How many times have you been bombarded with the million dollar ‘Why MBA?’ question during B-school interviews? Always, right? Ever wondered if that’s what you should be asking the school instead - Why MBA from X, Y or Z?
Well, I think so too and that’s why I thought of putting together the prime reasons that made my Great Lakes Experience unforgettable to help answer this very question for prospective candidates.
(Promotion - Great Lakes Institute of Management – Last date to apply to PGPM November 30th, 2014.
Apply now.)
Not just teachers, your mentors for life
Mentors have a great role to play in any individual’s life. And we have all the right in the world to decide our own mentors. I shortlisted the B-schools I wanted to apply to based on the faculty base and the curriculum. I was clear I wanted to specialize in marketing and was convinced there was no better place to do marketing from than a school which boasted of marketing stalwarts like Dr. Seenu Sreenivasan from Stanford or Dr. Paul Prabhakar from Northern Illinois. After all, it is quite a thing to learn conjoint analysis from the person who coined the term!
Join a school which has your probable mentor, someone you look up for inspiration. Only then can you make the most of your MBA.
You’re who you hang out with
It is not enough to learn about leadership in classroom, it is also important to learn how leaders think and work. And there’s no better way of doing that than interacting with them. Each B-school has its own network and invites renowned personalities to share their insights and interact with the students.
Guest Lectures and Industry interaction is one of the key focus areas at Great Lakes, and the schools aims to bring together renowned personalities, industry leaders, corporate heads, alumni and students in order to provide an ideal knowledge sharing and disseminating platform.
I got to meet and interact with leaders like Philip Kotler, Nitin Paranjape, R. Gopalakrishnan, Dr. K.C. Chakrabarty, Jonathan Mariner to only name a few at Great Lakes.
Stretch yourself, find yourself
It’s rightly said that you don’t know what you can do until you try it. And I never knew I could read that many pages, do that many assignments, be awake for that much time and still have that much fun chasing (or running away from) deadlines till I joined Great Lakes.
What you don’t have at Great Lakes, is the time to sit and stare. Prof. Bala V. Balachandran, Founder Dean of Great Lakes, with his high spirits and overwhelming energy was a true inspiration to all of us and taught us how one can dream big and strive to make them true.
And when I say ‘stretch yourself’ I must mention Prof. Venkat Krishnan and Prof. Tapan Panda. I often thought that there should be a Great Lakes Bravery Award given to all the students who dared to take both Prof. Venkat’s and Prof. Tapan’s courses in the same term! They always pushed you harder than you thought you were capable of performing.
On hindsight, taking their courses was one of the wisest decisions I made in Great Lakes. All those grilling morning 6:45 AM classes were totally worth it and made me realise how much I was capable of achieving when I put my mind to it.
(Promotion - Great Lakes Institute of Management – Last date to apply to PGPM November 30th, 2014.
Apply now.)
Ideal Setting for the intellect to grow
The first thing that strikes you when you set foot on Great Lakes is the size of the campus. The Great Lakes Campus is comparable is the best in the world in terms of infrastructure, aesthetics and more importantly an example of sustainable use of resources. The campus provides a serene and tranquil environment with ideal setting for pursuing extremely rigorous and intellectually challenging programs.
The sprawling 27.5 acre, LEED Platinum rated greencampus is just out of the world and made sure the days spent at Great Lakes were etched in our memories forever. No Great Laker can forget stealing time out of the super hectic schedule for short visits to the sea shore or the 4 AM filter coffee and maggi at Bistro while cracking the next day’s case study. Neither can they forget the night outs at the resource centre before exams and the evening soiree at the basketball court. The memories just stay with you forever!
A family for life – the Alumni Network
It’s never an end when you graduate from Great Lakes but a whole new beginning. The bonds forged at the institute don’t end when then batch completes its tenure but stays with you life-long in form of the alumni network. The school’s alumni stay in touch and help each other long after they graduate. The school also has city wise alumni meets in the metros and outside India and Mega alumni meet at Chennai to help its alumni interact with one another.
Last but not the least, is the sense of pride in being Great Lakes alum. I am proud of being a Great Laker because along with equipping me with the required skill set to excel in my life, it also gave me the opportunity to meet and interact with some people I might not have met otherwise, it introduced me to my mentors, helped me test my limits, provided me with a whole new family and memories to last for a lifetime! What more can you ask from a B-school?
- Gajendra Sisodia
A proud Great Laker
Gajendra is a techie turned marketing enthusiast from Great Lakes Batch of 2013, currently based out of Madras (yes, that sounds more cool). He is currently working with a health care start up where he is a full time corporate planning manager and part time music addict cum travel junkie cum HBR devotee.
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(This is a Promoted Feature Story and the Editorial Team at InsideIIM has played no part in creation of this Story)
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