Hey everyone...
Am back briefly, after a long long looong time..
Drishtikon is long over, but i havent yet posted on how it went.. havent been able to write something out exclusively for your viewing pleasure, but heres something i wrote on drishtikon for our college mag, slightly edited... for the reading pleasure of those who still keep mailing to remind me:D
I have the third round of a really important for me job interview on monday.. wish meh luck:d and hope yu enjoy the read, even if disconnected in the beginning...
In what was a first, our faculty coordinator invited individual proposals for Drishtikon’s Core Committee this year (as opposed to randomly picking out students he thought were smartish), outlining ideas for the event, topics, contacts for speakers, sponsors etc. Yours truly had been doodling logos for drishtikon on backpages of notebooks since a sem earlier.. so had to jump in :D..somehow
At the end, a motley crew of 8 got together, soon joined by 3 more from 2nd year.
The Mission: To make Drishtikon a meaningful experience for its audience, its students, it was important for us to go back to why seminars are and should be organised in CBS at all...
To see being put to practice, what we have learnt in theory. To learn new approaches, the current market scenario, from those who are involved in changing trends.
A seminar is our only contact point with corporates from the industry, so it goes without saying, to market CBS better.
It is also the only place students and corporates from the industry share lunch, and tea, and there is no better setting than lunch to impress a prospective employer.;)
An event well organised can help bring any brand to the fore front. And we wanted Dristikon 05 to do that for CBS.
As Team Drishtikon learnt during a meeting with one of our panelists, who also recruits from CBS, CBS is a very good catchment area for Talent. We however need to market ourselves better.
So there, we had a goal to reach. Not just to make Drishtikon a success, but to help CBS gain from it!
The work: After much discussion, consulting teachers, and some more discussion, we settled on the sessions, relevant topics to be discussed and the format for each session. It started slowly... Drishtikon 05 needed an individual identity… after much drawing and sifting through magazines (oh, and some net surfing for inspiration ;) we came up with the logo(hehe, finalised on the logo i had once doodled;) and the tagline -Viewpoints that Matter.
We also managed to book a 5 star hotel for the seminar, after some heavy duty negotiations, though with relatively low strife as compared to previous years.
With a Venue, an identity and a mission statement ;) it was time to do the rounds of prospective sponsors… It was heartening to see sponsorship kits and concept papers disappear by the dozen, seeing the juniors take such keen interest in extending their hand to make the event a success…
Sponsorships, it turned out, were not to be a problem for Drishtikon 05.
Work for sponsorships, venue, speakers and even details like brochures, folders and badges started nearly two months in advance.
We also came up with a Pre event contest- ‘What’s your Drishtikon?’ which in hindsight, received a better response than we had imagined, it being the first time such a pre-event activity had been undertaken. I recommend other events in the future to try such a tactic as well, since it gets people interested. Even those who did not send us entries enquired, went to our website, read about the topic, which only got them more hooked onto the actual session during the main event.
Roller coaster ride: Planning well ahead always helps, they keep saying. We took the saying to heart- A week before Drishtikon 05, we had all our 15 speakers confirmed.
2 nights before our event, we were left with 11.
Due to unavoidable circumstances, they left, one by one, like in the movies.
Each left us a little more crushed, a little more determined to start over.
A night before the event, after replenishing our stock of speakers, we were faced with some more 'outgoers'.
This is where all the crisis management crept in from photo stated notes into our being and our thought process. And so, we managed to find another illustrious speaker who went on to become a hit at Drishtikon.
D-Day: had Urooj and me (we were the powerpuff gurls of Drishtikon:D 2 powerpuff girls? haan.. kyoonki hum do hi teen ke barabar hain;) compering the event. Our speaker woes had yet to end when one of our speakers almost refused to come, on phone. But persuasion was an art we were adept at by then. In all the frenzy and adrenalin rush, we 'facilitated' and 'facilitated' and 'faci-felicitated' our illustrious panel ;). With the Finance Panel a big hit among the students, and ending with tea, we were one down, two to go.
The HR session made up for a speaker less, with new learnings in the biotech arena, and an interactive Q & A session. The session brought out the latent interest students of CBS take in HR, evident by the well informed opinions and intelligent questions students fired at the panelists. For a long time. Despite rumbling stomachs and the knowledge that lunch was to follow!
The Marketing session as well started and ended on schedule, without any untoward incident :D and with a Q & A which carried on beyond the event...
The Vote of Thanks was given, our hard work recognized, photographs were posed for and Tea was served.
The seminar ended with Team Drishtikon happy and relieved for no glitches barring an unreliable power generator of the Hotel and the Non announcement of the customary till then post-event holiday.
We celebrated with pizzas and excited banter.
Post event: We received tremendous positive feedback from our panelists, in the form of SMSes and phone calls - something unprecedented! One of our speakers is impressed by our student quality (thanks to the interactive Q & A) enough to have his organization hold talks with our placement cell to recruit graduates into an organisation that hitherto took only MBAs. This, for CBS is not a first, and hopefully will not be a last either!
It wouldn’t be wrong to say CBS has won some new fans :-)
In the end, despite the classes missed, the sleepless nights spent working, or sometimes in plain stress, the incoherent muttering of cell phone numbers of speakers, and the humongous petrol bill, Drishtikon was worth it. It taught us more than just what books can teach. And despite the cliché, the experience of being out there doing everything, mere novices, but learning every minute, is one that each one of us would cherish forever.
