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