The most exciting part of the academic courses that I find are the Winning at the Workplace courses, says Sumit

I had always wanted to study from a teacher who had taught in the colleges in the USA just to experience a different pedagogy of learning. Thanks to BITS School of Management (BITSoM), Mumbai, my wish has been fulfilled. The last one month as a first-year student of MBA at BITSoM has been nothing but an adventurous ride.

Our academic session started with Kumar Mangalam Birla sharing some wisdom with us. The entire orientation week was filled with various activities and sessions ranging from the legacy of BITS to a session with people from the founding class of other top Indian Institutes, who shared their thoughts and views on being a part of the founding batch of a top-class educational institute. The end of the week gave me a glimpse of the variety of talent that comprises the founding class of BITSoM when we competed in the Talent Night.

I was a little skeptical about the block teaching method where we study a single course for a couple of weeks; but having completed three core courses now, I am assured that it is a unique way of learning the concepts in depth without any diversion; also, thanks to the fantastic faculty from NYU Stern, Terry School of Business and McCombs School of Business, Austin. The most exciting part of the academic courses that I find are the Winning at the Workplace courses (or WAW- that’s what we call it). These are a unique set of courses that teach us various aspects about life which give us a very different perspective to look at things around us. The first three courses were on Well-being and Success which was taken by Prof Raj Raghunathan who has done tremendous research on Happiness, a course on reasoning which was taught by Rudrangshu Mukherjee who is a very famous historian and author of several books and finally a course on Learning Agility taught by our very own Dean, Dr. Ranjan Banerjee.

Though the classes for us are online, we are very lucky that in a time when the students in most other colleges in the country are attending the classes from their homes, BITSoM made sure that we meet and interact with our peers right from day 1 by arranging a very comfortable stay for us.

Eagerly waiting for the things to come!

About the author

Sumit Saboo is a founding class student of BITS School of Management (BITSoM) MBA Programme with a Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from VNIT-Nagpur in 2019 and 18 months of work experience with Tredence Analytics. Sumit is also the winner of HackHarvard Global Hackathon at Harvard University in 2019.