Studying @ DoMS
There is a sea of articles out there about MBA colleges and what special facilities and benefits an aspirant can avail by choosing to join their ranks. Instead of following the grand tradition of listing down special features of DoMS, IIT Roorkee’s facilities with a numerical number, let me paint you a word picture of a few things that are fundamentally more important; Processes and environment.

My first exposure to DoMS was when I sat at my home anxious to know more about the college in order to take an informed decision about enrollment. DoMS was among one of those few colleges that was actively rolling out content and addressing the questions and curiosity of aspirants on a variety of social media platforms like pagalguy, facebook and even Instagram. All this work was not done by hired professionals, these were the first year students part of the Media and Public relations cell handling official work from various cities at which they were doing their summer internships. There are dedicated teams and cells here that are entirely student driven and have a specified agenda to be accomplished over the course of the year.

If there is anything that a B-School should instill in its students, its professionalism, and we at DoMS IIT Roorkee live by it. Immediately after joining the college there are selection procedures (some that span 3 rounds) based on questionnaires, activities, team tasks and finally interviews for selecting the right people for jobs like Alumni relations, Event Management, Public relations and Magazine publishing. That whirlwind of learning, planning, organizing and presenting you always imagined MBA to be has already begun by the 1st day of your joining and you find yourself sitting in introductory sessions about excel, marketing, consulting and what not. These activities are organized by clubs, groups of 4-5 people passionate about something. There is so much stuff happening and DoMS puts you right in the middle of it. Drawing from the experience of my batch, in merely 4 months we have people who are in touch with CEOs and eminent speakers for arranging guest lectures for the batch, Sales team doing field work for generating sponsorships for our events, media and PR people covering events around IIT Roorkee and engaging outside queries and numerous other students engaged in a plethora of activities.

There is due process for everything here and all you have to bring with you is passion and ideas. Want to start something new? Write an email to the class representative who will bring it up during the weekly review meeting with the HOD and if your proposal is strong and actually adding value to the growth of students it will be accepted. You will find yourself planning events, drafting proposals, sending out official emails and all the while working in teams of 5-6, which is a great opportunity for personal growth and development.

The unique advantage that DoMS has is that its right in the middle of IIT Roorkee next to the towering legacy of James Thomason building which is more than 150 years old. Being at the epicenter of where the brightest minds of this generation show up for their technical education provides DoMS students the ideal environment and opportunity to help them turn their ideas into startups and enterprises. This is exactly what our students do in TIDES business incubator located inside IIT campus. The learning opportunities are immense starting from making business plans, working in a startup environment, valuation of startups and nuisances of intellectual property management. Students can apply their management skills at central IIT level by participating in Cognizance (Technical fest) and Thomso (Cultural Fest) organizing committees which work at a scale that’s bigger both in terms of capital and logistical complexity than your average startup. The possibilities are endless when it comes to implementing new ideas, you could collaborate with 20 different academic departments for a project or help in a live project, call up alumni working in a wide array of fields and academia for help and advice, talk to startups that are out of the incubation stage and doing well for developing a case study for an online competition, do live projects and consultancy work for multitudes of chapters, organizations , professors working within IIT Roorkee campus.

One of my favorite quotes from Harry potter is “Help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it“ and this is very much true for DoMS. If you have grand plans in your head and are willing to work to make them come true, this is the place to be.

Yes, we have a state of the art library, swimming pool, auditoriums, guest lectures by eminent speakers every weekend, north India’s biggest cultural festival, state of the art classrooms and teaching resources, highly qualified faculty, a beautiful campus the size of a big village, student recreation centers and one of the strongest alumni networks recognized throughout the world. What’s more important is the attitude, state of mind and the environment that surrounds all these materialistic things. Ideas and passionate people and we have that in abundance.