“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”
Ancient Chinese Proverb
Plavon Bora, 1st Year MBA Student at Fortune Institute of International business (FIIB) hates cooking. With a Pre-MBA work experience as a Technical Support Officer at Microsoft, he joined the 2-year full-time MBA program at FIIB to catapult his career in Marketing. He was pleasantly surprised in the first few days of joining the program when during Orientation he found himself donning the Chef’s hat in the FIIB MasterChef Challenge. Along with 4 other classmates, he had to plan and cook a 3-course meal with few resources, in a strict timeframe and after negotiating his way with competing teams in a practical exercise of game theory. While his team did not win that day, Plavon and 179 other classmates, learnt some important management lessons in dealing with setbacks and challenges and optimizing returns with limited resources.
Activities such as this and learning through action are common at FIIB both inside and outside the classroom. Students are empowered to think out of the box, accept challenges, take onus of implementation, learn from the shortcomings and execute activities with responsibility. This process of student learning through active participation is institutionalized by creating forums and action committees. While academic management is faculty centric, the pedagogy is learner and student centric. Each major activity has an associated student group for planning, execution and management.
A typical day in the life of an FIIB-ian starts with a shot at the world view and global developments through an access to variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and books of national and international repute available through a rich resource pool at the FIIB Library. The day then dawns with classes where case studies and active discussions form the basis of learning. Here students are guided to balance the heart and the brain to understand, frame complex business problems and propose potential solutions to the same. While academic learning is a key focus, FIIB-ians live up to a philosophy of work as well as play hard. They get ample time to strategize and plan activities for the student clubs that range from theatrics and public speaking to conclaves dealing with frontiers of business management. The FIIB student lounge is equipped with tempting and inviting games like pool, chess, carrom and badminton, which keep the adrenaline flowing. Modern infrastructure at the FIIB campus provides learning engagement opportunities for all.
FIIB-ians spend time managing their curriculum and organizing conclaves and summits that keeps their hands full. Every student club organizes several events inviting industry speakers to come and address the students and share industry’s insider perspective. In the words of a student Shreesti Ghosh, Co-Head of the Industry Interaction Forum at FIIB – “8 months into college, 28 external speaker sessions (out of which 8 were with CXO level), 6 in-house conferences, 10 days of student club events, a Global immersion Experience to Dubai, have all had a tremendous impact on my own confidence as a young manager and aspiring leader”.
Paralleling real businesses, FIIB’s curriculum allows one to look across the broad spectrum of disciplines. Learning is facilitated by the use of extensive industry projects, role plays, management games and case studies, to blend theoretical knowledge with the current business practices. Study abroad trips to the port cities of the world give an added perspective to the students to visit industries on a foreign land and learn about global business environment. Assessment Centers, View from the top Leadership Talk series, Industry Interaction sessions, and Employability fests provide an opportunity to students to introspect and internalize their strengths and weaknesses.
In the words of another 1st year FIIB student, Tania Ann Koshi –“The MBA at FIIB is a doing MBA where the students not only become subject matter experts but also leaders in every sense. The doing MBA at FIIB prepares the students not for just running the sprint, but to also run the marathon!”
Note: This is a sponsored article and has NOT been written by the PaGaLGuY Editorial Team. It is intended from an informational perspective only and it is upto the readers to research and verify the claims and judgements in the article before reaching a conclusion.