OCTAVIANS have a gala time at ‘Creat-e-witty’ work-shop

Students at OCTAVE got a refreshing break from their studies recently and got an opportunity to indulge in some interesting outdoor activities. The two-day outbound activity, which included creativity and team skills’ work-shop, was held at ‘Maitraban’, situated at the banks of lake Zilpi on the outskirts of Nagpur city.

DAY ONE

The first day was occupied by the creativity work-shop. It was a fun filled day with OCTAVIANS running their grey cells to come up with witty answers to hypothetical situations. Most popular of them was ‘the loss of gravity and its effect on our daily life’. Gauraw’s answer invited the maximum laughter and applause when he quipped, “the phrase, ‘love is in the air’ would become practically possible. “ Some other funny thoughts included, “The education minister will have to skip the chapter on ‘Gravity’ from the syllabus,” from Piyush J and “Sir Issac Newton wouldn’t be famous”, by Saurabh.

Another activity was that of naming a product, person and a process which is creative and students came up with brilliant answers having names of everyone and everything famous. However, it was an eye opener as Mr. Milind Apte, our faculty and a psychologist, gave an example of a ‘potter’ and a ‘mother’ as a creative person. His view, that, “we always think of a renowned figure when thinking of a creative person, but turn a blind eye to ordinary people surrounding us who too are highly creative in their life”, was agreed and appreciated by everybody.

Some more activities followed in the day, like ‘co-relating two words random words and making a meaningful sentence out of them’ and review of short movie ‘Highland Road’ directed by Nikunj Agrawal, a III year engineering student.

It was time for some physical exercise after playing enough mind games and students were quickly divided into five groups and asked to collect everything that looked like garbage around the campus. OCTAVIANS were again running their brains as they were asked to create something meaningful out of that garbage!

The groups came out with themes on a village, city, war front, scarecrow, and potty paradise!

DAY TWO

The next day began with a drawing activity. It was a pleasant atmosphere and ‘Maitraban’ looked its scenic best in morning hours. A great location, to sit and ponder how the beautiful landscape will look like on paper.

It was time for some adventure camping after the breakfast, which everyone was looking forward to.

Wall climbing proved out to be the toughest one as few could actually climb till the top and flash victory signs. ‘Cobweb’ was a great team activity where the entire team had to make a strategy to move from one side of the web to the other and only one person going through one gap at a time and only once. No touching the web or your team will have to start all over again!

There were some prizes up for grabs at the end of the day and that included, ‘most creative person’ (Shweta Madan, Gauraw Ganvir, Chetan Gite, Tejaswini Giripunje) and some more for taking initiatives, participation, co-operation, etc.

All in all the two days were fun filled and a welcome break from routine classroom work.

• By Aditi Deodhar

Word of praise for OCTAVE from guest lecturers and industry experts

The guest lecturers and industry experts were highly impressed by OCTAVE Business School and its students and were all praise for the institution. The experts, most of whom are based outside India, interact and address students through remote delivery sessions.

As OCTAVE provides hi-tech facilities at its campus, distance is no matter to connect with anybody in the world. The Wi-Fi enabled campus supports video conferencing wonderfully, which makes the world look so small.

“OCTAVE is a unique Business School. I have had the opportunity to interact with the students from USA via the remote lecture delivery platform and have been impressed by their questions and the enthusiasm to learn."

--Prem Talreja

Business Executive in USA.

“I had the opportunity to interact in person with the students at OCTAVE Nagpur early January. It was hugely satisfying to see OCTAVE grow from a nascent idea to this stage. The importance given to real life projects in the OCTAVE curriculum is a unique and differentiating factor as compared to other B-schools. I wish the team best of luck, and hope to continue to help in any way that I can.”

--Shashikant Khandelwal

CEO, thefind.com

“As a industry speaker for OCTAVE, I was impressed by the enthusiasm and thirst for learning by the OCTAVE students. They were wide awake and fully engaged on an early Saturday morning!. OCTAVE has an innovating model that combines MBA education with indigenous local business context. This will enable growth and prosperity to filter down from the large MNCs to the local level and have a positive influence in the overall wealth creation for India. I look forward to OCTAVE's continuous success and wish all students the very best!”

--Deepak Sharma

Industry Speaker & Investor - OCTAVE

“I was very impressed with the quality of students at Octave and their enthusiasm to learn and succeed. The college apart from regular class-room teaching uses a variety of innovative methods to teach the students and bring out the best from them. The college management is quite determined to make this initiative a success and I am sure Octave will soon become a hotbed of talent for companies looking for new recruits.”

 --Vikram Deshpande

 Business Consultant E-Commerce, Tesco

• Compiled by OCTAVE PR Committee 

IIM-A and SPJIMR alumni address OCTAVians

The first semester at OCTAVE was full of excitement and knowledge sharing as alumni of reputed Management institutions such as IIM Ahmedabad and SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR) visited the Nagpur campus. The management graduates, now working with leading MNCs, addressed students on various topics like Finance, Consulting, and Marketing etc.

OCTAVians felt privileged to interact with the alumni and learning about the real corporate world through their experiences. It was exciting to hear stories of alumni’s student life at IIMs and SPJIMR. The interaction further got interesting as the graduates discussed various career options available after MBA and provided an insight of the same. A wise advice that came from the guests was that the students should select the right field based on individual interest and how should they develop the interest in order to succeed professionally.

They stressed on importance of non-classroom activities such as student interest clubs, field exposure and doing projects with industries during MBA curriculum.

The alumni were also impressed with the infrastructure and facilities at OCTAVE.

• By Aditi Deodhar

OCTAVIANs start working on Real World Projects under OBAG (OCTAVE Business Advisory group) program

OCTAVE has started the implementation of the 4th component of their PGP+MBA management education i.e. Real World Projects as a part of regular semester curriculum. More than 10 companies listed their projects for the program and eventually 7 projects were selected based on the student preferences. Rest of the projects and new projects may be executed in the next semester beginning 1st July 2011.

Companies which are participating in this semester include FIRE Arcor Infrastructure, V-Das Associates, Global Power Systems, Wasant Kutir Udyog (Shreeji Products), Shades Furnishing and HIFEM Informatics. The scope of projects is varied and includes Web marketing strategy, New products marketing launch, Advertising plan, Loyalty marketing and design of HR plan for hiring, training and retention of employees.

Each project has three parties actively engaged. They are:

•3-5 students selected as per their choices and priority number based on academic performance and attendance

•One of the founders and/or an industry experienced faculty as the mentor

•Owner of Business Partner (Local company) or an assigned senior manager with necessary authority

Under OBAG, students work primarily in the late afternoons and on Saturdays. Each team has a coordinator assigned and every member gets to do this role in rotation. Team members use Skype meetings and traditional methods for discussion among themselves and with their mentors. Each team is expected to regularly present the progress to the Business Partner thereby keeping them fully updated and involved. At the end of the project (end of semester) each team will submit two reports, one to the Business Partner and one to OCTAVE.

A Session By Vinod Verma: CEO, Managing Director and founder of Sum Amicus Consultants

It’s a first time that some one from Harvard Business School (HBS) shared his experiences with OCTAVIANs. Many consider HBS as the number one business school in the world. Mr.Verma impressed OCTAIVIANs with his outgoing personality,deep knowledge and great sense of humour. He is a graduate in Electrical Engineering and started his career in Steel Authority india Ltd (SAIL) in 1970. After working with SAIL in various capacities including Head of Plant and Head of HR, he joined Wockhardt as Sr. Vice President HR, IT and Health Care Business in 1996. He founded Sum Amicus Consultants in 2001 and is currently its CEO and Managing Director. He has been a consultant to many leading companies including Bharti group, Vedanta group, Reliance, ONGC, Zee group, Ispat Industries, Capgemini, HCL to name a few.

Since the beginning of the session, Mr. Verma interacted with the students in an open manner and made the session as practical as possible by giving many real life examples. He shared his Work Experience and knowlesge about what is expected from fresh management graduates. He Emphasized the need of Change Management with practical exercise and how Learning and Implementation of knowledge gained in classrooms is important in today’s world.

In his session OCTAVIANs got valuable insight in to what motivates and how to keep yourself

motivated and how positive personality will help you to reach Pinnacle of your carrier. He also shared ways to recognize one’s area of interest and passion, which will help to choose the desired field of specialization.

• By Nikhil Pote

The Diwali Project

When it comes to learning, the practical way is the most effective. It was on these lines that OCTAVE decided to push their students right into the market to learn business. The ‘Diwali Project’ was one of a kind experience for entire 2010-12 batch on how a firm runs a business.

The project was all about starting a business venture with a capital amount in hand. The meetings of the respective groups, delegation of posts, of selection of products, market research, risk analysis, SWOT analysis, marketing, advertising, sales and a lot more was done within one month. And the results were great in terms of gross profit.

Executing such a project successfully, even before the completion of first semester, definitely boosts up the confidence of pursuing the dream of entrepreneurship in future.

The real earning out of the project was not the profit but the knowledge gained by practical things like working in organization, managing people and conflicts, handling disturbances, surviving in the group and most importantly: convincing customers to buy your product.

A very good learning experience indeed!

• By Nikhil Pote & Aditi Deodhar

GROUPS AND THEIR PRODUCTS

GROUP 1: H PRYSM

MEMBERS

1. Harsh Khombhadia
2. Samyak Jain
3. Prutha Deshpande
4. Somesh Mishra
5. Mohit Mohta
6. Yashica Singh

PRODUCTS: Rice Lights and Torans

GROUP 2: The Grandeurs

MEMBERS

1. Mukul Agrawal
2. Aditi Deodhar
3. Gaurav Ganvir
4. Tejaswini Giripunje
5. Sneha Amte
6. Gaurav Kakran

PRODUCTS: Designer diyas and candles

Group 3: Sprouts n Roots

Members

1. Piyush Jugade
2. Saurabhh Ambaselkar
3. Amol Dhopte
4. Ashish Hatwar
5. N Deepak

Products: Eco-Friendly Paper Bags

Gaining confidence through public speaking

It was a wonderful experience to address the crowd of career launcher as an Octavian. We were very excited to share our experiences with the other MBA aspirants. We had a head start with Chandani addressing the crowd about her personal experiences at Octave followed by Samyak who gave a wonderful introduction of all our directors. Gaurav Kakran then elaborated in details about the guest lectures we had. My part was to address the crowd about the various committees we have at Octave and the way we carry different projects in groups. It was really encouraging when the crowd listened attentively to each and every word I said. It was a nice experience to explain everyone about the very unique committees we have. Some of them were really worth mentioning like the Industrial relationship committee, Public relationship committee and the entrepreneurship committee. Besides I also told them about the Diwali project we are carrying out.

Being an MBA student it is very important to learn soft skills. It boosts your confidence and you can see the change in yourself when you start developing your interactive skills. We give the credit to Octave to help us develop our personality.

• By Prutha Deshpande

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It was a nice experience to deliver a small speech in front of a huge crowd.

Initially I was very nervous regarding how should I speak in front of such a huge crowd but later when I started with my part I found that it is not very tough to speak if you are clear in your thoughts and had practiced about it.

• By Samyak Jain