All Facets Of Academic Cycle Administered Diligently: Debasis Sanyal, Great Lakes

What is your approach to make a mark in the community of B-schools? 
Great Lakes Institute of Management, Gurgaon (GLIM-G) is a very young business school that has established itself as a credible brand in a short period of time. Today, GLIM-G has become an aspirational destination for students and faculty from across the country, looking to add to their professional skills and career journey, respectively. The number of applications for the 2-year PGDM programme has gone up by nearly five times, from around 3,000 in 2018 to over 14,000 in 2023, owing primarily to our constant emphasis on value-added quality education. All facets of the academic cycle, from admission to curriculum development, to delivery of the courses and up to placements are administered diligently with an eye to delivering best-in-class quality. The credentials of the school are based on student and faculty satisfaction, which comes from an environment that fosters excellence in all aspects of learning, intellectual development and career development.  

Quality of faculty becomes a key prerequisite for building up credentials of a business school. GLIM-Gurgaon boasts of a faculty cohort that any B-school would be proud of. Moreover, placements is a critical issue for students in business schools in India. The placement record of GLIM-Gurgaon has always been very impressive, reinforcing our ability to attract good quality of students in the programme.
 
What have been the challenges in this journey and how has the institute overcome those? 

The main challenge has been to attract faculty with excellent credentials. Today the academic community in India recognises GLIM-Gurgaon as one of the best young B-schools, committed to provide an environment of research and teaching in addition to providing attractive remuneration and service conditions.

While placement of students will continue to remain a challenge for every B-school, GLIM-Gurgaon has a full-time team of professionals that has not only negotiated these challenges with success but is also ready to meet the increasing expectations of the students in the future.
 
What are the locational benefits of your institute, and what impact has the institute created in the region?

GLIM-Gurgaon is located in the National Capital Region (NCR), in the industrial hub of Gurgaon. This provides us with significant locational advantage, as we are able to interact with academicians from across B-schools and universities in the region, as also with leading policymakers. It is very important that the students of B-school have exposure to industry experts. Being located in the industrial hub, sessions by senior industry executives are held regularly along with visits to nearby factories and corporate offices. This also helps students to obtain live projects from industries, to complement their classroom learning.
 
How has physical infrastructure and faculty strength been augmented? 

GLIM-Gurgaon is a residential campus, beautifully landscaped and aesthetically designed. Over the last five years, the intellectual growth of the institute has been amply supplemented by an equivalent increase in infrastructure capacity, from 1.43 lakh sq. ft to 2.50 lakh sq. ft. Starting with 2 hostel buildings, the institute now boasts four state-of-the-art hostel buildings with sufficient capacity to accommodate 900 students. It can be rightfully claimed that very few Institutes have shown such remarkable achievements within a short time period of five years, as GLIM-Gurgaon has achieved.

The institute has always prided itself on its high-quality faculty members. Today, we have a highly qualified faculty cohort of 23 members, with ever-increasing intellectual outputs. In 2018, our average faculty research output used to be less than 0.5; as of 2022-23, our average research output has been 2.3 per faculty, and more importantly, most of the publications are in B and A category peer-reviewed journals, including in FT 50 journals.
 
What impact will the increasing penetration of AI and disruptive technologies have on management education? 

New technology disruption has been and will continue to impact individual lifestyles as well as the business world. It is important for a business school to be agile to adopt new technology and rise to the occasion by developing a dynamic curriculum that can address such disruption. The institute has been a pioneer in introducing courses and programmes in cutting-edge areas such as analytics, internet business, artificial intelligence & machine learning, cloud computing etc., which significantly impact the future of businesses. It is our belief that management is an ever-evolving field and the synthesis of new ideas and technology through close industry-academia partnerships is the way forward to successfully meet the challenges that the business ecosystem will continue to throw up.