Sumit Singh

IIM Calcutta

School: Kendriya Vidyalaya, BHU Campus, Varanasi

“Passionate advocate about sustainability, actively seeking eco-friendly solutions for environmental issues.”

Hometown: Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh

Fun Fact About Yourself: I love to travel and want to cover at least 50 countries in next decade of my life.

Undergraduate School and Major: B. Tech – Chemical Engineering, MNNIT Allahabad

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Manager (Operations) at Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, Kochi Refinery.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of IIM Calcutta’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school, and why was it so important to you?

IIM Calcutta is the oldest IIM in the country and one of the few IIMs to offer multiple centers on the campus to explore. Apart from providing a plush green campus with seven lakes, IIM C boasts a vast alum base who helped me a lot during my application and gave me insights about how the association with the college has aided them in their careers.

What has been your favorite course or extracurricular activity at IIM Calcutta? What has been the most important lesson that you have learned from it? My favorite course has been “Managerial Communications”. It taught me the essential skills for effective communication in a business context. What techniques business people use when they communicate with each other? It shows how celebrities communicate with their fans, how firms communicate with their customers, and how to communicate the same message differently with different generations. During the course what I really liked was learning very new concepts everyday (e.g., imagined community, laddism, and wish plosion).

What has been the best part of studying business in Kolkata? The best part until now has been the professors and their way of teaching. The way they teach us to solve real life case studies through discussions in the class really amazes me.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I consider my dedicated work during COVID-19 pandemic to be my biggest accomplishment until now. Maintaining the refinery operations 24/7 with limited resources and manpower and completing some critical projects during that time has taught me more than anything else in my life.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far: I believe that my biggest accomplishment until now (and ongoing) has been the learning which I got from my batchmates from diverse fields such as Finance, Banking, IT and Healthcare. I got their perspectives and outlook on any problem and experienced how different they were from mine. Overall, I learned from the collective knowledge of the cohort and which I feel is invaluable.

What is your class’s favorite hangout away from school? Why do you gather there? The favorite hangout place for us is our common room in hostel. We have mini-gatherings, indoor games, birthday celebrations, sometimes study session over there. Overall, it is a fun place to be in.

What do you hope to do after graduation? I would like to work around sustainability and energy conservation and would like to leverage technology in finding innovative solutions which will not only be applicable for present but also for future generations’ problems.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into IIM Calcutta? Being one of the top courses in the country, competition is going to be tough. So do in-depth research about the course, prepare well for GMAT, reach out to alums to know more about the application strategy. College promotes people from diverse background to apply for the course.

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