Back to Future!

Samarth Gupta from the batch of 2009-11, shares his thoughts on - 'what it takes to be an SIIBian'!

It’s a hard fact of life that we never pay importance to things until we are deprived of them. The same happened with me, I never paid heed to my college life experiences to a great extent till I joined corporate life where I missed by engineering days badly…………..”Purani jeans aur Guitar…muhalle ki who chat aur mere yaar”……..

After 3 years of grind, God’s been kind enough to give me back those good old days…

Well….today is one of the most vella working days since I have joined SIIB(thanks to the cancellation of one of the classes out of the 2 scheduled for the day)..Hence I have decided to pen down some of the thoughts accumulated over the last 8 weeks at SIIB.

It was 6^th June, 2009 which showed me a gateway to this new chapter at Symbiosis. I was excited and happy to be back to college…some of the reasons were a getaway from the extra formal and contrived corporate culture as well as a relief from wearing formals.

Much to my ignorance, at SIIB we were supposed to follow an extra formal dress code on Fridays unlike the casual wear /cake and coke parties on the Fridays better known as Fun Fridays in the IT firm I was working with. Well, one thing is for sure that life in a B-school is poles apart from that in a corporate. The biggest shock came to me when I realised that I had to share my room with 2 other students unlike my private rented apartment at NOIDA .Much to my despair, the rooms in the 2^nd year are even smaller, but that’s life…”kuch pane ke liye kuch khone padta hai”.(the concept of opportunity cost in the economics class made me realise it even better).

We were put through induction programmes followed by an outbound trip to a picturesque surrounding nearby which a picnic/ice was breaking exercise (I was constantly looking for like-minded people, especially music lovers and luckily I am a part of a big circle of friends…adding new members gradually…). It was full of fun …much to our realisation that there were tough days ahead.

We were introduced to subjects ranging from boring HR to exciting Capital markets…one class after the other and the whole day is gone...phew!!...(we used to talk about work life balance …mind it .weekends is not in the dictionary at any B-school)...We all had a few jitters in a few subjects…but I guess we have acclimatised ourselves to this change…after all that’s what we need to learn …adaptability to change! Whatever exhaustion is caused due to these classes/assignments/presentations gets nullified by the pleasant weather at Pune…unlike the cruel weather at my Delhi where my ex-colleagues are still waiting for a respite….

And for nature and music lovers like me, this is an apt destination wherein I can appreciate beauty (whatever the form be…) apart from other musical and memorable instances at the symbi campus….aarambh , the talent show , a classical rendition organised by Spic Macay and extempore (wherein I had to craft an innovative story within 30 seconds)….hope there are many more to come .Thanks to the various clubs /teams in place.

I hope that I will stop cribbing about the formal wear protocol at SIIB and various exciting and learning experiences will take over in the days to come!