Only By Admitting What We Are, Can We Get What We Want - Srinivas Guptha Kapaganti - Best50 - Class Of 2017

One of my biggest fears, ever since I can remember, is being mediocre and hence this forms the crux of my story. I am from the beautiful town of Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh. Owing to my dad’s continuous transfers I attended schools in 5 different places but I was able to quickly adapt and was among the top students in every school. I graduated from NIT Warangal in electrical and electronics engineering in 2012. This is the place where I made friends for life and it also helped me enhance my personality. Apart from excelling in academics and building my passion for some subjects, I was able to develop a holistic personality by being a very active member of many clubs and committees. NIT Warangal has also played an important role in building my value system. Be it the position of student mess secretary or an NCC cadet or playing a game of volleyball with friends, all these things had a great role in building my personality.

I started my career with Texas Instruments as an Analog design engineer. I was the only one to be selected from my college. To be selected by a company which hasn’t selected anyone from my college for 3 years in a row, moreover competing in a domain in which my peers from other branches were more competent than me was a dream which seemed very unlikely to come true.  Thus being selected by TI boosted my self-confidence and encouraged me to always believe in myself. I had heard tales of how challenging the job was. It is a profile that graduates, post graduates and even doctorate holders from best IITs and research organisation passionately fight for. It took me some time to actually believe that I had made it. After I joined the company, I realised most of the tales were true. The job was no less than “Rocket science” and I felt as if I was nothing more than an average performer.  I did my best to learn the skills as quickly as possible but I still felt the need for improvement. Even though I had a good understanding of the domain, I lacked the passion to be a top performer. So I realised that time had come for a swot analysis and I did a lot of soul searching for the next course of action. My experiences had taught me a big lesson -“being good at and liking it are two completely different things”. Finally, the events and a lot of thinking on my part led me to pursue MBA.

After 3 years at TI, I had embarked on a new journey. This journey is a bit different from the previous ones in the way that I am clear about what to expect from this one. Either being part of the student council or excelling in academics by being among the top 12 of the batch or actively taking part and winning some B-school competitions or being part of the college volleyball team or gaining international exposure through student exchange program, all of them were part of the plot I have written for me in this journey. Nothing was just coincidental. I never let any criticism or praise influence me too much and this trait proved to be very helpful in MBA. Being a part of multiple things and with a value system that motivated me to question any wrong doings, I bore the brunt of people’s judgements. I accepted their constructive feedback and insulated myself from everything else. I chose to do my internship with Amazon as a marketing management intern, where I got a chance to implement the strategy for new customer acquisition through Amazon home page.

While all my previous journeys have made me technically strong and the learnings were very apparent, the learning at IIM Lucknow is subtle and only the person who is thoroughly conscious can feel it. I feel very lucky to be one among such conscious individuals. 3 years of work experience has made it clear of what to expect from an MBA and it also made me strong to pursue the goals which will bring the best out of me rather than running races which might be the best races in other people’s words and which I might even win but I wouldn’t know why I wanted to win them in the first place.