The new Director General of Jaipuria Group of Institutes, Dr.Pankaj Gupta, was on a one-day visit to the Indore campus. After a detailed interaction with the faculty members, he also made time to address the PGDM batch of 2012-14.

After welcoming all the students, he started off on a thoughtful note by asking the most elementary question of whether the students had thought about why they were doing an MBA in the first place. He said that in his career, he had come across many students who had just got into doing an MBA because of peer or parental pressure.

He emphasised the fact that even though everyone has different potential, most of us are bound down by our own beliefs. He said that we ourselves create many glass ceilings in our lives and that all limitations are in our own minds. That was the reason he had started with this question – he felt that we needed to have clarity about our goals and purpose in life, and to be self aware.
He went on to say that these were two valuable years of our lives which, if spent in the right way, would take us miles ahead in our professional careers. But to do that, it was very important to assess ourselves and the management roles which we would fit into, as a mismatch in choosing careers could greatly affect our productivity at work.

Giving valuable inputs, he suggested self-evaluation methods like Thomas Profiling for assessing ourselves and the organisational roles in which we would make best use of our skills. He also said that we needed to have clarity in our expectations from the institutions we joined.

To illustrate his point, he went on to give examples of his former students who were now well placed in companies like McKinsey and Britannia, and how they had dreamed of reaching these organisations. He said that they had made their dreams come true though sheer hard work and determination. He added that if they could, then there was no reason why we couldn’t; it was all about putting in the effort and believing in ourselves.

The new Director General certainly gave his enthralled audience something to think about. After taking a few questions from the students, he finally concluded by saying that we were responsible for our own success and that it was all about preparing for the big future which lies ahead and creating our own destiny .