Badminton is a game that emphasises agility, strategy, opportunistic moves, and coordination. Sounds uncannily like Management, doesn’t it? Here’s another link between Badminton and B-school: Sanya Sethi is a PGDM student at FORE School of Management, New Delhi and an international level badminton player! She was India’s representative to the 2016 World University Championship held in Russia. Sanya has also represented Chandigarh at various national level tournaments winning several championships.

Sanya bring her on court energy to FORE as well. Apart from meeting the demands of the rigorous PGDM course, she is also a key member of the placement committee, which drives the student body’s year-round initiatives in ensuring successful and smooth placements for the entire batch. This energy has its roots in the motivated individual that Sanya is and her mantra of ‘No Pain, No Gain’. Having spent 10 plus years playing competitive badminton, she always aimed to be counted in the Top 5 players of the nation and compete the international level, both of which she achieved with perseverance.

The fighter’s spirit is something Sanya wanted to utilise in a management setting and this is what made her decide to pursue a management programme. She counts FORE as an optimal choice considering everything, she has learned in her short stint here. Apart from the commonalities between badminton and management listed above, Sanya counts team work & leadership, time management, balancing priorities, risk taking, and learning from mistakes as the valuable skills picked up on the court that she gets to apply at FORE. She is confident that these and all the skills picked up at FORE will help her to be a successful business manager. There are several on-court lessons that she gets to apply in her course and she hopes these will stand her in good stead in her career too. For example, on risk taking she recounts an instance at the prestigious World University Championship held in Russia where she was also captaining her team. In a crucial tie-break round she took the initiative and asked the 6th extra member of the team to play believing that her playing style would be difficult to understand for the opponent. The move helped the team win the match and was a key lesson in strategic risk taking, a key aspect of management.

At the individual level, Sanya counts fitness, discipline, focus, and dedication that she built as a professional badminton player as being extremely useful skills in her present stint. How else can one explain a person handling course load, student body responsibilities, personal fitness, mentoring, and corporate ambition simultaneously?! Besides her own strengths, Sanya is particularly appreciative of the fact that as with her Badminton coaches, the FORE faculty too emphasises practical learning methods. In this way, the pedagogy too has proven to be a perfect fit for this athlete.

Despite all the responsibilities and time demands, Sanya is preparing for Inter College Badminton Tournaments that FORE is encouraging her to participate in. A true champion always looking to push her boundaries.

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