Dear Alum,

It’s been a busy busy month here at school, what with round two interviews, placements and various academic seminars and conferences on at the same time. We’ve had lots of alums on campus especially for day one and day two placements coordinating the placement efforts on behalf of their companies, and making sure that as many students as possible are recruited. It really gladdens my heart to see such commitment to our Alma Mater and a sense of unity towards the current students year after year. After all, the better placed our students are, the better our network. I encourage you to let the CAS team know about any openings you see in your organisations and persuade your senior management to recruit from our school. The Alumni relations office will be happy to coordinate with you on this.

As you all know, Dean Ajit Rangnekar has now officially taken charge as the Dean of the ISB for the next five years. Ajit has always been a vocal supporter of alumni and believes that we have a major role to play in the school’s progress. Along with the ISB’s primary goal of developing world class leaders and research, the school will now also focus on recruiting senior faculty and being known as knowledge creators rather than just disseminators. The goal is also to make sure the PGPMAX programme becomes the programme of choice in the part time MBA segment and that the Mohali campus is up and running in the next two years. We, as alumni have to contribute and make sure all these initiatives have our active support.

We have just wrapped up the Senate elections and we have four very capable individuals at the helm. This year the percentage of people who voted was far greater than the last two elections and I hope this kind of involvement continues. Kamal Narang, from the Founding Class, is now elected as the Chairperson, taking over from Prashant Dhawan, Class of 2003, and will be sharing a joint vision of this Senate over the next few weeks. Many thanks to the outgoing Senate members for steering the association for the last two years.

We have started a new section in this newsletter ‘Alumni Spotlight’ and our first profiles are of all people who stood for the Senate elections. We want to make sure at least 100 alums across classes are showcased every year. Do let us know if you think we should be profiling someone from your class or your network.

We also want to use this newsletter as a platform where alumni can publish articles on the exciting things they are doing at work, on things that they are knowledgeable about, on things which are just interesting to know. Let us know if you have any thoughts on this.

Just as we were about to wrap up this edition of the newsletter, the Financial Times released its annual global B-School rankings and we are now at number 12. Of course we must be aware that this is a reflection of relative performance and we need to continue in our pursuit of excellence as well as recognise that people now have higher expectations from us. The campus, of course, erupted in spontaneous merrymaking and the Dean acknowledged that alumni performance played a large role in our ranking. So congratulations to all alumni and a special thank you to the Class of 06 who were the ones polled by FT this year. We have some pictures of the FT celebrations on campus in this issue.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you, and you can email me at nidhi_reddy@isb.edu

Cheers!
Nidhi