Over the past fortnight, we have been in India, enjoying our summer holidays. Travelling back home is always refreshing since it involves meeting friends, relatives, and even acquaintances, and makes me happy. We decided to travel to three cities during this break: Kolkata, Gurgaon and Bengaluru. I always wonder how different we are as I travel through each city, but yet how wonderfully we are united. The more I travel through my country, the more my respect and love for my motherland grows.
On a friend’s request, I visited a renowned MBA college in Gurgaon, and met the students. I must say, I met a bunch of bright young kids, who will surely take our country places. The relationship that I saw between the students and the teachers was outstanding. To me it felt like two generations understand each other and stand by each other.
While I was supposed to speak for the next hour or so, seeing the energy at the room, I decided otherwise.
We agreed to share stories and, at the end, I think I spoke only for 30 per cent of the time, while the rest of the time was actually filled in by the students and professors, who shared their insights, experiences and stories.
It felt wonderful. And I returned enriched.
The topic of the session was “The transition from Campus to Corporate” and what we realised is that it's a phase of transition and thus this phase can be sensitive and complex, and requires us to open up our mind and adjust ourselves to accept changes. Through stories that we heard from each other, it became clear to us that there will be gaps between expectation and reality, and we all may not be ready to face up to the new challenges. And hence it is our role to get ready for this important transition. One of the professors spoke about “Gap Shock”.
And then as we start to explore the new world around us, we realised we need to first start taking that plunge and explore the world around us. The onus is on to us to:
- >Understand the expectations from us
- >Getting involved
- >Keep our learning streak alive
- >Beginning to learn to work in a team
- >And importantly, master the dos and the don’ts of the corporate world
We will speak more about these later in my further articles
And then we spoke about how we learn to survive in the new world. In the discussion we agreed to
- >Remind yourself of your goal every day
- >Lead
- >With positive attitude
- >Impeccable integrity
- >Use common sense
- >Have a curious mind and to look beyond mere analysis
- >Master the art of communication
- >And to enjoy every moment that we spend in our new world
Finally, as we all want to win, we also discussed on how we prepare ourselves to emerge as the winner. Many stories came out, one of the students shared how he, even as an intern, helped his organisation save a large sum of money by suggesting new ways of working taking calculated risk. We also heard stories on how to
- >Network intelligently
- >Manage ourselves as a ‘Brand’
- >Manage time
- >Manage conflict, embrace criticism
- >Learn to attain alignment
- >Plan well
- >Not mix our mood with performance
And finally we spoke about the important of taking care of ourselves. And we had interesting discussions about work-life balance, where it emerged that many a times it’s a myth and the meaning can differ from person to person. It is up to us to manage this balance, others really can’t help.
I must say, that small session enriched my understanding and provided me more clarity about the transition from campus to corporate.
Thank you all and good luck guys!