Understanding the case #2

Rishi and Anand came to my campus to meet me. They were quite excited about coming to IIM Ahmedabad and it showed when I gave them a tour of the campus. They came with a friend of theirs who was keen to visit campus. The visit to campus was intended to be a visit to help boost their morale. Because of its reputation of being India’s leading MBA college and also its beautiful architecture, a visit to the campus for anyone is something to look forward to. For MBA students, it is like a pilgrimage.

The idea of getting the students to visit the IIMA campus was that by sharing the life of MBA students here with my mentees I could try and get them to push themselves beyond their usual routines to invest themselves more in their own development; both, as students as well as participants in the mentorship and motivation program. I wanted to see if I could get them to think of themselves as not being very different from the 20-something year olds in this campus. SO I shared with them the details of the life that students on this campus live, where they live, eat, sleep, work, etc. I described a typical day in their life.

What I quickly realized was that for these three guys, IIMA represented a world so far removed from their own life and course that it became immediately apparent that the role modeling I was attempting wouldn’t work very well because the MBA students at IIMA were so far ahead in terms of overall general intelligence and undergraduate exposure that it was no longer ‘proximal’. Also, the facilities available to the IIMA students, the future that they could look forward to in terms of jobs and careers, the kind of faculty and quality of management education at IIMA was so different from their own and so much more better, that they perceived the gap to be more than they had initially thought. I was beginning to wonder if I did the right thing in showing them around.

After the previous interaction, I had introduced the trio to the duolingo app on the android platform. This app would help them learn English skills using daily practice on an app on their smartphones. The apposed the local Hindi language as a bridge. This was consistent with ZPD concept and so I encouraged them to use the app. But to my disappointment, use of the app has not been very great and there is very little enthusiasm to use it on a regular basis. I will have to look into the reasons for this in the next interactions.

On the other hand, my attempts at teaching them fundamentals of marketing that might held them in understand the practical aspects of sales and marketing have been very well received. But it is an interaction heavy way to teach and learn marketing and the limitation of face to face time is very evident. Whatsapp and mail are not so conducive.

My meeting with Divya went off very well. I was able to help her develop some level of trust and share some of her work with me. The main thing we ended up achieving was deciding on some fairly well articulated goals on what we hope to achieve over the next few weeks.  The technology part of writing a blog will be a challenge as we are working on two different platforms. It will be a learning curve for both mentor and mentee. She also seemed motivated to read more of the kind of poetry I shared with her and actually took away one of my copies of an anthology of Rabindranath Tagore’s work. 

Going into the future I intend to impress on my mentees the importance of self regulation and how they can go about trying it out on themselves and how it could make the critical difference.