Home Competition Stories IIM Rohtak’s Parag Nawani shares his journey through corporate competitions!

IIM Rohtak’s Parag Nawani shares his journey through corporate competitions!

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IIM Rohtak’s Parag Nawani shares his journey through corporate competitions!

The first of the many things that I learned after joining IIM Rohtak is the importance of corporate competitions. They give you a platform to apply theoretical knowledge to real-life situations. Furthermore, they provide you an opportunity to interact with Industry Leaders. For me, these were the major benefits, amongst others of participating in these events.

Also, corporate competitions add CV points. They provide one with discussion-topics in your placement interviews. Many companies offer PPO/PPI opportunities to students performing excellently in their competitions.

Corporate competitions are mostly case-based events, in which the companies might ask the students to prepare a marketing strategy for their products. Similarly, they might ask students to select the best possible approach for solving a particular intriguing situation.

One needs to follow a structured approach to crack the case. I have formulated the following 6 steps- ABCDEF, based on my experience of such competitions:

A- Analyzing: Identify the crux of the case, around which the presentation of your team will revolve;

B- Brainstorming: Propose 2-3 concrete ideas, rather than more number of solutions;

C- Content planning: Plan the content for each slide and try to maintain an approximately equal amount of content on each slide.

D- Dividing the work: Divide the work among your team members, based on your solutions. Also, you can divide it based on a particular task. E.g. one person can do the PPT design work, and one can perform the primary research, etc.

E- Exploring: Collect relevant data required to solve the case study. It is always good to present relevant information from trusted sources to back your ideas. Also, there are many sources available on the internet, on which important information is readily available- like ibef.org, statista.com, etc.

F- Furnishing: Selecting an apt background, applying a good template, choosing an appropriate font, etc.- all these are parts of polishing a PPT. There are many resources available online like SlideModel, POPP, Creative Venus, etc. where you will get many design ideas to be used in your PPT.

There's a dedicated Competition Cell in IIM Rohtak which prepares the students to excel in various corporate events. The seniors of the club took sessions on design and strategy for the competitions. After a great run in the Corporate Circuit, I can say for sure that they are fulfilling their duties to the greatest extent. Besides, the seniors and batchmates in the Competition Cell were our biggest strengths throughout the journey!

It is advisable to make a team which has a diverse skill-set required for the event. For example, an event might require some amount of technical knowledge, so a person with prior experience in the same field will make a good team member. Similarly, an expert in PowerPoint presentation will help you with the design.

For TATA Motors MindRover Season 6 (which had a case on TATA Hexa), I approached one of my batch mates who had prior work experience in the Automobile industry. His experience certainly helped our team reach the national finals in the event.

It was almost always a challenge to strike a balance between college work and corporate competitions. Yet, it was the motivation and the interest which enabled me to manage for that extra time for the events.

Most memorable victory for me has to be the TATA Motors MindRover Season 6! We were still 1st-year students and luckily, we got enough time to get an idea of various stakeholders of the company. We visited the local dealer and interacted with TATA vehicle owners. The PPT for the final event was one of the best, which my team made for any event. It was an exhilarating experience!

My accomplishments through this journey were in terms of:

A: Approach;

B: Brands;

C- Competency;

D- Dynamism;

E-Experience; and

F- Fulfillment

I highly recommend participating in corporate competitions for MBA students. They provide a great platform to apply classroom concepts, and also offer great networking prospects. Also, it is especially helpful for freshers to build their CVs. Moreover, these events will also help in personality development apart from learning important tools like PowerPoint and Excel!

I want to thank Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete)for providing the platform to get information about almost all the corporate competitions. The initiative taken in the form of Unstop (formerly Dare2Compete)Awards is a great step forward in motivating the students to take part in these events, and it will definitely prove to be fruitful for the MBA community.

Edited by

Parag Nawani - IIM Rohtak

(Batch of 2017-19)

Parag Nawani, an MBA student from IIM Rohtak, is a Mechanical Engineering graduate; has interests in finance; has bagged many prestigious titles of prestigious corporate competitions.

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MBA B-School Dare2Compete Awards Dare2Compete Awards 2019 IIM Rohtak