AvantGarde

I am sure everyone working across different domains & industries must have thought at one time or another “I am not made for this work. I should be part of the management”. When I started my career as an engineer, I also believed the same. What I used to believe was that Managers just needed to take a few decisions, manage everyone & assign the work. After gaining some experience, I started feeling that I should directly become the manager instead of following the long hierarchy in the organization.

But what I lacked at that time was the justification & research required for making every decision. I believe this is the reason why organizations follow such a hierarchical structure. Being a little impatient, I wanted to become a manager earlier than normal. So I opted for the MBA course. During my first semester I held the same conviction. But by the time I completed my first year, I realized what an MBA program does to you; it changes your attitude, makes you responsible, thereby making you accountable for all your actions. Working in teams, brings out the leader in you. When you work with your peers, with everyone having their own set of solutions for the same problem you have to fight out for your solution which requires in-depth research & justification. This healthy competition makes you aware of the rationale behind decision making. So, to conclude I would like to say that it’s not the position in an organization which should determine your work, it is your work that should determine your position.

The MBA program at IIT Kanpur provides that attitude and belief which motivates a person and bring out the leader in him/her. I would like to share my internship experience which gave birth to the leader in me. Interning in the field of market research just after studying the subject in the previous semester, I had a lot of expectations. But the actual path is never easy. During my first few days I was kept engaged only in secondary research & conducting surveys. I was a little disheartened but never lost hope and kept pushing my supervisor for more interesting work and greater responsibilities. But my request was never heard and I was asked to conduct an Ad-Recall study. This project laid the foundation for other quality work. The Ad-recall study was conducted across different locations and the client appreciated my work. This appreciation helped my company gain another project from the client and also made them notice my potential. I was then made to work end to end on a project. After almost a month, I was able to complete everything but the analysis. I was very excited about the analysis part and wanted to go as deep as possible with my level of knowledge. Although the company just asked me to make a few pivot table & charts, I decided to go ahead and do the complete analysis using the SPSS tool. I presented both the pivot table outputs and the output I fetched from SPSS to my supervisor who was really impressed with my work & asked me to continue using the tool for analysis. At the client presentation, our client was not expecting such an output. They were not even aware that such kind of research was possible. They appreciated our work & promised to come up with new research as well.

From my internship experience I got to know that, today many are aware of the word “Market Research”, but still most of them are involved in its superficial part and the field needs more exploration. And this is the reason why I would like to go further into analytics, and show the world the potential raw data has.

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Ankesh Khunteta

M.B.A. 2013-2015