The Road Ahead.....

An article that I wrote for Reflections, the batch magazine........

DoMS Day-Out was coming to an end! As the prizes were being awarded, I got a sudden sense & feel, my days in DoMS are numbered…The thought just rushed to my mind. I could feel it.

“The DoMS chapter of my life is almost over and it has been a fabulous 2 your tour of the long itinerary of life….Since all of us are in the twilight of our DoMS days, I was thinking of what was so different & special about DoMS that most of us, if not all, are going to remember. Is it just the lectures that we got from the profs that’s going to make us competent managers? Is it the placements and the fat pay packets that are going to differentiate us from the rest of the lot? Or was it just a 2 year holidaying in a wild life Sanctuary with Homo Sapiens as the dominant fauna and monkeys/deer playing the supporting role?”

DoMS is still a very young B-School in India and has miles to go before achieving that “Premier” B-School tag and as the management lessons teach, we as stakeholders still have a major role to play. We cant still boast of having an illustrious alumni base, cant still say that DoMS has a great research output that the haloed institutes like Harvard/Stanford/INSEAD in the West have. But as Prof. LSG says, “We are moving in the right direction to achieve that excellence in a quiet way.” We have the CRs and GSs of the world, who keep churning the numbers and running the algorithms that can baffle the best brains, we still have the researchers who can produce the best theses in the world, we still have the alumni who have performed admirably in a short corporate career.

I attended the DoMS interview process for the new batch in Mumbai recently and it was a great experience in terms of knowing how DoMS is perceived by the new aspirants. I had a chance to interact with some of the candidates and was pleased to know that our interview process was one of the best in terms of coordination amongst the many Indian B-Schools. I also talked to some of my friends from other B-Schools in Bombay and was quite pleased to know that we actually have strong fundamentals in terms of faculty, infrastructure etc.

Eventually this brings me back to the same question – the differentiating aspect of DoMS? My answer to that question is plain & simple – it’s the sense of belongingness. It’s the feeling that our achievements in life have to be in proportion to the stature that our alma mater possesses. As one of our seniors said when we entered this institute, the expectation from us will be quite high when we enter the corporate landscape. And the better you fulfill those expectations, the higher is your contribution to DoMS-IIT Madras.