Everyday Something New!!

Interesting - although I have learnt so much, there is still so many things to explore!! Everyday brings something new - I am off to India in another week and for the first time in my life just dont feel like working !! This is not who I am but its for me its like the lull before the storm.... Besides I think it is important to refresh and recharge before taking the plunge into the academic world again. Academics should be good, after all the practical learnings on the job...Lets see ..

XLRI GMP Placements 2008

XLRI General Management Program (GMP), one year full time management program, has concluded a successful season of placements for its 2008 batch. The batch has been offered plum roles - like AVP-Finance, Director, Associate Director, AGM Operations,Chief Manager, Managing Consultant, Strategic Account Manager, Client Solutions Manager, etc. - clearly highlighting the potential of the participants to don middle and senior management roles. Also placements helped 30% of the batch change sectors where students had prior work experience. One participant opted out of the process to start his own entrepreneurial venture.The process attracted 54 companies, as opposed to 23 last year, and made 101 offers to 53 participating students. The average salary of individual offers stood at INR 17.8 Lakhs (an increase of close to 20% from previous year), while the highest domestic offer was INR 33.8 Lakhs and the average of international offers was USD 130,000 (an increase of 30%). Sponsored candidates have also got elevated roles and middle/senior management responsibilities from their parent companies.The batch witnessed a good mix of participating companies from diverse sectors such as Banking, Energy, IT, Consulting, Manufacturing, Steel, Real Estate and Telecom. Arcelor Mittal, Reliance ADAG, Jindal Steel, DLF, Tata Communications, Cairns Energy, L&T were some of the major recruiters of the batch. Few of the consulting companies that participated are Mckinsey, Accenture, IBM S&C, ICRA Management Consulting (IMACs), TCS Global Consulting, KSA Technopak. Axis bank, SBI Capital, ICRA, UBS were some of the BFSI companies that turned up for recruitment. IT/ITES majors like HP, Cognizant, Satyam, Wipro, Inautix, Hexaware, and Genpact participated."With just two years of organized placement support from the Institute, the one year General Management Programme of XLRI has firmly established itself as a source of quality talent for recruiters. There were a number of recruiters who personally expressed their extreme satisfaction with the quality of the participants. These positive comments reinforce our belief that we are doing things right as far as our one year programme goes." quoted Prof. Uday Damodaran, Chairperson of the Placements at XLRI.The placement season was held during 2nd week of February at Mumbai followed by rolling placements in March at Jamshedpur. The process was aimed at offering flexibility to the students and recruiters to find the right fit, as the participants were potential middle and senior management candidates with experience ranging from 5.5 to 15 years, with the average pegged at 7.5 years. Students also visited Australia as part of the international immersion introduced in the curriculum from this year. From the next batch, the immersion module is expected to include various options for students, with the tie-ups that XLRI has with major universities across the globe. XLRI has plans to increase the student intake from the next batch, due to high response from industry.

The Last Lecture......

I have been following Prof. Randy Pausch of the Computer Science in CMU. He was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer and in spite of having the best medical care in the world he is slowly slipping into a void from where there is no turning back. CMU has a lecture series called "The last Lecture" where a renowned personality is asked to give a lecture imagining that this would be his/her last lecture in this life !!!!!!

The speech by Prof. Pausch shows what a person is capable of. An excerpt from his speech(verbatim).


"And the other thing is I am in phenomenally good
health right now. I mean it’s the greatest thing of cognitive dissonance you will ever see is the fact
that I am in really good shape. In fact, I am in better shape than most of you. [Randy gets on the
ground and starts doing pushups] [Applause] So anybody who wants to cry or pity me can down and
do a few of those, and then you may pity me. [laughter]
All right, so what we’re not talking about today, we are not talking about cancer, because I spent a
lot of time talking about that and I’m really not interested. If you have any herbal supplements or
remedies, please stay away from me. [laughter]"

His speech is being published in the form a book called "The Last Lecture" by to be released on April 8.

There are many other nuggets throughout.The complete text of the speech is present in youtube at : -

video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5700431505846055184