Sunday, June 28, 2009

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

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