Tour de' ISB

As I'm in Hyderabad on a official trip I thought of visiting the Indian School of Business (ISB) campus. They organise a campus tour on every Friday from 6.00 PM to 7.30 PM (maybe I should charge ISB for advertising this). So, I went online to book a slot for yesterday, but found that the batch was already full. Disappointed, I just dropped a mail to the Admissions Office saying that I'm from Mumbai and wanted to take the tour. To my surprise, after few hours I got an invitation from them, something that I might not expect from other established Indian B-schools.

The campus is located on the outskirts of the city and sprawls in an area of more that 250 acres. I'd not say that the infrastructure is phenomenol because that would be an understatement. 'Truly worldclass' would put it more appropriately.

The tour started with the tour guide showing us all the facilities present on campus from shops, banks, sports facilities to everything required for an years' stay. After this we headed for a classroom where the presentation was to be given about ISB and its admission process.


The ISB song '525600 minutes @ ISB' with slides showing the student life at ISB really made me nostalgic about my college days, which now seems like ages before. The presentation was handled by a student from the current batch and a guy from Admissions Committee. They went through the slides explaining why ISB is ranked in the top 20 B-schools of the world. By the way, it's the first B-school to get into this league in the very first decade of its inception. Some more stats were thrown at us, which we normally find on the ISB website.

Next came the most interesting part of the tour - 'Q & A session'. I was amazed to see the diverse mix of people attending the session. In the group of 50 odd people, we'd Army officers, Airforce officers, CAs, Consultants, News Reporters and obiviously a lot of Software Engineers. It was pretty visible from the queries asked that people were so specific about what they wanted from an MBA. There were some budding entrepreneurs also, who wanted to know how ISB could help them with their business plans.

I almost fell off my chair when the person behind me asked - "I've 16 years of work experience and I'm CEO of four companies. How could MBA at ISB help me"? They said it all depended on what he wanted from an MBA degree at this point of his career. Later he revealed that he wanted to take a break from work (maybe mid-life crisis) and wanted to utilize it properly. I was glad that we'd similar reasons for doing an MBA, only with a slight difference that he'd been in the industry a bit longer than me.

The gentleman next to Mr CEO was an Army Officer. He wanted to know how his application would be evaluated as he may not have best of acads and GMAT score. They said that it is entirely on case by case basis and each year around 5-7 Defense Officers join the program. Even the class President of current batch is an ex-Lt Colonel. When he asked - "Would it matter if I get a referrel from the Chief of Army Staff"? I almost fainted.

Why don't they ban such people from applying is what I was thinking on my way out. And this is not all. It's a weekly tour. Next week another group of aspirants would visit the campus and another one on the week next to that and so on.

The session turned out to be an eye-opener. I could now imagine the kind of people who finally make it. Some food for thought and a lot to be done. They say, aim for the stars and you'll atleast land up at the Twin Towers. Oh! that stupid Osama even destroyed them.