DoMS IIT Madras Emerges Victorious at Navonmesh, the Entrepreneurial Convention at SJMSOM-IIT Bombay

Manish Negi and Nipun Khanna, two second year MBA students from the Dept. Of Management Studies IIT Madras, did their school proud by winning ‘Navonmesh’ the flagship event at the fest ‘Avenues 2010’ organized by SJSOM, IIT Bombay.
This contest was intended to sensitize the business fraternity about innovative ideas that require their support and funding to bloom. It invited entries from the best minds across the country. Some of the other schools which participated were ISB Hyderabad, SP JAIN, NITIE, IIM-S, IMT-G and Welingkar.
The competition had an interesting format, with the B-plan and the Venture Capital challenge taking place in parallel. After three rounds of rigorous competition, four finalists were selected from the ‘VC Challenge’ route for the finals held at SJSOM, IIT Bombay on Sat, 23^rd Oct 2010. It is indeed a matter of pride to note that two out of these four teams were from DoMS IIT Madras. It so happened that there was only one prize on offer: that to the winner. The second team consisting of Praveen K and Vishal Kamath also deserve appreciation for having been among the top four teams to reach the finals.
The event was judged by SIDBI Ventures and TePP (in association with whom the event had been conducted)
In a lighter vein, with the first prize carrying with it a prize of Rs. 25,000/- cash award, needless to say, the return of the victors was eagerly awaited by their friends back here at Chennai.
Hoping to see more such successes in the near future, which will truly reflect the department’s motto of ‘Quiet Excellence Demonstrated’.

Team DoMS Interface

SHAASTRA 2010

Shaastra is the identity of IIT-Madras and year after year it has been bringing together creative and intelligent minds to a conglomeration and this year was no different. In this year's event held from September 29 to October 3, student participants were from all IITs & other prominent engineering colleges across the country and the distinguished chief guests and event judges were from among the who's who of the research world.

It also gave the DoMSians a wonderful opportunity to collect the pearls of wisdom offered by professors such as Richard.B.Freeman, professor of Economics at Harvard University and Alex Taghi Tabarrock, a professor of Economics at Virginia’s George Mason University. If the thirst for technical enlightenment was quenched by astonishing events such as AirShow, HackFest, Da vinci Machine, AeROBOtics, Imagineer, the mathematics related Pentathlon, an array of workshops et al , ethereal entertainment was offered by a spellbinding Laser show which ended, aptly, in making us look forward to Saarang - The other big identity of IIT-M to be held in January 2011! The impact of Shaastra was so huge that it left people starting the 365 day countdown for Shaastra 2011 when the curtains went down.

By,

DoMS Interface Team, 

MBA Class of 2012

ICON 2010

Inter Corporate Outbound Nationals (ICON) is the annual "Adventure Sports “event organized by the MBA students of IIT Madras. A student-corporate initiative of the department of management studies (DoMS), ICON has a history of 3 years and like wine gets better with age. It provides the corporate to break free of the cubicle shackle and breathe some fresh air. The huge forested area of IIT Madras provides the perfect setup for this event.

ICON’10 was exactly what the doctors ordered for the corporate and students alike, a rejuvenating getaway weekend. Spanning over three days from 10^th September, 2010 to 12^th September, 2010, the event saw people from the age of 21 to 45+ jumping in and letting the hair down (literally). Events like Cross country and rafting tested the endurance while the monkey crawl and the crocodile walk saw the corporate become more agile than the Olympic gymnasts. Teams included members from corporate like L&T, TATA, iNautix, Ajuba, Marg and BHEL.

Emerald, a photography contest was held as a curtain raiser to the main event. It was a grand success with around 120 participants and there were 330+ contesting photographs in the lot to choose the winning ones from. The creative imagination of the participants was on display as pictures ranged from stacked water containers to the camera-shy spotted deer-the cynosure of the IIT-M campus.

The top honor went to this picture of the IIT oxidation pond shot against the backdrop of a hostel building by Silambarasan.

Chief Guest for the event was Mr. Z.Mohammad Ajmad, former international football player from India. The fun ended on Sunday with the team from Ajuba emerging as the winner. The winning team and the runners up were awarded prizes sponsored by Talwalkar, Chennai.

All in all, the event was a huge success with the corporate getting rejuvenated and the students motivated. ICON’10 was a big hit and has set a high standard for next year.

By,
DoMS Interface Team,
2010-2012 

Standard Chartered Bank reinforces association with DoMS, sponsors Trading Room Training

Participants alongwith Mr. Philip Eden

Reaffirming the 3 year old association with DoMS IIT Madras, Standard Chartered Bank sponsored a three day Trading Room Workshop for selected students of DoMS.

Offered as a part of course on Financial Institutions and Markets, the workshop was preceded by a two month long online self study course on wide spectrum on topics including Foreign Exchange & Money Markets, Fixed Income, and Interest Rate & Currency Swap Fundamentals. Based on the performance on simulated tests, 24 students who can really count themselves as lucky few for the kind of training that they were going to get were finally selected for the workshop. Intuition, the most renowned name in financial module training was roped in by Standard Chartered for pre training study modules and trading workshop.

The workshop was conducted by Philip Eden, Senior Learning Consultant, Intuition bringing with him decades of experience in Capital Markets, who came all the way from Singapore for the same. The workshop gave students real life insights into what really goes in around in a typical trading room setup and helped us appreciate how important it was to have firm grounding finance concepts for a trading career but at the same time how different it was from what we learn in classrooms. Over three days the participants were exposed to different trading formats like Trading Pits on the first day to Equity, Forex and Derivatives Trading over the two days through simulated games and case studies. 

 Post the three day workshop experience, students only had words of appreciation and gratitude for Standard Chartered Bank and Philip Eden for giving us such a cutting-edge knowledge session. 

By,

DoMS Interface Team,

Class of 2011.

Expectations@MBA

On 18^th September 2010, a Saturday, the third Corporate Wisdom session in the academic year 2010-2011 was organized. The speaker was Mr. P. Jeevan Jose, Head of HR, Royal Sundaram Alliance Insurance. We students thought that the topic would be ‘expectations of the corporate world’. When the session started however, we saw that the topic title on Mr. Jose’s presentation was ‘Expectations...’

Mr. Jose began by asking us a simple question-‘What is shelf-life?’  A fair number of people were aware of shelf-life in the general context, but the shelf-life he referred to was the shelf-life of an MBA. He defined the shelf-life of an MBA as ‘the average time spent in the first job’ and that the shelf-life was a disappointing one year and six to eight months. This figure is not at all surprising to most of us. But companies, he said, though not astonished, are trying very hard to unravel the mystery behind the number. So, we figured, that the ‘expectations’ being discussed were not only the expectations of companies of MBAs, but also the expectations of the MBAs of companies and of their B-school. Some of the common expectations of freshman MBAs are getting a good job with a high salary, social recognition etc. Ideally though, the expectations of MBA students should be to learn to add value, to question, to seek answers and the alternatives, to learn to analyze and channelize the efforts of not only themselves but also their colleagues.

The audience was absorbed. What we had just heard was a little out of the ordinary. None of us anticipated that a discussion on expectations would be so thought provoking. Most of us were waiting to know what the world wanted out of us, in terms of what services we were expected to provide. But nothing more crossed our minds.

Going beyond the classroom, when we had finally touched upon what the corporate expected of MBAs, Mr. Jose gave us a beautiful example to illustrate, that the companies hire MBAs not for their fancy degrees but for their ability to see problems with great attention to detail while not losing sight of their long term objectives. He went on to add that the corporate world seeks a professional- one who can work unsupervised and who can certify his own work as complete, a person with integrity, speed of execution, courage and immense patience.

As a final piece of advice, he said that an MBA student must plan not for a job, but for a career and happiness, must practice professionalism, seek counsel, learn from diversity, learn to influence people without power and most importantly, he must have the heart to admit that he doesn’t know.

Our minds were processing question after question once the session had ended. So much had been conveyed with so little that was said. The session had opened our minds to a new dimension, one which not many people stumble upon while still in college and fewer still would recognise when not guided by great people such as Mr. Jose.