Competitions and Student life in MBA at TAPMI

Student of the year debuting Alia Bhat, Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra was a great success in the box office and award shows. Though the movie's theme was a love triangle, already a well-explored one, depicting the competitions in school days has made the cut.  There are a number of good movies like 3 Idiots, Chhichhore, Student of the year 2 that used the same competitions in school days to attract the audience. Cinema is a mirror of society, thereby helping us understand the mindset of the masses. As evident from these recent Bollywood movies, competitions in school days are inevitable, and aspiring students, especially the MBA, must gear up for the same. 

As stated above, competitions are essential parts of a student's life in any B-school. I am quite sure that most of the MBA aspirants have imagined themselves in a few moments like giving presentations in business formals, late-night case-study analysis in a small group, clicking a pic with a big cheque (like the player of the match award in cricket) after winning a competition, and tossing mortarboard hats in joys on the convocation day. I am writing this article to help the young MBA aspirants to increase awareness of the moment a pic with a big cheque, i.e., competitions in B-School life.

Let me clarify the meaning of the word ‘competition’ used in this article. Competitions mean a contest/challenge floated by leading corporate houses or top-rated B-Schools, having voluntary participation. Finally, the winners get good awards/rewards through fair rounds of evaluations by a competent jury. For example, HUL-LIME, Bajaj FinServ, Reliance TUP, TVS Credit, Virtusa Business Cipher and L'Oréal Brandstorm are popular competitions in the B-School space. On average, there will be two to three competitions every month.

At T. A. Pai Management institute (TAPMI) Manipal, B-school competitions is an integral part of students’ life. There is dedicated student committee called competition committee of TAPMI (CCT), a unique initiative, managing all the facets of B-school competition participation by TAPMIans.  CCT primary responsibilities are promoting and supporting TAPMIans to participate in various corporate and academic competitions. More specifically, CCT conducts activities like champion talks, skill building workshops, database management, knowledge sharing, travel and stay support, coordinating with organisers. Figure 1 highlight the performance of TAMPI students in B-school competitions in the 2017-2021. Whereas Table -1 shows the select list of competition wins by TAPMI students in the period 2017-18 to 2021-22. 

Figure 1: Competition won by TAPMI students from 2017-18 to 2020-21

Table 1: Select list of competitions won from 2017-18 to 2021-22

TAPMI believes in holistic development of students and does encourage participation in B-school competitions. Following are twelve advantages of participating in competitions during two-year MBA journey.

1. Application of classroom learning into practice

The competitions allow students to apply the classroom learnings into practice. The first year of coursework, in general, offers the basics of business management to all the students. Students learn accounting, business statistics, operations management, financial management, business communication, organisational behaviour, IT for business, marketing management, sustainability, ethics. Generally, the competitions are organised by leading corporate houses that throw contemporary business challenges to young and aspiring business graduates to test their classroom learnings. As a student of business, competitions are one of the first avenues to test classroom learnings without taking any major risks. Research shows that students who participated in good competitions did apply theories, frameworks, models learned in the classroom to practice proposing quality recommendations.    

2. The opportunity of PPI/PPO

Any write up on the business management education is incomplete without highlighting the job prospects. Continuing the same tradition, competitions do have a major role in the placement process. From a recruiter’s point of view, competitions serve as a great filtering mechanism to shortlist good candidates for pre-placement interviews (PPI) and pre-placement offers (PPO). The recent trend shows that almost all reputed competitions have a PPI/PPO opportunity and high cash prizes. The recruiters can minimise the adverse selection and cost savings by using competitions as a placement strategy.

From the students’ point of view, competitions are a great point of difference in the CV. Competition wins signal recruiters about various traits that make you job-worthy, such as multitasking, communication skills, analytical ability, time management teamwork. Competitions serve as a hook in the formal interview. It provides students with an opportunity to take the conversation to their areas of strength, thereby increasing the odds of getting the job. 

3. Networking opportunity

Competition is a platform where like-minded people meet and exchange ideas. It is a place where quality meets quantity, thereby offering an excellent place to expand your network. Major stakeholders are corporate houses, students, faculties, and sponsors (generally corporates). Networking is one of the most important skills for an MBA student but, unfortunately, the least practised one.  

4. Personal Branding

Competitions do provide an opportunity to market yourself effectively. Regular posting of competition wins in the social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram may help students to get traction in the business world. This will open doors to many opportunities.

5. Awards/Rewards

Competitions may help students to bag extra awards/rewards at their respective B-School. Many B-schools do have a system to felicitate students based on their overall performance. There are awards/rewards such as best outgoing students, excellent in specific domains (marketing/HR/Finance), Achievers' club, scholarships. Competitions do have a major role in bagging these extra awards. At TAPMI there is an unique initiative called TAPMI Achievers Club (TAC) to felicitate excellent performance by students including the B-school competition successes. 

6. Teamwork

Most of the competitions are team-based. A team size of two to four are the most popular one. Therefore, competitions allow you to create and join team/s. Leadership skills and team-player traits will be inculcated as a byproduct in this process.  Research says these two skills are very important for short- and long-term career success, thereby increasing your placement chances.

7. Selection of specialisation

Competitions may help students zero down on specialisation in the second year of the course. Most of the competitions call for extensive reading of specialised topics like branding, channel management, pricing and revenue optimisation, and portfolio management, thereby increasing participants' awareness in respective fields.

8. Research experience

Most of the competitions are real-world problems/issues faced by corporates, encouraging students to do firsthand research. Doing research will push students to read and write specialised topics and get guidance from B-school faculty. As explained in the next point, this virtuous cycle will promote tangible outputs.

9. A tangible output

Suppose research is done under an appropriate faculty mentor. In that case, competitions may lead to a tangible outcome like the publication of a case-study/research paper (subject to permission by the competition organisers). These outputs are great to have in CV, opening PhDs or future higher education doors.

10. Improves communication skills

Competitions provide a much-needed impetus to hone presentation skills (written and oral). Working on a tight deadline competition nudges participants to improve continuously.

11. Memories for lifetime

Finally, the efforts to prepare competitions, disagreements/fights among the team members, late-night working, the pitch, Q&A, travel to venues (pre-COVID), felicitation ceremony pics, media coverage, etc., will be a treasure of life. The time and efforts invested in competitions will always give you great returns in terms of experience and memories for a lifetime.

I hope, by this time, you have got convinced that participation in competitions in your MBA course is critical. I am going to give you some valuable tips that will help you in this endeavour, as mentioned below:

• Start early: Most of the competition allows you to participate much before your MBA coursework starts. Participants may get 1-2 months between admission and the start of coursework. Use this time to participate in competitions.
• Create a good team: Having a good team with complementary skill sets is a must. Try to have diversity in the group (gender, work-exp, location etc.).
• Talk to past winners (your seniors/super seniors): Getting guidance from past winners is always beneficial. Try to contact them and get at least basic details. This will increase your network as a byproduct. 
• Look out for opportunities (websites like D2C): Some websites list all the competition available in the B-School space. Get yourself registered on these platforms.
• Update presentation skills: Doing a presentation is like breathing. It's a regular job, and participants should proactively look forward to doing it. There are specific MOOC courses available in the market. It is recommended to get updated on presentation (written and oral) skills. TAPMI provides free Coursera licenses to all the students to hone their skills.
• Read business news: Reading business news from the popular business press is a must. This will always help you to be relevant in your pitches. Remember to read the full news and not just the headlines.

Finally, I wish all the young MBA aspirants my best wishes. I hope you will participate in a good number of competition and bring laurels to yourself and your institute. I hope that all of you will get the debutant awards (PPO/PPI) like Sidharth Malhotra and Alia Bhat received for SOTY.

About the author

Amol Subhash Dhaigude is working as an Associate Professor in the Operations Management and Information Science area at T.A. Pai Management Institute (TAPMI)  Manipal, India. He is holding the role of Chairperson Student Affairs at TAPMI since 2018. He is a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Management Indore. He is actively engaged in research in supply chain management, services operations and tourism management. He is a profound case writer and teacher.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha