Q1) What are the top challenges that you are currently working to solve for your institute this year?

With our close industry interaction, corporate oriented pedagogy and assessments as per recruiter needs, we have managed to make our management students much more employable than those graduating from other MBA institutes. They have been placed in many top Indian companies and MNCs, and we have received strong testimonials from their managers on how they are performing.

Our biggest challenge this year is to start customizing our teaching and assessments to support specific industries like finance, media, consulting, FMCG etc. This means that any student who wishes to join a certain industry (eg. FMCG), is trained as per the needs of that industry and is placed in a top FMCG company. This training will be slightly different for a student who says that they want to join a top firm in the advertising industry. The goal being that we match a student’s ambitions and strengths to the sort of industry that they will do the best in and train them to get a job in a top company in that industry.

Q2) What according to you has been your most significant progress your institute has made in the last one year?

Our institute has expanded rapidly from our flagship PGDBM program to offer additional Diplomas and Professional Diplomas in areas like Real Estate Management, Entrepreneurship, Media, Advertising, PR, Banking, Digital Marketing and Event Management. This year, we also tied up with the prestigious Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, which allows our students to get this highly regarded MBA in India. This enables our students to get an MBA from a top UK University at half the price they would pay if they went to the UK.

Q3) What are the qualities you look for in an applicant when short listing for your final selections?

We expect most of our students to hold leadership positions in the corporate world within a decade of their graduation from TSCFM. Hence, we prefer applicants who have an inherent leadership capability which will enable them to zoom past their contemporaries when they join industry.

When students apply, we analyze their personality via psychometric tests, behavioral assessments and personal interviews to determine their leadership capabilities. Interestingly, a student’s ability to become a leader is unrelated to their academic scores, so we rarely look at how well they have performed in their undergraduate exams.

Q4) What according to you is the one progressive change that you’d like to see in the management education scenario in the country today?

We have more than 350 companies in our network. Most of the CEOs we speak to complain that the graduates who come from other Indian management institutes (including some well-known ones) do not possess the industry ready skills they look for. Our own institute took their advice 5 years ago and revamped our curriculum, pedagogy and assessments as per industry needs. I’d like to see other management institutes reduce their focus on academic theory and lecture based teaching; and become more job oriented and help students learn through practical, hands-on training