Experience of a Lifetime, in a few words

Sitting in my cubicle, looking into the calendar kept on my desk, a myriad of thoughts are running in my head. Life, just a year back, was so different.

Last year, this was our last academic month as far as CBS goes. We were in the process of wrapping up the last few final touches and the internship part of the course. The final trimester exams were just ended. As a part of the curriculum, we had to work for a month in any organization, pertaining to our specialization before completing the course. This would help us realize in the practical sense, all that we studied during the one year course at Chennai Business School, from close quarters.

Chennai Business School has played a significant part in our lives. Just imagine a melting pot of people from different backgrounds, professionally, coming together on a single platform to ‘learn for the real world’. That’s CBS in a nutshell for you.

The unique point about CBS and its teaching practice is the amount of emphasis given on learning from experience as opposed to just limiting oneself to the textbooks. The rail fanning trips, trip to a Santhai at Acharapakkam were such experiences that’ll remain etched in our memories for a lifetime. These were a part of our Dynamic curriculum for the Marketing Communications varsity. I would call it Dynamic as it ensured that we were made to implement our learning from the class room on to the field and take the experience back from the field to the class rooms to complete this art called Knowledge.

Management was not only a part of our curriculum, in fact the way we were made to manage time and effort between classes and case study presentations, brought us close to the real world’s organizational situations. Though I must say, we’ve had tremendous fun going through these sessions. It’s not every day that you get to meet key people from the advertising and brand management world taking classes for you. But the fact of the matter is, that here we did get to see this happening almost every day. Lectures can never get just theoretical when the people implementing these concepts on a day to day basis, explain them to you. This aspect of CBS is quite unique to the style of teaching that is undertaken here. Getting to hear concepts from the horse’s mouth is nothing short of an inspiration as it helps in relating to the subject matter in a better way.

At the Marketing and Marcom varsity, we’ve always toyed with this idea of coming up with new means of exchanging information. A part of our lunch time was used for this purpose, where we formed sets of two and presented the most interesting and intriguing news articles for the day. The subject of the news items stretched across industries, but the idea here was to search for a marketing concept in these and discuss the pros and cons involved with the article. This was our way of giving food for our thoughts, literallyJ.

One of the fundamental aspects of doing a post graduation in management for a year is that you need to be at the job almost every day. You have little time to react and you don’t get enough chances coming your way everytime. Such circumstances not only help you understand the pressures of a work environment but also help in developing a balanced temperament towards situations that are in store in future. This was one of the most important take aways for me from this institution.

With the kind of support and guidance that you get from the faculty and other members of the management, learning never looked this enjoyable. Though I must confess, at times we’ve really got on to their nerves. All said and done, this was our way of growing up here.

CBS , to us , will always remain one of those crucial phases of our life, where we rediscovered ourselves and moved ahead in the journey of our life. It’s this journey, which will never end and all the roads will keep leading us back to CBS , in one way or the other.

Looking forward to that road soon.. :)

By Pradeep, Batch-2, 2007-08, Marcom Varsity

Current Employment: Communication Executive , Health Care Services Dept , Apollo Hospitals, Chennai

Life is ‘Busy’-ful

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"The busy man is troubled with but one devil; the idle man by a thousand"

There were these few months before I joined this college, soon after I had quit work and had a few months to “cool off”, when I used to watch TV all day long and slept as I wished. No commitments, no deadlines, no targets, no reprimands to dent my day. Though I missed being busy, I bought the fact that I needed the well deserved break. Soon enough all this came to a stand still. I had heard that the marketing varsity was the highlight of this college from our predecessors. When I joined the college I had my hopes higher and my head even higher, floating on a presumption that my experience in sales would make me one among the elite. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

All that I had assumed in my mind about what marketing was came crashing down to earth. I was introduced to the world behind the products that we see on the shelves, TVs, newspapers and where not, and trust me when I say there’s more to them than meets the eye. I was amazed when I learnt that marketing was way beyond just selling the product but went much into the creation of the product itself. That was when I was introduced to the concepts of segmentation, targeting, positioning, branding, Advertising, B2B, B2C, Services marketing and so on.

Apart from the marketing curriculum, we were exposed to a few sessions in retailing, advertising, PR etc which widened our understanding about the world outside. The best thing about this college was that they deliberately exposed us less to theoretical knowledge and brought in industry speakers from renown companies like CavinKare, HCL, O&M, JWT etc. and CEOs of other business entities, from different industries, to give us a sneak peek into how the jungle outside was and how high their expectation levels were when it came to employability during this recession.

Projects, case studies and assignments were showered upon us during the course with tight deadlines but much to our delight they were interesting enough to set our pulses racing and in the process got over our laziness. Sleepless nights became a habit and presentations became the stimuli for further endeavours. What we didn’t or couldn’t learn from the text books, we learnt through the case studies; So many live cases from Indian companies and a heavy load of global cases from the top B-schools of the world. Each case study opened up our minds to new invaluable strategies and implemental business logic. This gave us a healthy edge over students from other colleges when it came to job hunting as we knew what the employers expected, while the other’s thought they knew, but, eventually didn’t.

Where there is a smoke there is a fire. Similarly, where we fledglings are eventually fluttering around, we have had our favourite award winning Professor and mentor, Prof.Sathyanarayanan, constantly spending long hours at work, improving our curriculum, roping in industry speakers, giving feedback about performance and not to mention a few lighter moments too. This battle hardened knight somehow manufactured time to attend to his chores and also patiently heard us out when we had issues to be addressed. I couldn’t help but observe that we had tons to learn from him apart from the course.

Thus in these last few days, I feel, over the period of the course I’ve transcended to a competitive level of understanding of the complex business world and with my career path lit up I am but at a loss of words for thanking this course, for having set the sails for me.

P.S.Suhas, Batch -3 (2008-09), Marketing Varsity

A year full of practical retail experience

“Retail Is all About Detail” … these words of Mr. P.K Mohapatra, Retail Varsity Chairman are still ringing in my head. And true to his words CBS was able to give us in-depth understanding about the Retail industry. I can proudly claim that our course curriculum is one of the best in the country. The reason being, it has a comprehensive gamut of courses on Retail like Shopper Behavior, Luxury Retail , retail branding, Mall Management, Retail Supply chain Management, merchandise and store management, fashion merchandising, e-tailing, Customer Relationship Management, Rural retail, etc. handled by the industry experts.

That’s not all. “Learning with fun” has been our mantra and we have followed it judiciously by having numerous in-class games, with one of the first being the simulation of a Wholesale market scenario, followed by the “Beer Game” ( though unfortunately there was no beer in it for anyone!!).We also had games to predict Consumer Behavior.

The real-world projects that we did gave us a strong foothold in understanding the nuances of Retail both organized and traditional, right from Kirana store analysis to Big Bazaar Sabse Sasta 3 Din , site location project for an Adidas store and consumer survey work for Spencer’s Daily. If that was not enough, we had the privilege of rubbing shoulders with the who’s who of Retail at various Retail Summits throughout the year. To top it all, we also had several international case studies which let us take a glimpse into the best practices followed all across the world.

All these were carefully woven by Prof.Sathya, our Varsity Head who also deserves a special applause for motivating us, raising the bar and pushing us to do our extra best all throughout the course. It was an amazing year for us in learning about retailing, hands-on.

By Khadeeja Bilquees, CBS, Batch-3 (2008-09), Retail varsity