Growing up in India, classrooms have matured along with ourselves. Remember the times when we were small, really really small when we used to cry every day to school, didn’t want to leave our cosy homes when the classroom was all about fun and exploring, and later came a time when things started to get serious, like really serious. Your whole life supposedly was decided by what you did in those classrooms. Only as we grew did we know that they were all wrong; that there was always a silver lining waiting for us. But rest assured that, ‘The classroom experience’ has in many ways made us into what we are today.
According to me ‘The Classroom Experience’ can be categorized into the following categories
- The ‘I want to play, I don’t care about anything else’ category
- The ‘I hate homework’ category
- The ‘When is the Games Period’ category
- The ‘Board exam is the be all and end all’ category
Most will agree that the first category is the one we used to enjoy the most, like when we used to sit and colour pictures, build sand castles, clay models and used to run our childish innovation in full throttle. As we grew up, we thought those times were over and we’ll never get to relive those memorable childhood days.
IIM Indore had other ideas though. They wanted to rekindle those creative buds which have been lying dormant for a long time now, or in my case, I thought it never existed in the first place. A course was designed for Design Thinking, focussed on developing innovative entrepreneurial solutions for problems around us in our day to day lives. We were given a real-life problem statement of a shop in Chennai which donates clothes but provides the receiver with a shopping experience. We were given the task of coming up with innovative solutions to enhance the user experience.
Once the solution was prepared, we had to come up with a model for it. When the Professor announced to create a model, we were thinking about business models and stuff. Then came the surprise package that the model had to be a physical one and we were given equipment such as cardboard, styrofoam sheets, modelling clay, chart papers, crayons, sketches, paints and many more. Suddenly, the minds which were grilled for a year to come up with analysis after analysis, calculations after calculations were faced with a task of rewinding to the “I want to play, I don’t care about anything else category”. For the next 2 hours, all we did was play, play and more play. Played with clay models, glue, scissors and what not. All the sleep-deprived management student’s eyes were suddenly excited with good old memories. All the worries of placement suddenly didn’t seem to matter anymore. Everyone was reliving those memorable times and probably just probably would have realised that in the end, it will be all fine.
Which ABG company would you want to work for and why?
The ABG company I would like to work for is Aditya Birla Chemicals. The reasons being as follows, first is that it would give me an opportunity to associate with multinational conglomerate which is focussed at developing leaders reflected by its ranking of No. 4 in top global companies for leaders. It would give me an opportunity to interact with wonderful leaders and to focus on developing myself into a world-class leader. Second, I’m interested in ABG Chemicals because of the background I carry of being a chemical engineer and hands down will not be able to find a better chemicals company to work for.
- Titus M