2 years @ corpcomm

So we are at a B school, and the rank of a B school is directly proportional to the number of committees it has, and your “success” quotient in turn, is directly proportional to the number of committees you are part of, or so you are made to believe as you sit wide eyed in the Assembly Hall at midnight, listening to your seniors go on and on and on about their respective committees- Placements, Alumni, Corporate Relations, E cell, Admissions, Consultancy Cell, Six Sigma, Neev, Finance Club, Marketing Club and so on and so forth- all of them having more stringent selection process than the admission process of SCMHRD! As you fill up the nth form, talk to the nth senior and the nth friend in the nth B school, wondering which committee offers the best, is the most prestigious and allows you to bunk the most number of lectures, you tend to ignore the most important aspect: which committee do you really want to work for!!

So as I got caught up in the usual mad rush of signing up and attending “inane” interviews at inane hours, I finally stopped to take a deep breath and realized that if it wasn’t for peer pressure and the fringe benefits, I wouldn’t like to work for ANY of these committees. The only committee which really offered me the “job satisfaction” was the much understated Corporate Communications headed by four very understated guys who struggled to get applications from “aspiring” juniors who “aspired” for something “better” and “more rewarding”. They didn’t have a financial support from the college, they didn’t have a faculty to guide them, they didn’t have an event of their own, they didn’t even have a room to have meetings in, they did all the dirty work for other committees rather like a poor cousin for the big brothers (very much parallel to India acting as a low cost outsourcing hub for Big Brother U.S.A.) but I couldn’t care less- this was the committee I wanted to work for! So I went for the interview, relaxed and casually dressed and for a change I wasn’t made to wait outside for the “process” and for the first time I had an honest answer to the question, “why do you want to join Corpcomm?” as I simply replied, “because I am passionate about writing”. However, the final round with the Director was not quite a cakewalk as he embarrassed me to the core, and even now, when I look back, I can’t help blushing at the very thought of him reciting a cheesy poem looking straight into my eyes. But there we were, the chosen ones- four junior girls (Ratika, Mani, Samleen and me) along with the four senior guys: we were a small but happy family!

While the initial handholding was over, we found ourselves neck deep in work, some of it even more hectic than our regular academics of 18 subjects! From being editors of the college magazine Hyperbol and the alumni magazine Sandes to making 11th hour presentations before every event, from calling up random press people begging for a little space in the daily for free to hurried event coverage, from laboriously taking down notes during boring guest lectures to chasing after the guests for some interesting sound bites, from coming up with catchy taglines to designing advertorials, from sorting through over a thousand photographs to come up with the best to struggling through windows moviemaker and flash, from amateur PowerPoint slides to sleek Publisher and CorelDraw graphics, from alumni meets to Risk Management seminars, from hating our senior team for ordering us about to growing to love and respect them, from midnight meetings at the atrium to wild cake cutting sessions- it was a long and self motivated journey which made us stronger and closer!

As we said goodbye to the seniors and took over the reigns, we survived one of the mindless reshuffling of teams, the ensuing chaos of too many cooks spoiling the broth, too much of compartmentalization and too much of independent talent. A team which barely found any takers was suddenly inundated with applications and after a week of grueling interviews, written tests and Subbu onslaught we finally came up with a much bigger family of twelve people. It was a rollercoaster ride, a more complicated one but one that got noticed, that got respected but had its share of brickbats too.

At the end of two years, I can safely claim that my biggest takeaway at SCMHRD was undoubtedly the Corpcomm team, the friends that I made, and the amount of learning was certainly far greater than all of the hundred credits worth of academics. I joined the team to cultivate a hobby, and I will be leaving it with a heavy heart, a new career goal and a deeper passion!