PGDBA at IIM Calcutta. Start of Journey.

----------------------

I was working in Johannesburg as a system integration specialist at Multichoice johannesburg for last 3.4 years as a contract engineer. My employer was Altech Multimedia, South africa.

On 28th of  May 2015, i got the admission offer from IIM calcutta, for PGDBA. Details of the course can be found at, http://www.iitkgp.ac.in/pgdba/Programme_Overview.html

I resigned from the company on the same day after talking to my family and deciding that  i will go for this course. I always had lot of craze to study in top colleges of India and this chance looked so promising. I mean where else you can have experience of 3 colleges which  are pioneers of different education verticals in India. Indian statistical institute kolkata is the first and best institution of statistical research in India. IIT kharagpur the first and one of the top IIT of India and IIM Calcutta the first IIM of India. So in terms of brand name this course had no match. And it attracted many of us. I left Johannesburg  in a month on 17th of June 2015. My orientation was starting at 22nd June 2015 at Joka , IIM Calcuttta.

Arrival at Joka, IIM Calcutta:

On Sunday 21st June 2015 i reached Joka, IIM Calcutta campus. First thing i saw was a board with welcome message for PGDBA batch. We were the first batch of this course. I felt so special when saw the message. "IIM Calcutta, IIT Kharagpur and ISI Kolkata welcomes inaugural batch of PGDBA 2015-17". I was feeling on top of the world. Any way went to MDC(Management development centre) of IIM Calcutta and checked into the hostel room. Met my room mate Anirudh, an IIT Delhi fresher, who came with  his parents. It felt so nice to meet him. Then i met our other class mates who were chatting in the corridor. Every one was new there and every one was so excited.

IIM C campus: IIM C has a beautiful large campus. You come inside and it really feels you are in one of the best campuses of India. Beautiful buildings, so much greenery, many large water ponds. In these days when land is such scarce resource in India, seeing large ponds in a campus was unbelievable. And i always had craze of top colleges, best campuses, so for me it was a treat and a proud moment to feel myself as an IIM C student :-).

MDC hostel: This is IIM Calcuttta's executive hostel. PGP students from IIM C don't get accommodation in MDC. We being the first batch got the privilege to stay there. It was like any four-five star hotel. Never imagined a centralized air conditioned hostel in an institution in India. It was so clean , centrally air conditioned, excellently furnished. It is managed by a professional hotel company.

Orientation:
---------------

We had registration on 22nd June Monday from 10 AM-1AM at Tata Hall. Registration went smoothly. Our lunch for that whole week was arranged at Tata hall. Lunch was lavish.
From 2 PM our orientation started by talks of IIM professors, our course coordinator prof. Indranil Bose. Prof. Bose is such a wonderful person. Every question we posed, he listened to it carefully and tried to answer them.

The talks on business analytics started from eminent personalities from in domain. We had vice presidents of delloite, SBI, Microsoft, SAS, latentview, TCS,IBM speaking to us. They gave presentations of how important business analytics and data science have become in these days. The sessions were interactive and fun. Some sessions were bit boring as slides were too technical with huge amount of content, which  induced sleep. :-). But over all sessions were informative and really helpful. Best part of these sessions were, that every speaker told us we have taken a correct decision by choosing this course. And when they talked about the huge potential of the domain.

We went to ISI Calcutta and IIT kharagpur as well on two days as part of our orientation. First we went to ISI Calcutta. Prof Bimal Roy, a padamshree awardee took session on use of probability and statistics in the field of analytics. Prof. Bimal da is an absolute genius and one of India's most talented academician. He had completed his PHD in 2 years from US. Best part about him , is his real life examples from number of research project he has done. He was director at ISI Cal for 5 years. Then Dr Sourav sengupta took a session on Liner algebra part. The high dimension part was mind boggling :-).

We went to IIT KGP in a Volvo bus arranged by our college. Whole journey we enjoyed songs, mafia, dumb charades.There were sessions from Flipkart, IBM and Xerox R&D. Again very interactive, informative and fun sessions. I was living my dream of feeling a student of IIT KGP.:-). Campus of IIT KGP is so impressive.

We also had sessions by other IIM professors, like Dr Ashok Banerjee who was the dean of new initiatives at IIMC, a session on how bad plagiarism is and how careful we should be about it during the course,  a fun filled introduction to Calcutta city by Prof. Partha Roy. Also our director at IIM Calcutta Dr Shaibal Chatterji interacted with us. All professor also warned us, about difficulty level of this course. This course is more difficult than MBA. PGP students are given 3 years to complete the course, where as this course gives 5 years, seeing he difficulty level. 2 F's were allowed in PGP in two years to get degree in PGP, but not a single F is allowed in this course.

Sessions from industry experts were amazing. They gave us an idea about how great things are going on in Business Analytics field. I was very happy, when each of the experts reiterated that, we were at a very good place and it was an amazing course and whole industry will be looking forward to this course. There will be plethora of opportunities for us. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

 I found a very strange anamoly of a code working on Jupyter notebook, but its not working on the app.python from a flask applicatoin. When the type of column names if int instead of string, the str.replace() code works on the jupyter notebook, but does not work in the flask python. Scenario: I have a dataframe having year-months(For example 202001, 202002 etc.) as the column name. Now I want to have a replace code, like, col = [ '201911', '201912','202001', '202002', '202003', '202004', '202005', '202006', '202007', '202008','202009','202010']  the below code works on the jupyter notebook, but fails on the flask. data_df[col] = data_df[col].replace(to_replace=['-',' ','\*'], value='', regex=True).astype(float)
Read more
PGDBA at IIM Calcutta, 1st semester at ISI Calcutta. ------------------------------------- We reached ISI campus on 19th July. We were given accommodation at 4th and 5th floor of CD Deshmukh Bhavan. It was a twin sharing accommodation. Every room was well furnished and spacious with attached bathrooms. Round the clock Wifi and  Lift facility were available for us. Mess facility was arranged at Rani bhavan which was 3-4 minutes walk from our hostel. Our first semester classes started on 20th July 2015.Our class schedule was not very hectic. We had two 2-hours classes per day. But as time passed we started having extra classes in the evening and it started getting hectic. Initially our classes started at NAB-1 at ground floor of AN Kolmogorov bhavan. Buildings at ISI are named after personalities. Size of batches are very small at ISI, Normally they have close to 20 students in a batch(It shows hot competitive it is to get into ISI :-)). So classes are of small size. Ours was large
Read more
Facebook extraction using R. ( For beginners of Facebook App development).  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It took me lot of time to authenticate with Facebook when i was trying to extract data from facebook using Rfacebook package in R language. An important step which is not documented properly while authenticating our APP using R code. After creating the Application, Go to Settings and click on "add platform". Their you will find a textbox with name "Site URL"  fbOAuth(app_id = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXX",app_secret = "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX") When we run above code, on console with get a small link. "http://localhost:1410/ ", This link has to be pasted in  Site URL text box in App settings and saved. After we do this, we should press "Enter" on the R console, which lets this API authenticate the APP on Facebook. Once this is done the APP is authenticate and a browse
Read more