What are your top 5 challenges as the Dean/Director of the institution?
– I would consider the rigid curriculum which needs to be changed to embrace and include the current developments and practices in the world of business.
– the quality and approach of faculty; though it is a well known fact that attention span of any individual to any lecture is very much limited, most of the faculty believe in long lectures and the chalk-and talk method. There is no institute or course that guides faculty in best practices.
– the mind-set and expectation of the students; during all their school life they are trained rigorously into rote learning with primary focus on scoring in the examination and it is a huge challenge for us to make them think differently within a short span of time.
– the spirit of Responsibility and contribution; the world in general and the youth in particular today seem to be not very serious about their Responsibility and contribution to their family and to the country. There seem not many institutions that have value education in their curriculum.
– mushrooming of the management institutions and that too with the eye on ROI; they expect a windfall profit that too within a shortwhile, while the ground reality is that it takes some time for the world to notice your uniqueness and quality.
Institutions like yours with access to good infra get marginalized because of information asymmetry and lack of diversity (with strong local audience). What’s your take on this?
True. As I have mentioned earlier, it takes some time before the world stops to notice your uniqueness and quality. What is happening now is the battle of quality and in the long run all those that cannot serve the purpose will soon die out and only those that keep uncompromising quality upper-most in their agenda will survive and continue.
How can a candidate with a national test score (CAT/XAT/MAT/etc) be considered as an “Admit” in your program? What’s the process?
Though Anna University considers only the TANCET scores, those who have CAT/XAT/MAT scores can also join these courses in our institutions under the management quota on the basis of the merits of these tests.
How are you improving the employability factor in your b-school?
Like medicine and law, management courses also need on the job exposure and experience that one needs to gain experiential learning. Therefore, I insist that my students start working even while they are in the college – from the very first semester. We have arrangement with companies where they spend week after week every Saturday in that particular company and learn on-the-job.
How much time do you feel you’d need to become a nationally recognizable business school brand?
I would say between two to three years. As Lord Krishna says ‘the labour is in our hands but not the fruits’. There is wide web of influences other than the quality.