Dear Alum,

This edition of Alma Matters heralds the beginning of a new relationship for me. Having graduated with the Class of 2008, I recently took charge of the Alumni Relations office in addition to my role at the Centre for Emerging Markets Solutions (CEMS). But I have been a passionate advocate of alumni relations right from the beginning and truly believe that we, as alums, are the best ambassadors of the school and have a huge role to play in its development.

Alma Matters now comes to you in a whole new avatar. We have redesigned the newsletter to make it more relevant and useful to you. It will now reach you every fortnight with updates from the school and alumni around the world. We have attempted to incorporate all your feedback and suggestions into the new design. I hope you find this a good way of keeping up with what is happening at the ISB.

We conducted a comprehensive alumni survey a few months back and the findings have been very useful in designing new initiatives to cater to the needs of the alums which fall under four broad categories - Domain knowledge transfer and life long learning opportunities, Career advancement support and services, Strengthening the alumni network and connect to the school and Appropriate and timely communication from the school on initiatives and developments. Over the next few months we will be unveiling various activities which we hope will provide huge value to the alumni.

The School wants to encourage alumni, who are interested in an academic career, to do their Phds and is offering many benefits to those who want to come spend a year or two on campus in preparation for this. You’ll find the details in this newsletter.

The recent tragic death of Lt. Col. Anand Singh (2008) brought us all together and we collected close to 11 lakhs to help his family who were left without a bread winner. Alums across classes contributed generously and many wrote very touching notes pledging to contribute more if required. This, for me, is what a community is all about – people standing by you in your time of need. Now that we are almost 3000 in number and with a new class coming into the alum fold every year, we have been exploring the possibilities of setting up an alum endowment fund or a group life cover so that all of us have one more way to ensure our families are taken care of. Many thanks to Kamal Narang (Founding Class), for leading this effort and to Saurabh Khedekar (’08), and Ujjwal Nanavati (’09) for helping out. You will soon hear more from them on this.

The ISB Alumni Association Senate election process has commenced and December 16, 2009 is the last date for self nominations. You can get more details elsewhere in this newsletter but I urge you all to think seriously about being a part of the team and even push others who you feel can make a difference. At the very least do exercise your vote and make this Senate a representative body of the alumni group.

Solstice 2009 will be held from December 18-20, 2009 and the Class of 2010 has some very special events lined up for you. I, for one, am very excited and look forward to welcoming you all on campus. This year is the Class of 2005 legacy year and I hope many 05ers will be a part of Solstice.

Do write to me at nidhi_reddy@isb.edu in case you have any comments or suggestions.

Cheers!

Nidhi