The Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad like most schools has experienced a drop of 20 percent in salary levels and had a long drawn out placements seasons. The most interesting statistic regarding this year’s placements at ISB is that 55 percent of students have changed careers when it comes to industry or function and this is a reduction of 26 percent as compared to last year’s placements. The average work-experience of students at ISB is five years and this statistic clearly shows that even high work-experience along with an MBA is not enough to allow for a career switch in these times.

XLRI, Jamshedpur launches Agri-Business Management program

Xavier Labour Relations Institute, Jamshedpur has launched a six month certificate program in Agri-Business Management in Hyderabad at the Loyola Academy in association with Ikisan (an agri portal promoted by Nagarjuna group). The online self learning program aims to help students understand marketing and sales jobs in the agri-business industry.

About 100 odd old users on the PaGaLGuY.com forums are going to be lining up for this year’s CAT as part of OMPA (Old Men’s PaGaL Association) but they aren’t simply cooling their heels and waiting for the CAT notification to come out. Far from it! You can invite your favourite OMPA member in the city for dinner to get answers to all your questions regarding CAT preparation, MBA life and careers. Before you start counting your pennies, there’s some good news; a maximum of eight aspirants can get together and take an OMPA member out for dinner.

Career Launcher (CL) recently sent across a press release declaring that all its centers across India will be offering a free online mock test from August 8 to August 21 and top performers in each city can get the test series package for free. CL decided to provide this offer because it was receiving a ‘huge number of frantic calls’ from students for doubts regarding this year’s CAT. We thought that it might be a good idea to just cross-check this useful offer. Off we went, put on our student hats and called up some CL centers across the country. Here are some conversations we had with people at CL centers; CL might still get a huge number of frantic calls because information at centers is not consistent with the press release.

XLRI Jamshedpur: A solution for villagers to harness solar power

Dr Harish Hande, Founder and Managing Director, SELCO India addressed students at XLRI, Jamshedpur and explained how solar power can be made available to rural people in a systematic manner. He argued that along with technology such as solar panels, a customized micro-financing arrangement should also be provided so that it is easy for poor to use technology. A customized loan arrangement means that hawkers could repay on a daily basis while salaried people such as teachers could do so on a monthly basis. Dr Hande pointed out the lack of awareness in India for such ventures. He said that SELCO often has student interns from foerign universities but rarely recieves applications from India.

An MBA program aims to provide exposure to a wide range of issues and students from varied backgrounds enroll at business schools. However, Indian b-schools in most cases have a gender ratio heavily skewed towards male students. Interestingly enough, Apeejay Educational Society has chosen to set up women dedicated MBA programs at two branches in the NCR region.

Fewer people will definitely be crossing oceans and going to business schools as the number of GMAT registrations has reduced for the first time in five years. The Asian MBA may just prove to be a good option in these times and Nick Soriano, Admissions Director at Nanyang Business School, Singapore takes us through the nitty-gritties of the MBA programs at the institute and explains the admissions process, financial assistance and other important issues concerning the institute.