With 1,200 expected applications this year and a selection ratio of 1:12, the next batch of Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad's one-year PGP- Executive program (PGPX) might expand to two sections, says PGPX Chairman Prof Arvind Sahay. He also explains how PGPX is different from ISB's one-year program.
How many applications have you received in last two years of PGPX how many of them made it to the interview stage?
In the first year (batch of 2006-07) we received 730 applicants and we called 210 applicants for interview. The final batch size was 60 students. In the second year (batch of 2007-0
, we got 849 applications of which 231 were called for interview and the final batch size was 73 students.
How are the admissions coming along for this year?
This year, at the current run rate, our applications received could be anywhere between 1,200 to 1,500.
How do you decide the size of your batches?
It depends on the quality of applications that we receive. There is certainly a supply constraint in terms of faculty and even if we had the number and quality of applications we wanted, we wouldn’t be able to take as much as we would in an ideal world. But we are looking to expand. Right now we have one section of 73 students which we selected out of 849 applications, making it a 1:12 kind of ratio, which is as good as that in any top school around the world. This year, my hope is that we will get somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 applications and hence admit between 100 and 125 students. That would make two PGPX sections. That is where I am hoping to be, assuming that I get the same quality of applications as I have in the previous years.
During admissions, do you compose the batch in terms of sector and background participation?
No, our only criterion is the quality of the applicant. We have many different dimensions to the quality of an applicant, including previous academic performance during the Bachelor, Master or PhD level, amount of managerial industry experience, how much of it is in India and abroad, the GMAT score and the hour long interview that every person who meets the cut has to go through. Then there are essays that people have to write on why they want to come to IIMA over some other school and how they see the PGPX contributing to their career goals. These are some of the parameters we use to evaluate the applicant.
Are you looking to be generally a local executive education program for Indians or are you looking to be an essentially international school?
In India, the MBA program has conventionally been for freshers or people with one or two years of work experience, which is what IIMA’s two-year PGP program is about. In India, one tends to complete his or her education at one go, getting it out of the way and then going ahead to do a job. If people continue education later, it is usually in week-long courses. But over the last five or ten years, people have started going into jobs immediately after their Bachelor degree. They work for a substantial period of time and then start feeling the need for an MBA, either to accelerate their career path or to switch tracks in a minor or major fashion. The PGPX is targeted at this completely different group of MBA aspirants. We are saying that we recognize that there is a difference between a person who has little or no experience and wants to do an MBA and a person with substantial experience, and one should have separate programs for this. The PGPX is for the latter category and these people are free to come to us from any part of the world. In principle, we are open to getting these people fro any part of the world. But in practice, in the initial years, the majority PGPX participants are coming either from within India or from the Non-Resident Indian community, where IIMA enjoys great brand equity. So in the second batch we had five foreign passport holders out of 73 participants and in the first batch we had three foreign passport holders out of 60. We are very conscious that we must increase the number of foreign passport holders in order to internationalize. That is definitely on the agenda, but not something we are hung up on. A lot of US b-schools have a mantra that you should have a lot of international students in your campus. But most of them have 50 percent of their classes comprising of Americans, which makes it largely an American class, regardless of how many international students they might boast of. The only truly international schools are INSEAD, France and IMD, Switzerland because they have no nationality that dominates. So I don’t think that argument (of having a few international students in the class) washes. In fact within India itself there is great diversity, as a North Eastern is way different from a Punjabi, who is different from a Gujarati or Malayali. But having said that, I recognize that the rules of the game do require us to have more foreign participants and we would definitely increase the number of foreign participants in the class.
How are you marketing PGPX outside India?
We are mainly approaching companies which have operations in India, and have managers who would be working sometime in India and would like to get to know India better. Of course if such a company wants to sponsor a candidate, he would have to go through the same entry process. This year we have a Korean participant from Posco. Hopefully this year we would get more people like him. We are also doing some low-key advertising in some focused media outlets abroad.
How do you compare PGPX to Indian School of Business’s (ISB) one-year MBA, given that there is a pool of common applicants between you both?
Actually last year, the overlap was not much and I am as curious as you to know why. This year, I expect the overlap to be larger. Anyhow, there are many differences between ISB and PGPX. Firstly, ISB’s classes have people who are fresh out of an IIT as well as those with 15 years of work experience. Their design is a one-size-fits-all approach, whereas we are saying that these two kinds of people ought to be dealt with differently in separate programs. We have a ‘Preparing for top management’ module, which is specifically designed for the kind of people we get. In fact last year one of our participants directly joined as the Chief Operating Officer of a company. We have an international immersion project where you get to do an international project, exploring both the academic and practical sides.
What are some of the biggest mistakes people make while writing the essays in the PGPX application?
Consider somebody who has submitted a canned essay against someone who has taken the time to think through himself about what he actually wants to do. The quality of the person shows in the essay. Sometimes a person is tempted to crawl through the Internet and aggregate and reword others’ essays. But when you interview this person, the mismatch in the essay and what he speaks reveals itself. Sometimes people write content that is completely unrelated to what they have been as people and what they want to be in an ideal case. So the essay should reflect the person.
What is the lowest GMAT score below which you refuse to look at an application?
There is no lowest GMAT score. Like I said our admissions consider a combination of many criteria. In fact in the first batch we rejected a candidate with 770 in GMAT.
Your application has description of international exposure as a separate column. Does someone who has not worked in many countries at a disadvantage while applying to PGPX?
It depends on what his strengths are on other criteria. If international exposure is a weakness, he can make up for it on the other criteria.
Are you over the years planning to set a niche for yourself in a certain industry or sector?
The PGPX like the PGP course is a General Management program. However, we do offer sufficient number of electives for people to gain a fair amount of depth into areas, be it finance, consulting, production or others.
How easy is it to change one’s industry and function after PGPX?
In the first batch, 57 pc people were from IT-related industries but only 33 percent went back into IT. That should give you some idea of the shift.
Given that PGPX is functioning is the same faculty base as the two-year PGP, do you think this resource is enough?
Faculty constraint is a concern for us in terms of availability. In the last three years we have recruited 20 new faculty. At the same time there has been attrition due to the retirement of eight faculty. So the net addition has been 12. It is a fact that if we do not recruit enough faculty then we might not be able to expand as much as we could or want to. In the next three years we will probably recruit another 20 faculty. We are presently about 85 in the number faculty and we should go upto 100 in the next three years. We are on a faculty recruitment drive, though it is extremely hard to find good faculty. So no questions about the fact that we are looking to hire new faculty to sustain the increasing load. But if all goes well in terms of recruiting faculty, it would be much easier for us to move from the present one PGPX section to two sections.
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I think we are lost the track of the thread right from the second post 
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