A Rendezvous with MBA
Sometimes the most obvious decisions fail, and the least obvious ones’ flourish. A similar adventure happened with me when I started experiencing my life at a B-School. Today revisiting that, hit by a wave of nostalgia; memories of long lecture hours, of altercations in the student committee meetings, of late night hangouts around the campus, of sleepless nights to write assignments, of nervous interviews and of immense fun; couldn’t help but deluge down. They say that the school is for children, the college is for the teens and the life is for the adults. As for a b-school, what can I say; the B-school is where an adult goes to school to relive those teenage days!
A year and a half back, when my B-school journey started, it started with a bang and quite literally at that. The beautiful hill-station campus, rigorous lectures, corporate events and the most dreadful – summer placements with a blissful moral rearmament session in the hills of Panchgani. The arena of highs and lows has given ample experience to quote literature altogether but apart from the usual stuff that people talk about which is quite generic to all B-Schools and MBA lives, I would like to mention my most prestigious achievement so far in this journey –L’Oréal Brandstorm. A brand as valuable as L’Oréal, a competition with a legacy of 24 years and the tag of a National Finalist, sums it all up in a single line. When I started working on the competition, it took all the adrenaline rush of me to value the event and work to win it. Not to forget, the initial ideas that we pitched in with the support of the college and suggestion from seniors was good enough to make us reach the Regional Finals. Once there, we started off our real tour.
An exciting dream to go to Paris to quench the trophy from the heads of the brand was enough motivation to be an active seeker. From refreshing ways of presentation rather than the ideal-look-at-the-slides-and-speak method, we presented a skit for our digital disruption ideas which ranged from vending machine popping out face cream tubes to wearable technology and we cracked a spot in the Final 5 for the National Round beating the likes of top most MBA colleges. What came as a surprise was the L’Oréal India Head Office visit where we interacted with senior leadership members and got a hint of the multi-cultural global exposure that the organization offers. No matter how many people go around telling that losing is a temporary feeling, I believe it is not. To me it is a continuously burning desire to win and achieve something bigger in life, to remember this and not get demotivated. An overall six months of pure learning and interaction with different sets of consumers, a very different corporate real life case challenge and an enthralling team experience to rejuvenate. A year just ended doing competitions and working with the student committee running across the campus juggling between the lectures and having fun with friends.
And here I stand at the brink of my MBA life, attending lasts in the journey of firsts-photoshoots, trips, and final exams. I feel grateful for all the experiences and the way they have shaped me. And as I sit to pen down the last chapters of life of my rendezvous with MBA at SIBM, Pune I hope that the journey of learning and adding new experiences to my life never ends. 
-Swati Gupta
( Swati is a student of the second year, Marketing at SIBM, Pune and was a national finalist of L’Oréal Brandstorm 2016)
