JBIMS Director Interview
What makes JBIMS different from other B-schools?
JBIMS is located in the heart of the business district of India’s financial capital Mumbai. The institute enjoys invaluable advantages because of its location. Week after week we have leading corporate personalities coming down to campus for guest lectures. Such a high level of corporate interaction keeps our students abreast of the latest business trends and helps them to hit the ground running when they start their careers as young managers.
JBIMS also has a very large number of visiting faculties. Many of our faculty is practicing managers. This helps students gain exposure to contemporary industry practices and develop an in depth understanding of how management concepts explained in the classroom are applied in industry.
A striking feature about JBIMS is the level of autonomy that students enjoy. Student committees handle most activities on campus including placements. Besides students also handle the media relations, alumni interaction and meets, events like business fests, and also maintain the entire IT infrastructure of the institute.
What is the JBIMS cut off score for CET? Are you looking at changing the CET pattern in anyway? What can an applicant expect from this years Admission test?
JBIMS does not have any pre-fixed CET cut off score. The top rankers in the CET and GD/PI are admitted to the institute. The CET is designed by the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE), Maharashtra. As always the test would be very challenging and evaluate the aptitude of the candidates in areas like verbal, quantitative and logical ability.
Applicants would have to focus on increasing accuracy and speed both as the CET would also test time management skills as well as decision-making ability under pressure.
Why is the GD/PI given lesser amount of importance as compared to the written test? What are the qualities one looks at while marking applicants during the GD/PI?
JBIMS being the university Department of Mumbai University is bound by the admission norms drafted by the DTE. It is true that GD/PI accounts for about 20 pc of the aggregate score. However, because of the immense competition (only 120 out of more than 45,000 applicants are admitted to JBIMS) what is ensured is that only the best performers in both GD/PI and CET make it to JBIMS. A look at the scores of students who make it to JBIMS would reveal that all have excellent scores in GD/PI. Therefore it would be unfair to say that GD/PI has less importance. A candidate needs to perform well at the GD/PI to make it to JBIMS.
Qualities that we look for during GD/PI are clarity of thought, communication skills, erudition in the field of graduation, general awareness, ability to gel with a group and presence of mind. GD/PI is also an opportunity for us to judge the quality of the candidate’s work experience (if any) and maturity.
Can you share some information regarding the batch profile of students in terms of gender, previous education background and work experience? Does JBIMS prefer any profiles of educational background and work experience to others?
In the Batch of 2007, 50 pc of the students have less than 6 months or no work experience. About 15 pc of the batch has more than two years of work experience. 70 pc of the students in this batch are engineers. The rest of the batch comprises graduates from commerce, arts, pure sciences and management.
The Batch of 2008 is highly skewed towards experienced students with almost 80 pc of the batch having significant prior work experience. Majority of the students are engineers, but there is a lot of diversity with students from medicine, arts and commerce disciplines as well.
There is no mandate for the institute to select candidates with work experience or from a particular educational background. We are open to all candidates. However if candidates have significant work experience, which adds value to their candidature, then it can work in their favor.
Could you briefly explain the mentorship programme at JBIMS? Besides academics what activities do JBIMS students get involved in?
JBIMS has a student buddy system and a corporate mentorship program. Student buddies from the senior batch are assigned to each student of the junior batch from the beginning of the academic year. Student buddies help juniors adjust to the rigors of B-school life and provide assistance with academics and project work.
In the corporate mentorship program every student is assigned a corporate mentor by our alumni volunteer to become mentors to our students based on the expertise of the mentor and the career goals of the students. Students can have informal one to one interactions with their mentors. Corporate mentors provide invaluable guidance in aspects relating to career choices, choices of specialization, summer placements and final placements.
The institute hosts a plethora of Extra Curricular Activities, which adds to the overall development of our students. Strategym, our annual business convention, provides a platform to our students to research contemporary industry issues and provide innovative solutions to problems that plague industry. The event has heavy corporate participation. Most of the research work presented at Strategym is carried out as consulting assignments for companies and is also adopted by companies in their day-to-day operations.
Prayaag is our annual B-school cum corporate extravaganza and includes various events like quizzes, business plan competitions, management simulation and strategy games.
Our Entrepreneurship Cell (E-cell) regularly organizes entrepreneurship games and workshops. It also provides opportunities for students to work with NGOs and carry out consulting work for SMEs.
A series of online quizzes is held during the course of the academic year. JBIMS also has very active Finance and Marketing clubs which help students put management concepts into practice.
Coming to placements, what is the placement process followed at JBIMS? What are the kinds of jobs, students at JBIMS have been taking up in the past three years?
Placement season begins with companies coming to campus for Pre Placement talks. This helps students assess opportunities for growth, job profiles and the remuneration offered. It also gives students the chance to interact with employees of the company and learn more about the work culture. Based on this assessment companies are ranked by the batch through a democratic voting process. This ranking/slotting determines the order in which companies visit campus for recruitment.
Over the last few years JBIMS has proved to be a happy hunting ground for consulting majors. Students have been taking up offers in companies like Mckinsey, Accenture, TSMG, KPMG, and Ernst & Young. Traditionally, JBIMS has been a favorite of banks and FMCGs. Our regular recruiters include Citibank, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, ICICI, HLL, ITC, Colgate Palmolive and Coca Cola to name a few.
JBIMS infrastructure needs a lot of work and restructuring. What is your take on it? What are doing to compete with other Indian B-schools?
Infrastructure at JBIMS is improving. The institute went wi-fi in 2006. The computer centre is equipped with Pentium based workstations with the latest statistical and analytical packages, project management and business environment simulation software. We already have a state of the art 150 seater -auditorium named after our founding Director Dr. K. S. Basu. Our library, which is equipped with over 40,000 books, thousands of theses, and over a hundred foreign and domestic journals is, considered amongst the best in Asia and is regularly visited by distinguished corporates including alumni.
While infrastructure does have a role to play in any B-school, over the years the strength of JBIMS has been the high quality of its students and faculty. Despite the limited infrastructure vis a vis other institutes, JBIMS has produced industry stalwarts like Mr. Harish Manwani, Ms. Chanda Kochchar, Mr. Uday Kotak, Ms. Lalita Gupte to name a few.
Could you explain the quota system, which is the part of the CET admission procedure? Are students looked at differently depending on the state to which they belong? Do you feel a difference in quality of students because of this system?
As per DTE rules JBIMS has 70 pc of seats allocated for students graduating from Mumbai University, 15 pc allocation for students from other universities in Maharashtra and 15 pc for Outside Maharashtra students (OMS).
Maharashtra students have to take the CET. OMS students may apply to JBIMS on the basis of their scores in CET or other tests, which include CAT/XAT/JMET/ATMA/MAT.
Besides this difference, the rest of the admission procedure remains same for all candidates. Candidates from different states are not looked at or evaluated differently. This system ensures that we get a good mix of the best students from Maharashtra and outside Maharashtra.
Does JBIMS plan to introduce the PGDBM course along with the MMS? Also are there any plans to introduce part time courses at JBIMS?
The full time MMS course has been the flagship course of JBIMS. On the executive management education front we already have 3 years part-time Masters Courses in Finance, Human Resources, Marketing and Information Management which are nearly equivalent to the MMS course. We also have a doctoral program in management.
We also run a PG diploma in management studies for officers of the Indian Navy, in association with the Naval Warfare Institute. Similarly, we run a Certificate Programme in Capital Markets (CPCM) in association with BSE. Besides this, we also provide consultancy services to private, public sector enterprises and state and central governments in different functional disciplines of management.