Competitive
Camaraderie
- by Maloy Patnaik *
Imagine a crack team of ace
pilots, at a briefing before an extremely dangerous raid behind enemy lines.
Although they are all confident that their training will ensure their success,
they also recognize the fact that at the end of the mission, some of the people
may not come back into the room.
This is very similar to the
situation that exists in the waiting room outside the interview chamber during
the placements. The pilots have donned business suits and campus placements are
on at XIMB.
At XIMB, we believe that the two
years that we spend here are essential to build up this competitive camaraderie
in every student that passes out.
The competition here is intense.
The unpredictable XAT, followed by the stringent scrutiny of the GD/PIs ensures
that the students who get admitted here are the cream of the applicants. In fact
less than 1% of all applicants actually make it into the final call list.
The admissions are only the
beginning of two years of the toughest schedules that can be found in any
B-School in the country. In fact the first term at college goes past in flurry
of lectures, surprise-quizzes and presentations.
It is during this term that a
student gets to build friendships, which go on to become lifelong associations.
The wide variety of people that one gets to meet here is unprecedented. For
example, the first week that I was here, I was wondering what I was doing in
such a place. The guy sitting next to me was in the Limca Book of Records for
being able to memorize and reproduce more than a couple of thousand binary
digits (?!?!?!???!) in under four minutes. Then there was this girl who had done
her Masters in Germany, another guy from Korea, some guy who was a green belt
and one who was a Six-Sigma expert. One thing that I realized is that if you are
looking for competition, well you will get lots more than you bargained for.
If you look at the work
experience of the batch, well, what can I say, but that it's worth looking. With
an average work experience of about 27 months, about half the batch has previous
work experience. And when I say work experience I am talking about experience in
companies like Accenture, Samsung, Oracle, Seimens, IBM� and lots more. There
are students who have left jobs paying more than Rs. 600,000 p.a. to join this
place.
People generally think of
B-Schools as an elevator to the best jobs around. We must admit that with two of
our highest salaries at 12 lakhs p.a. and an average salary of around 4.6 lakhs,
we do lend credence to such belief. But you have to understand that jobs are not
the most important factor that drives most of the people here. In fact it is
nowhere near the top. See, the moment you enter XIMB, you are almost assured of
a job. The fact that there are people who leave jobs paying more than this to
join this Institute does bear witness to the fact that it is more the challenge
than anything else that drives the people here. Besides, there are students who
even opt out of the placement process to pursue their dreams.
Ask anybody on campus and he will
tell you that grades don't matter. But I wonder if it is because grades really
don't matter or is it because we have so many tests that people just lose track
of grades. Not really. The competition as far as academics are concerned is
cut-throat. The relative grading pattern generally followed for evaluation ranks
you against the batch and there is no escape. The difference among the grades of
the top 10 students would be typically at the third decimal point.
There is continuous evaluation,
which simultaneously stretches and stimulates the students to keep pushing the
limits of their endurance. Typically in the first term, there would be about 8
papers (out of 40 in the entire course) and one may expect anything from 4 to 8
quizzes and assignments in each paper. Most of the quizzes being surprise
quizzes, there can be no excuse for not being upto the task as far as studies
are concerned.
In fact, excuses are something
that are categorically discouraged in any field at XIMB. But then, there need be
no excuses when it comes to enjoying campus life here. If students here work
hard, then they play harder. With the campus located bang in the middle of the
hospitality district, restaurant hopping is an experience that can be matched
only by the in-house disco that is setup during the JLT parties. Homegrown
deejays stir up the place with the grooviest tracks and the dance floor sizzles.
It is not unusual to have parties lasting all-night into the wee hours of the
morning.
But then it is also not
impossible to come back from an all-night party and read a notice on your
desktop, from the Marketing Prof, declaring a quiz on Kotler. It is in moments
like this that the students tend to think less kindly about the hard-wired
campus, with a full-featured Academic Information System, on the fibre optic
LAN. One tends to think that with talk of future batches being provided with
laptops, will they ever be able to escape from the consummate competition.
Again, no excuses. Long Live
Competitive Competition.
