Fall Project Report on CoolAvenues.com

For further reference to the Fall Project Report pls. check http://www.coolavenues.com/bschools/070101/glakes-fall-project-1.php

Fall Project @ Great Lakes

Industry Recognises Great Lakes’ Increasing Brand Equity  
http://www.glakes.org or http://www.glakes.org/report-2006.htm

Despite this being the first year for the concept of a one-month Fall Project, Great Lakes was able to build in capabilities and create opportunities for students with different kinds of jobs that they loved to do. Fall Project was a testimony of the interest that industry has shown towards this concept. 

In addition to the regular recruiters, 2006 saw the entry of bigwigs like Standard Chartered Bank, KPMG, Pepsico, Pricewater House Coopers and Deloitte, which recruited for the first time from Great Lakes. The growing visibility of the institute is reflected in many similar companies offering fall projects to Great Lakers. 

As many as 81 companies offered projects during the one month project phase, with 37 of them being first-time recruiters at campus.  Great Lakes grew in reputation as a finance bigwig shone across again with nearly 30% of the PGPM batch getting a finance profile. Premier Banks and Financial Organizations like Acumen Fund, Standard Chartered Bank, Kotak Mahindra Asset Mgmt., KPMG, SBI Caps and Langham Capital reaffirmed their relationship with the campus. FMCG and Retail majors too recognized the talent at Great Lakes with profiles in Marketing, HR and Finances being offered to students by ITC, Pepsico, Reliance Retail and others. With a booming industry sector and multiple profiles on offer, IT companies made a collective pitch for the MBA students. Major firms like Cognizant, Covansys, TCS, Oracle, Lehman Brothers, Flextronics & Wipro offered attractive choices to the students. 

Projects in consulting arena were also offered at Great Lakes by companies like Frost and Sullivan, E&Y, Technopak Advisors, KPMG and Deloitte. Some companies, like Honeywell Automation, in FMCG, Manufacturing and other sectors also offered roles like Process Consultant etc. 

Says Prof S. Sriram, the Executive Director at Great Lakes “The Fall Projects at Great Lakes, Chennai displayed the sound academic foundation and an excellent industrial interface. The diversity of the internships across horizontals and verticals on offer this time are indicative of Great Lakes equity in the industry. The successful fall project is once again a reflection of the trust that corporates place on us”

 

Why MBA @ Great Lakes?

This post has been pending for a long time.

I was getting all kinds of enquiries about Great Lakes, the kind of student profiles we have here at
Great Lakes, the faculty that teaches here, and the most important of all, the placement scene! – Basically the usual “What is in it for us” kind of questions. The objective of my post here is to reason what sets the Great Lakers apart… Why and How are we different from the rest of the B-Schools.

• One – Year course- the only other college offering the same kind of course is ISB. The common link between both the colleges being Uncle Bala, who is one of the founders of ISB, MDI and also
  Great Lakes. One year MBA makes certainly more sense, specially for those with prior relevant work-ex – You save one precious year of your life
• International Focus – Our entire curriculum has an international focus to it. We study Chinese language and both US and Indian forms of Accounting – Indian Accounting taught by an Indian CA; the US GAAP being taught by a US based Accounting Professor
• World class faculty – We, at Great Lakes, have professors flying down from the US to teach us various courses. 90% of the courses that we study here are taught by professors from Kellogg School of management, Carnegie-Mellon University, Stern School of Business, Georgia State University, University of Miami, Stuart Graduate School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Florida International University, University of Rhode Island, San Jose State University, University of Illinois, IIMA, IIMB, and so on…
• Quality of Student Interaction – We have students with an average work-ex of 3.5 years. This being the case, the wealth of practical knowledge Great Lakers bring to the table even before joining Great Lakes is exceptional. This thereby, leads to high quality peer group interactions and brings in newer perspective to different dimensions.
• International Affliations – Great Lakes is affiliated to Stuart Business School, Illinois Institute of Technology for its PGPM course. We also have MOU with Nanyang University, Singapore and Collaboration with Yale  University. We have recently signed an MOU with Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, thereby enabling us to have value additions in technical expertise that IIT has been able to gain in past few decades.
• Research Outlook– With Dr Venkat R Krishnan, Director Yale – Great Lakes Centre of Research, at the helm of research activities at
  Great Lakes, we have already marked our presence in Management Research. We organized the first Yale Great Lakes International Conference on 24^thDec ‘06, which was a run away success with academicians from across the globe participating in the same. We have also announced the setting up of Kotler – Srinivasan Centre of Marketing Research, thereby developing our collaboration with Stanford University also.
• Luminaries – Great Lakes has been known for the luminaries visiting the campus. Interactions with them have been profoundly insightful and they not only enthralled Great Lakers with their charisma, but also have been extremely motivational, showing us the path ahead! In terms of Academicians, we have had the privilege to listen to the some of the stalwarts of Management education throughout the world. The list includes Dr. Bala V Balachandran, Dr. Philip Kotler, Prof C K Prahalad, Prof Seenu Srinivasan, Prof HayaGriva Rao, Prof. Sudhakar Balachandran, and many others. Some of the eminent personalities at our campus are:
  • Ms. Indra Nooyi, CEO & President, Pepsi Co,
  • Mr Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India,
  • Mr Ratan Tata, Chairman Tata Group,
  • Mr Adi Godrej, Chairman Godrej Group,
  • Mr Lakshminarayan, CEO Cognizant,
  • Mr Vivek Paul, Former CEO, Wipro
• Industrial Interface – In a short span of two and half years, Great Lakes has been able to build its brand equity, with Industry across verticals accepting and praising Great Lakers and their efforts. We have been able to achieve 100% placements in the first two years of inception and had 7.2 LPA as the average salary last year. This year, we have had more than 81 companies participating in Fall Project Phase, which is a testimony of the acceptance industry has shown towards Great Lakers.
• Last, but not the least, Great Lakes is a student-run school. Here Students are given a lot of freedom to decide what path they want to take. For instance, the students are the ones who decide what electives to be taken. Hence, the course structure is very application-oriented with a lot of focus on the latest trends in Management. Even though it is a one-year course, the total number of courses offered are 40, with the total number of teaching hours being around 950 hours, even more than what some b-schools teach in 2 years.

After having said this, Its our duty to warn you that the course is no piece of cake… The scope for learning is tremendous. But, an equal amount of effort has to be put in. For instance, for every one hour of class, there is 4 hours of pre-reading involved!! You have to slog… to see the fruit in the end!

Hope that meets most of ur queries… In case, you would like to know something more, do feel free to ask

Cheers

Indra Nooyi @ Great Lakes

C K Prahalad @ Great Lakes

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Its happening here people!!

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Indra Nooyi @ Great Lakes; First International Yale – Great Lakes Conference

President and CEO of Pepsi Co., Ms. Indra Nooyi, was one of the distinguished guests at Yale – Great Lakes First International Conference. Though she did not stay back for long, but marked her presence with some intelligent and witty quotes. As a member of Board of Yale University, she said that she would make sure Yale – Great Lakes Centre achieve stardom in field of Management Research.

The International Conference on “Global Mindset Indian Roots” was a run away success with Academicians from across the globe presenting their cases. We had professors from Kellogg, Standford, North Carolina, University of Toronto, Georgia State, ISB, IIM A, IIM B, MDI, XLRI, IITs  to name a few. People from industry also were present with speakers from Preferred Brands International, TCS, Hexaware, Orchid, Delta Management USA and Reliance Industries.

The conference marks the first step towards providing a platform for Management Research on India. With Dr Venkat Krishnan (Director Yale – Great Lakes Center) at the helm of the research center, i am sure Great Lakes is all set to have  another feather in its cap at such an early stage of its evolution.

Reliance Retail @ Great Lakes

Today we had the pleasure of having amongst us Mr Venkatrama, VP – HR, Reliance Retail, with us for the guest lecture. He took us through the careers in Retail industry and the expansion plans of Reliance Retail. This was followed by Q&A session wherein he patiently answered questions posed by Great Lakers.

Being informal, Mr Venkatrama took us through a very lively interaction.  Continuing with Skull Sessions, the team surely has done amazing job with people across various domains coming and sharing their experiences.

Kudos to Guest Lecture Team

Head of Commercial Banking, HSBC India @ Great Lakes

Mr Subir Mehra, Head of Commercial Banking, HSBC India, was at Great Lakes on 4th Dec’2006.

Graduate from Kellogg Graduate School of Business, he enthralled all of us with his talk on “Careers in Banking”. He took us through the various career options like Treasury, Corporate Banking, Trade Finance etc, and patiently went forward to answer every question that Great Lakers had. For a person of his stature, he was very down to earth and delivered a perfectly drafted presentation.

The talk was not only beneficial for Great Lakers who want to pursue their career in Banking Industry, but also for all others.

Great Lakes Announces Setting up of Permanent Campus

Great Lakes Institute of Management announced setting up of its own campus on East Coast road, Chennai. The new campus is supposed to be build on 14 acres land, with a built in area of 1,80,000 sq.ft. The new campus would be residential one with hostels, amphitheatres, elctronic class rooms, auditoriums, and staff quarters. The design of the building is ready and the new campus would be fully operational for April 2008 batch.

Great Lakes also announced new chair professorships with Mr Gopal Srinivasan, MD TVS Electronics and Mr K B Chandrashekhar, CEO Jamcracker Inc. donating 1 crore each for setting up chairs in related domains.

In the pursuit of being known as a Marketing B School, Great Lakes also announced setting up of Kotler-Srinivasan Centre for Marketing Research. Prof Srinivasan is a faculty in Standford Business School and Philip Kotler is a part of distinguished profs at Kelloggs. This is the second research centre for Great Lakes, which already houses Yale - Great Lakes Centre for Management Research.