The 3 day ISB Experience

The 3 day ISB Experience

The Campus

The campus is at the heart of the IT Hub at Hyderabad. Its a resort for the students for a year and exhaustively has everything that a student might need for a fine living experience. Only a few international schools could compare with the pomp of the ISB campus. A pretty snapshot is here

The full time 1 Year PGP program

The PGP program runs for 51 weeks straight with 8 terms of 30-45 days each. The terms are extremely intense and you hardly have time to do anything else. Its a heavy duty immersive experience. The classes are almost 70% case based. Although HBS cases are mostly followed but ISB has taken an initiative to create new emerging market based cases and has around 50 cases in its belt. Premier Indian B Schools follow ISB reference cases which are published by HBS (Harvard) and Richard Ivey (Western Ontario). ISB Currently has 50 permanent faculty residing on campus and a host of visiting faculties joining in from all parts of the world. I had the chance to meet a Booth Alumni, residing at ISB, who takes Corporate Finance classes and worked with the Indian Finance minister with the 2013 Budget. Although, being a one year program, the PGP model does not allow internships but it has tie ups with recruiters to provide a sandbox experience (course credit-based) in which students have to work with MNCs in a particular problem involving Marketing/Consulting/Finance etc. This can run upto 4-8 weeks and works in tandem with the term courses. ISB is also the ONLY AACSB accredited South Asian Business School. ISB does not have an university status yet because Indian University has to abide by certain non-merit based reservations (I highly support ISB here). Point to note here that the school operates as a not for profit organization. Having 13 different research centers spread out through the country, ISB also has the concept of area leaders for different functions. For example Wharton functions as the area leader in Finance, Kellogg in Marketing and MIT Sloan in operations.

Students at ISB

Students form the stars of ISB. The class kicks off with club registration and election for presidents. Right now there are 13 active clubs at the Indian School of Business, Marketing, Finance and Consulting being the most popular in 2012. The entrepreneurial club is proud to have 50+ entrepreneurs coming out in a span of 5 years, most of which started their business while at ISB. Internationals have more presence here than in any other business school in India and brings great diversity to the table. The average age is 26 and the percentage of women is 29. I got a chance to interact with several current students at ISB and I got in touch with a 24 year old Australian Indian, a 41 year old architect, a 32 year old entrepreneur. So the diversity is intense. Students at ISB have done exceptionally well in their past academics which forms one of the core criteria of admission at ISB. The average GMAT score is already 715 and moving upward. The admission team made it pretty clear that getting into ISB will be extremely difficult if your GMAT is sub 600.

ISB Life

If your spouse wanted to spend a vacation in an exotic country with all the privileges and comfort of the first world, thats a totally legit reason of applying to ISB It has the state of the art recreational center, student and executive lounges, fancy and low budget restaurants, day care centers, studio and shared apartments and SO MUCH more. I guess a picture says a thousand words so here goes!





Stay Tuned for my Day wise experience with the ISB Dean, the admissions team, the students and alums and the curriculum development team

Day 1 at ISB