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.
I am a computer science engineer by education, but I was scared of coding during all my engineering days. I always kept myself two steps behind and avoided picking projects which required coding knowledge. Though I was pretty familiar with the basics of coding languages, thanks to the C++ subject in high school, there was always an uncertainty attached to coding that scared me of taking up such projects - be it curricular or extra-curricular. I used to play hide and seek with coding, so much so that I did not even code a single line in the engineering major project but still secured the highest marks in the class and got the project selected for inter-college competition. I employed my presentation and communication skills to good use. I was leveraging my unique presentation attributes to secure jobs and marks in graduation.
But during my role at UrbanClap, I turned a regular weekend competition into an incredible learning and path-breaking opportunity. While I was in the Business team, a weekend Bug-Bash Competition was announced. Each participant was tasked to find bugs/issues on the UrbanClap platform - android, iOS, and web applications - which could hamper excellent customer experience. I decided to leverage my computer science engineering learnings in the Weekend Bug Bash Challenge. I went on to win the competition by reporting 40+ bugs, the highest by any member of the company. I presented issues to leaders of each vertical across the company, an honor in itself. Consequently, I got offered to join Urbanclap's technology team and work ahead with product managers in shaping the company's core products across businesses.
As big as it could get, the offer made me happy and took me back to the love-hate relationship I had with coding during my graduation days. I was doing quite well in my role with the Business team, but the opportunity presented to me was big enough to stall all my fears and push me to learn new things with the Technology team, for their work was already intriguing me for a long.
I took the plunge of accepting the offer and joined the technology team. I started slowly but persisted enough to deliver well for long. I shipped 70+ products in the next two years, led multi-dimensional projects, and got awarded the 'UrbanClap Champion' award in the new role- an award given to only 1% of the whole company for exemplary performance in the quarter.
With a strong belief in pushing my fears aside and a simple nuance of using my curriculum skills in an uncoerced competition, I learned the basics of self-control. Essentially my first step towards leadership and risk-taking, the achievement always brings in cherished memories of working in a genuinely new setting.
When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.
Helping others comes naturally to me. I keep doing things in my day-to-day life which in some or another form are a help to my colleagues, friends, or even strangers. One such incident almost 6-months back in my MBA journey. So when I made it through the IIMK PGP-BL programme, I documented my application to interview to finally be a part of the Co'22 cohort in the form of a Quora answer. Since I have been writing answers on Quora for 4-5 years now, I thought it'll be just another answer in the history of Quora. But it turned out to be something special. First, other students from Round 2 of the admissions cycle of the programme (I got selected in Round 1) started appreciating my long answer in the form of comments. I started getting much traction on my answer. So much so, my answer has now become my most viewed answer on Quora. But this was not it.
After I later joined the programme, in the month of April, I got contacted by an IIMK PGP-BL aspirant in the form of a Quora message. He was looking for advice to apply for the next year of the admissions cycle of the programme. He was going pretty well with his job at Deloitte but wanted to go for an MBA soon. He stumbled about this programme, so he wanted to inquire more about it and how he should go about it. I got on a quick call with him and asked him to focus on his GRE, which he was about to give in a month. I asked him to get a good score and then get back to me. He did the same. He reached back with a GRE Score of 321 and now was looking for help in 4-essays required as part of the admissions process.
I got on a call with him and gave him a structure on how to approach, focus, and the style to write in each of those essays. He was pretty obedient to my advice and created a rough draft of all the essays. He now asked me to read those essays and give feedback on them. His request put me on the burner because I was in the middle of my MBA curriculum. Term 2 was on, and I was already grappling with Corporate Finance and Macroeconomics courses. I am also a part of the Students' Committee and participated in multiple case competitions. So, the workload was high on me. But since I had agreed to help him, I said yes to his request. I tried to manage my time and requested him to come on a zoom call late at night, for which he complied. We used to get on zoom calls and go through his essays one by one. I made sure I read each of the lines and gave feedback on it. After multiple iterations of essays and many zoom calls, his final essays were ready. He submitted and soon got a shortlist for the next round, and now he had to submit another essay in the form of an alternative resume.
I gave him an idea to take a different approach and make a pictorial path of his journey until now, leading him to IIMK. He agreed, went back, and created a draft. He superseded my expectations, and we again got on a zoom call to make cosmetic changes to the draft. His final submission was ready, and soon he got an interview invite with that submission.
The final hurdle was an interview, for which I got on a long call with him and gave him a dose of confidence and motivation. I also asked him what to pick and how to approach the questions during the interview. He prepared well, and as planned, his interview went for only 15 minutes. The interview panelists were so happy with all his submissions that they didn't grill him for long like they were grilling other candidates for 45-50 minutes in each interview. I knew what the result was going to be, but there was a wait for official confirmation.
And yes, he got through the IIMK PGP-BL programme Co'23. He called and said that I made his IIM dream true. It was such an emotional moment, and I could feel the happiness in his words on call. He was just so happy. He then told me that he comes from a not-so-well-to-do family and how much getting into an IIM means for him. And that to IIMK, one of the top IIMs of the country.
So, this is something I did purely for someone else as an actual selfless act, and I'm going to cherish it for my life.
Tell us about a time when you disagreed with an opinion/idea/decision. What did you do about it?
Being a part of the Students' Committee of the PGP-BL Programme at IIMK is a big responsibility in itself. The programme is created to nurture individuals into leaders. When one is assigned a responsibility to be a representative leader of the leaders, it takes a lot from oneself mentally and physically.
One of the trying times was when the Students' Committee team was deciding how to go about a decision and was confused on what step to take. Since the team is of 4 students, the numbers for an idea which the other three were proposing outweighed my opinion. The numbers were overshadowing me. The situation is a pure clash of two essential classes the IIMK programme office had scheduled for the students. One was with Prof. Raj Raghunathan from NYU, who was expected to take his 3rd Happiness workshop on his module of Creativity and Leadership. The other was the KPMG conducted certification on Lean Six Sigma. KPMG had agreed to have classes only on weekends, and Prof. Raj's classes were crunched in a week as per his availability. Since the batch wasn't showing a good response to the external workshops, one of the team members went ahead and scheduled KPMG classes as an overlap to Prof. Raj's classes, but incidentally, the batch showed a positive response to his workshop classes and didn't want to miss one class to attend the other.
The office refused to help at the last moment. The other three suggested that we should apologize to Prof. Raj for the low numbers in the class. But I opined that we could apologize, directly check with Prof. Raj on his availability the next day and then reschedule his weekend class on Monday. The other feared that it could hamper our college's relationship with Prof. Raj as only office-bearers could get in touch with him. But I took the risk.
I went ahead and messaged him on WhatsApp number which he had shared in the class. He was kind enough to accept our request and reschedule the class.
My proactiveness helped us have a full-fledged class, and we as a team were delighted with the final result.
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?
Driven by curiosity, I have tried my hands a lot of the things from food-blogging to running marathons to volunteering for film-making, and fortunately, it's been a good run in all of those things. But one thing which is very dear to me, and I feel that I can certainly claim a depth of knowledge in that field, is internships. During my engineering days, I was always curious to solve problems. Coming from a business family, I always wanted to explore how companies use problem-solving techniques in different projects and assignments. Back then, in 2012, internet space in India was taking shape. Startups were cropping up; Amazon India was cementing its position, Flipkart was growing, no Urbanclap or Swiggy, and Uber used to offer free rides.
And that's when I got my hand at Internships. I started interning with startups in various roles, from Digital Marketing to Business Development. I started loving how I could intern, work on a unique set of problems, learn new things and even earn good money while engineering. Then the craze went on, and I soon got opportunities to work with brands like OLX, P&G, Adidas, PepsiCo, WeChat, Teach for India, and even Govt. of India. By the end of my engineering, I had done 20 internships with startups and brands across an umbrella of roles and domains.
This experience helped me come out of the cocoon of engineering and learn completely new things. With the confidence to crack internships, I now mentor young students in their graduation on how to find and apply for internships. It's good to see internships space evolving and companies respecting their interns with reasonable stipends and meaningful work.
Representing my college in so many companies and brands, I was inducted into the college's Hall of Fame - Class of 2016.
If 10 Million Dollars (approximately INR 73.5 Crores) is given to you to use it any way you deem fit what would you do with this corpus?
Having seen the challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic at close hands, I am deeply touched by the appalling condition of the healthcare, especially doctors and medical personnel, in our country. The government's focus remains on building a backbone of hospitals and medical equipment production in the country. Still, the real issue which boiled up during the pandemic was the condition of doctors and nurses. The amount of toll they had to go through to treat the patients in such trying times is an alarming sign, and the added scrutiny and harassment they were subjected to was an overbearing mental toll on them.
There are innumerable gaps in India's healthcare system, ranging from human capital to pedagogy and infrastructure.
I would choose to break down this $10M corpus into three funds (50-30-20):
- "HealFund" for capital expenditure on the healthcare sector incredibly human medical capital
- "IdeaFund" for capital expenditure on the startup idea I plan to work on post-5-years in the corporate setting. As part of the MBA programme, a team of our five batchmates worked on a startup idea called "Anvita: Bridging the Gap" in the space of elderly day-care as part of our academic submission. It's almost like Urban Company for the elderly. We plan to build the venture with the initial research starting as we step into our corporate roles.
- "InvestFund" for investment across a portfolio consisting of large-cap equity, government bonds, PPF, and gold assets to maintain a sustainable cash flow stream to sustain day-to-day operations.
HealFund would aim at the large-scale transformation of the doctor training institutes in Tier-2 cities (to start with). I am a strong supporter of localized solutions to solve large-scale problems in the country. The development of these institutions would focus on three key pointers:
- Human Capital Improvements: Structured and efficient hiring-cum-training senior doctors as teachers is the journey's first step. It'll be soon supported with an improved solution while cutting down expenses in legacy processes by bringing down the inefficiencies.
- Digital Excellence: Inculcating digital technologies at secondary levels would be the key to improving the institute's convenience, methodology, and pedagogy.
- Calculated Spending: Procurement of the various resources could be done in standardized processes with streamlined allocation.
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