Dr. Priyanshi Shah

Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow

“A voracious reader, an empathetic entrepreneur who doesn’t settle for the status quo.”

Hometown: Mumbai, Maharashtra

Fun Fact About Yourself: I am a hobbyist wildlife photographer who has captured over 50 animals and birds, and all the big cats in six regions of the world, leaving behind the snow leopard.

Undergraduate School and Major: Nair Hospital Dental College/Maharashtra University of Health Sciences, Dentistry.

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Face Surgery Centre, Co-Founder

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of IIM Lucknow’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? It would be the academic pedagogy. IIM Lucknow has some of the finest professors who bring in the best of both worlds: academic as well as business experience. Professors here have been stalwarts in their respective domains and are now helping us craft our professional journeys.

What has been your favorite course or extracurricular activity at IIM Lucknow? What has been the most important lesson that you have learned from it? Strategy Management so far has been my favorite subject. What fascinates me most about the subject is that it calls for a perfect blend utilizing the analytical left brain and the creative right brain. The multiple perspectives, individual approaches, and grey areas that lead to decisions that make-or-break companies is what encourages me to delve deeper.

What excites you the most about the International Immersion? What excites me the most is the possibility of stimulating conversations about business, social culture, and business culture with fellow students and academicians from an equally accomplished b-school from another part of the world. Learning from such conversations, classroom learning aside would be invaluable.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I started my dental venture just four months before the COVID pandemic hit in 2020. As the pandemic hit, we were forced to halt our business for four months during the nationwide lockdowns. Despite this dire situation, we continued to pay all our employees in full, inspiring them to stay loyal to us and return to work as the lockdowns eased. My leap of faith to invest my capital in the business, as opposed to borrowing, helped us stay debt-free despite the slowdown in business and even allowed us the comfort of continuing to serve underprivileged patients without any obligations.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far: As an MBA student, barely four months into my tenure here, I have been able to blend my past learnings with what I have learned in the classroom here to a real-life business problem. During my time here, I worked part-time with an IIM Lucknow-incubated startup helping them identify and solve their problems about product positioning, go-to-market strategy, and pricing.

What do you hope to do after graduation? I hope to utilize my past experience as a healthcare practitioner, combined with the upskilling that I have received here at IIM Lucknow, both through classroom learning as well as hands-on activities such as live projects and case competitions to solving real-world challenges in healthcare accessibility in the medium term. In the long term, I hope to go back to being an entrepreneur and to make a difference at the grassroot levels.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into IIM Lucknow? IIM Lucknow offers an ocean of learning opportunities for us as students. But sometimes it isn’t possible to grasp it all. So as much as you want to learn everything you can lay your hands on, be prudent – choose a set of subjects or discipline that you truly love, or something that adds tangible value to your past work experience. The academic and non-academic staff at IIM Lucknow are truly supportive and will go to every length possible to help you in finding your excellence in this way.

DON’T MISS: MEET THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT LUCKNOW’S IPMX CLASS OF 2024