A Session with our Alumni

Today was one more exciting day at NITIE. This day was exciting because for the first time we the IM20 batch of Section A were going to meet the three Alumni of NITIE . These Alumni belong to IM10 batch, quite a long difference. So, I was ready to take as much as can from them, their experiences, their learnings and anything which I could possibly get.  We went to the class then after few minutes Prof. Mandi entered in  with one of the alumni , his name was Nikhil Kulkarni. Actually first of all I want to express my gratitude to the effort of our Prof. Mandi  sir who had arranged our session with the alumni . Thanks a lot sir.!!!!! 

 

Prof. Mandi introduced us to the Nikhil Kulkarni and then he passed the proceeding of session to him. Nikhil  Kulkarni is very decent person, I observed him as simple living and high thinking person. Before starting the session he liked to took our views,  that what we are expecting from this session, and what questions does he really need to answer during the session.  In response to this there were several question out of which few of them were - What are the learning from NITIE, which we have to implement in our jobs. What is the scope of starting a our own business venture. How is life post NITIE. These were some of the questions. It was then our  session officially started. The very first topic he talked about is entrepreneurship or starting of one own business venture. There was a clarity of thought in the manner, he was speaking out.

Our class including me were seems to lost in his discussion and certainly there was our listening skills at its best. So, on the entrepreneurship part , he tried to analyzed our thought that why some of us want to take it up as a career. Basically in my opinion , he was trying to make out that it is really our passion to start a business or its all about  glamour. He then talked about the difficulties arising out of starting a business. The capital we require for starting a business could possibly be too high, might be 50 crore would be very little figure for statring a company. It is not easy to raise a capital of such amount and more over it requires more dedication ,personal time. According to him getting a good profile in good company and starting a business is more a like same thing. He told us that there is good amount of earning involved in job which is at par, there is big responsiblity involved as in entrepreneurship as same here in job also , there is lot of big tasks available which gives us the same feel like we are managing the business of our own. In Entrepreneurship we have to make people work in such a way that they are able to generate the revenue three times of their salary. The employee who is working for the company not only generates the revenue but also generates the salary of the manager/people who are above him in the company hierarchy till CEO's. Nikhil Kulkarni's target as set by his company is to genrates the revenues ten times more than his salary and we can imagine what kind of hard work and managing activities it would involve while doing a job. So, in no way we can say that entrepreneurship is better than doing merely a job.

At the end of  the day it is the satisfaction level that we people tends to derive. If we derives the maximum satisfaction level from entrepreneurship , then we must go for it and on the other hand if we are more satisfied in doing our job for company then , it is not bad either. After giving us the realization of the similarity and differences between  the two he proceeded with the his own experience in NITIE. He told us that there will be plenty of time, we would be getting in NITIE to work upon idea of starting a business , then if we find feasible , we can absolutely go for it.

One of his most interesting experiences , which he shared with us was  evolving of Mashtisk, a sort of online prerna ( Prerna is famous committee of NITIE related with organizing fest and all.) At this point of time his friend and our another alumni Hemant joined. Hemant happens to be co-founder of Mashtisk. Both of them talked about what difficulties they faced and how the concept of mashtisk was evolved. During their class meet , when Nikhil introduced his idea regading Mashtisk  but several others batch mate rejected on several presumption but then later it was Hemant who supported Nikhil. The idea of mashtisk was to designed a site were several kinds of business related games would be played. These games would actually test the management learning and skills of individual along with the business strategy. Any player has to submit his/her own business strategy of the games before 3 AM of the day and then from 3 AM to 6 AM , administrator has to download all the strategy of person , upload new with cases for the of new day. So this was kind of hectic schedule they had. After few days this concept gained momentum and now there were more people who voluntarily  wanted to be part of this team and thus it evolved on bigger domain. Mashtisk has a team of thirty members which comprises of both seniors and juniors.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win is very well suited here."  Their idea of Mashtisk was successful because it had a proper and definite vision, mission, commitment.  The rest of their year in college the team managed it very well. Then the discussion shifted to the work culture and how do we maintain it. It was also quite interesting . I gained the insightful knowledge of work culture post MBA  studies.
So, here I am concluding the blog. I tried to post a full experiences of the Alumni which I could gather. It was very much interesting, full of knowledge and for that all credit goes to our great Prof. Mandi. Thank Sir , you for helping us to interact with our alumni . I have tried to extract a full,  out of their experiences and this certainly help me in the future.