Recollections of FMS - my Alma Mater

I recently chanced upon this report ( Why FMS Delhi rocks ) about my alma mater, the Faculty of Management Studies at the University of Delhi. Six long years of post-MBA professional gruel doesn’t seem to have dampened my sensitivity or loyality towards the institute and hence I find myself compelled to blog this.

The article talks about how FMS, being a university faculty cannot match upto autonomous or private MBA schools in terms of campus facilities but makes up for this obvious drawback by virtue of being physically located in the heart of India’s best university. In fact, the faculty premises are sandwiched between the Delhi School of Economics, DSE (unarguably, the fountainhead of economic research/policy in India) and the Institute of Economic Growth, IEG (another leading economic think-tank of the country).

I can vouch for what report says ; some of my most endearing moments at the institute were the guest lectures we attended at FMS, involving some of the ‘superstar’ economists of the country viz. Prof. B. B. Bhattacharya, director of IEG and Bibek Debroy, who was then at IIFT and currently is the head of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies.

To this day, I rue the missed opportunity of listening to Amartya Sen (fresh from his 1998 Economics Nobel Prize) address a gathering at the DSE in 1999, owning to some unavoidable concurrent engagement. The opportunity to interact with such people, take up non-credit courses( this seems to be a new thing ) and access the libraries of these institutes is something, no other MBA school in the country can match and kind of compensates for all the shortcomings associated with studying at a university funded institution.

While on this topic, here’s a quick, spontaneous back-of-the-envelope SWOT for the institute.

- Student Quality– excellent, comparable to the best anywhere in the country
- Quality of Education– excellent for majors in marketing/finance/HR; good for operations; ok for IT/Systems
- Infrastructure– needs improvement; many lower ranked institutes probably have better infrastructure.
- Interaction with Faculty– very good, since batch strength is only 75
- Interaction with Industry– excellent, being in the capital
- Feel of the Place/Atmosphere – the way it should be at any top grade MBA school
- Cost– very inexpensive, being university funded
- Placements– excellent for marketing & finance; good for IT/systems, consulting & operations; ok for HR
- Lesser independence in shaping course content; hence trifle slow in incorporating latest industry trends in syllabi
- Reputation in Industry (based on alumni)– excellent (however you are not likely to encounter a large number of FMS alumni in industry, since batch strength is only 75 a year)
- The road ahead- the institute has to guard against erosion of its reputation as private institutes (with more financial muscles) and foreign universities get firmly established in our education system.