIT Bombay away from the hustle and bustle of the city.