There are around millions of apps that are developed in today's world. But, not many that can help you locate safe shelters during Earthquakes. Today's feature -
Pranishaa R. Prakash formed a team of 6 to take up a project for the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. The idea was to develop a prototype of an app that could locate earthquake shelters. Even after the successful submission of the project, Pranishaa felt something was wrong. She convinced the team for few more days to work on the features and make it more workable. Her eye for detail and the ability to read between the lines, her found her a place amongst InsideIIM's Best-50 Most Employable MBA Graduates!
The following is Pranishaa R. Prakash's set of responses to a questionnaire floated amongst MBA graduates to determine the top-50 most employable MBA graduates of the Class of 2020. Amongst the massive number of entries and responses being evaluated by the Founder of InsideIIM-Kampus Konversations, Pranishaa’s story and profile stood out. Here's a little about her, in her own words.
"I always want to be that person who could never be questioned of not being enough. I advocate a utopian ideology driving me to leave no stone unturned to make sure that no doubts are raised on my beliefs and motives. I envision myself to be that influential person in my organization who would be entrusted with the responsibility to steer head any venture thrown on the organization and would make sure to see the end of it successfully. Being a resolute individual with constant motivation has helped me succeed in my ventures including corporate competitions, exams and much more."
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.
"Life poses every individual with crossroads at some point or another. I experienced my turn while awaiting my CAT results. Being an engineering graduate, I was offered jobs from the campus. Given the level of competitiveness, securing a job is indeed a milestone achieved. However, I risked them all by giving up on the offers I had secured while awaiting my CAT results. It is also true that no one can completely predict the outcome of the CAT as it is all relative, making it impossible to know how well others performed. Believing that I gave the best I could, I decided to rely on it for my future professionally. The time till I could land in a B-School kept me very anxious as I literally had no alternate choices left."
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 strongly believe that helping others is one of the core purposes of living. In lieu of that, I have made sure to extend as much as the help I can to all my peers, family and others. It is also for this reason that I want to take up teaching as a hobby with which I could help and empower people with knowledge and education. To quote an incident distinctly, on learning that my parents’ friend’s daughter was not able to perform well in her 12th Mathematics and was anxious about the Board exams, I offered to help her owing to my existing beliefs. We connected and scheduled classes over the skype as I had just started my MBA studies. Every weekend I would sit with her and do math tutoring online along with managing my own studies. My efforts bore fruit when she cleared her board paper with flying colours. This instinct of mine also drove me to join Nurturing Minds, an IIM Shillong initiative where we conduct day-long classes for all school children from nearby localities during the weekends."
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
"I have always been oriented towards adding more value to my initiatives and have been on the constant lookout for its betterment. During graduation, we formed a team of 6 to explore opportunities outside our engineering curriculum. I pushed the team to take up a project for the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India, that involved creating an application to guide our countrymen to shelter areas during earthquakes. I steered the team in developing a prototype when in fact only a presentation was expected from us, to make the worthiness of the initiative evident. On creating the prototype very well in time, I strongly felt that we were capable of enhancing it further. However, the other team members had an opinion of having already done enough for the opportunity. Despite having little time in hand, the desire to do more was very much alive within me which drove me to convince my team that there still existed further scope for innovations by putting across logical points and countering the pain points the team members anticipated. It was then decided unanimously to incorporate additional features into the application by linking it to the Aadhaar database of users."
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?
"Since being a child, I have been very drawn to Mathematics. The subject is loaded with numbers and calculations always attracted me. With growing into the B-School, this interest took me to dive deep into subjects of Statistics and Analytics. Though I am finding my way into the subjects, yet I aspire to learn more in them. Apart from academics, my internship helped me gain a special interest in the Supply Chain dynamics of Stationery items. The internship tenure gave me a great opportunity to observe and learn the market dynamics first hand. The lessons I have learnt interacting with the super stockists, distributors, wholesalers and retailers tend to shape my views and decisions even in situations outside the internship making me realize my interest and expertise."
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 always recognized the ardent need of giving back to the place we belong to. Considering the monetary amount involved, I drill down to the granularity of helping the country we live in prosper better. For this, I have identified two prominent ideas that might help best. The primary focus should be laid on the field of health. For India to be catching up globally in inventing medicines and vaccines, it is time to concentrate on developing a healthier country backed by deeper research initiatives. For the second venture, I would like to aim at realizing the truest potential of our villages which might still be untapped. For this, facilitation of a program needs to be put in place that would help companies jointly adopt villages and provide them with infrastructure, training and other facilities along with creating demand for their produce and talent. This would achieve the dual purpose of development of companies and villages. These two areas if invested in would help our country grow multifold into a healthier and wealthier nation."
Also read -