LUCKNOW: Students at Indian Institute of Management – Lucknow (IIM-L) are playing mentors role for the aspiring MBAs during the Aspirant Mentorship Programme - Ignicion 2011. This programme is organized in order to guide MBA aspirants, who received group discussion and personal interview calls from the management institute.
The programme is a student-driven scheme that aims at mapping the profiles of aspiring candidates with those of student mentors currently pursuing management programmes at IIM-L. By assigning mentors to each candidate, based on their profile and background, prospective students are able to understand how best to handle tricky questions during personal interviews and group discussions. Himanshu Agarwal, mentor and first year student at IIM-L said that mentors address key concerns about ways in which crucial group discussions (GD) and personal interviews (PI) must be handled. In my own experience of having being mentored, inputs by my mentor made for the most important contributions.
As per sources, currently, the institute has over 1,000 students who registered for Ignicion 2011 soon after the declaration of CAT results and after IIM-L released its lists of students who made the cut for the GD and PI rounds. Typically, every mentor has about 8 to 10 mentees who they help. Each student gets two mentors. The idea is to familiarize them with how the entire processes that are followed at the institute. According to Abhishek Saha another mentor and first year student of IIM-L said that the idea is that students should be entirely prepared for what they experience during the selection rounds. He said that they also try to indicate the variety of questions that could possibly asked of a student, depending upon their skill sets, previous work profiles and so on.
In addition, this year, to offer give them an edge over other IIMs, the students at Lucknow have uploaded, for the first time, video testimonials by first year students about their experience of the mentorship programmes. Till the end of April, by which time the group discussions and personal interviews will be scheduled, students will be put through a variety of mock telephonic interviews, interviews over Skype, or through social media portals like Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and YouTube, where students will get a glimpse of life at the IIM-Lucknow. Saha said that the pull-push factor comes into play. It depends on the mentee as to how much he/she is able to extract out of the mentors.
Furthermore, a Lucknow-based student, on condition of anonymity, said that the mentorship programme has been quite helpful for him because he was introduced to the nuances of how he should handle tricky questions about his work experience. He added that, also, since his mentors went through processes themselves, they were able to tell him areas he should highlight in my work and educational profile to swing the interview in my favour.
