NuclioManiac

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

A letter to friends .. who are always asking .. Where have you been ?

My turn now :-)

Well I graduated from ISB this year and it was unbelievable experience. ISB is such a great business school and it surpassed all my expectations. I was extremely anxious upon choosing ISB as a business school, as I didnt know much about the school and was all set to go to the US for an MBA (was accepted at Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Tuck (Dartmouth), Darden and Insead). But keeping my long term goals of being in India, and at least attempting to become an industrialist, ISB it was.

ISB got hold of me from the word go and didn't let me go .. the year just zipped by. I didn't sleep a lot, but neither did I study. In fact, I doubt if i learn anything about an MBA at all, its just a degree i got hold of while networking for a year ... and boy oh boy did I do so major networking.

I became extremely involved in ALL the extra curricular activities on campus. was elected as the Social events coordinator of the institute, which meant that anything non-academic fell under my control, things such as networking events, parties, speaker sessions, picnics, alumni interaction events, some more parties ... you get the drift.

Apart from this, I was also heavily involved in the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital club, and was elected vice president of the same. This club is Big in ISB, and managed to get the business cards of scores of young entrepreneurs from India. The icing on the cake, was an event which we call the Tie-Isb connect, which is an event, attend by over 60 VCs from silicon valley and hundreds of delegate entrepreneurs.

anyway ... this went on for 9 months or so .. after which I ran away to HEC, Paris for an exchange. Paris was an unbelievable experience, and like Pramod, I not only used the opportunity to travel, but also develop some contacts in nuclear energy, which is big in france, fashion (was given a job by Moet henessy and Louis Vuitton) and European Private Equity. In my free time, I peeied on the Insead wall, pictures to follow ;-) Paris is a wonderful city and staying there for 4 months, I really learnt why people claim that travelling is the best way to learn.

I did pop back in India, during the middle of the my stint in Paris, to attend our placement week and having developed a distaste for consultants (sorry Pramod) and investment bankers, I chose to apply to really off beat companies, such as Aditya Birla Group, some other Indian companies and a few European ones. I was finally given an offer by Jindal steel and power Ltd., and it was such an awesome role, that I accepted it right away, rejecting one really high paying offer.

As of now, im cooling my heels in delhi, and understanding how Indian SME's transition from being an SME to much larger professional company and its wonderful. lots and lots of traveling, no time for a social life and a work schedule which would put an investment banker to shame, but I wouldn't have it any other way :-)

If any of you ever come to Delhi, do give a call ... would be awesome to meet up.

ohh btw: I majored in Finance as well as Entrepreneurship, mainly taking up courses, in real estate, private equity, capital raising strategies and hard core operations, things like logistics, supply chain and so on ... developed a distaste for soft courses pretty early into my programme, love Economics though.

take care and keep in touch,

With best regards,

Yash