"Excuse Me Sir, I'm a student at DoMS"

While going to malls and public places I have always dreaded strangers who come to you for either surveys or sell some schemes. Just imagine, you hanging out with your friends and suddenly somebody comes by saying "Sir could you spare a moment please"; you are in a dilemma whether to turn him down or take off your attention from the conversation. The situation becomes worse when the person is a guy with imploring looks or girl with a beautiful smile. But today tables were turned when I had to conduct a small survey for my marketing management assignment. We assembled in front of Gurunath around 2 o' clock. For the next half an hour we kept on prying on people even when whole place was jam packed. Every one appeared too busy to be bothered, it felt very awkward to disturb them but something had to be done. After contemplating for a while I chose a bunch of students taking among themselves. With the lord’s name on my lips and couple of deep breaths, I mustered courage to walk to them and say "excuse me, I am student of DoMS and we are conducting a survey..... ". Thank God, the guys were good enough to answer our questions politely. Now that ice was broken; with the new found confidence we went around campus asking everyone we came across same set of questions till evening.

Overall, the survey part  of assignment was a good experience where a few interesting incidents happened. There was a couple sitting at Gurunath, I went straight to girl, and after finishing my questions when I asked her “are you a student here?” the guy gave me a dirty look and said "I study here and she is my friend";  some  students just shrug, their shoulders and said “we have already responded to a couple of surveys today”, few people made deep inquiry into nature of our survey, then one man gave detailed answers to our queries while we were looking for one word answers and then we also came across an elderly man gave us a "buzz off" look and said "ask all this to students here don't bother me ". But the best moment was when one of my classmate said “if this is what marketing is then I am up for the challenge”.

Contributed by 

Varun Joshi

MBA 1st Year