ISB student body wins the prestigious ‘Beacon Award’
Hyderabad: The Graduate Student Body of the Indian School of Business (ISB) – Mohali Campus was recently conferred with the rare “Beacon Award”, by the Graduate Business Forum. The Graduate Business Forum is a global network of current and former student leaders from the world’s top 80 MBA and graduate business programs including the likes of Tepper, Duke Fuqua, Cornell, HEC Paris, LBS, LSE, CEIBS, HKUST, IIM Ahmedabad, NUS, NTU. Every year, the GBF elects two exceptional student leaders or teams to win the global GBF Leadership Awards, the Student Leadership Award (SLA) and the Responsible Leadership Award (RLA). This year, the GBF bestowed the very special Beacon Award to the winners – the Graduate Student Board of ISB, Mohali Campus.
The Beacon Award isn’t presented every year. While the Student Leadership Award was never intended to recognise the response to a single event in history, the GBF realized these accomplishments deserved special recognition. In keeping with ideals of virtuous leadership, global citizenship, and innovation for positive change, GBF created the Beacon Award. In these rare occasions, another version of leaders emerges. These leaders run to the scene as others run away. They pit their intelligence, creativity, and will to succeed despite despair and destruction all around. This is only the third time in history that the Beacon award has been given out by GBF.
The Graduate Student Body of ISB, Mohali Campus was nominated based on their achievements over the course of this academic year. The team’s vision –“an uncompromised MBA” materialized across four broad pillars – an academic revamp, student life, health and safety and online placements. The student body worked with the administration and became co-creators of school policy.
In the outset, they extended the academic curriculum to an unprecedented 15-month course, ensuring ample on-campus time for a course that began online. The body in partnership with school authorities helped waive off the annual increment in tuition fee, an amount equal to approximately 1.5 million dollars. Over the curriculum, the body engaged its cohort both online and offline, celebrated over 100 social events, kept morale up, and created an internal platform grounds-up that fostered inclusivity. Technology was at the centre of innovation with virtual quad engagements and masked conversation through Zoom acting as a catalyst towards cohort bonding. The GSB facilitated complete adherence of Covid-19 guidelines on campus, creating a near bio-bubble, helping vaccinate more than 70% of the cohort and ensuring 0 positive cases on campus in the first six months.
GSB also created a 300+ volunteer community, providing avenues to positively contribute towards society. This opt-in community worked round the clock in sourcing hospital beds, oxygen cylinders and supporting other Covid related requests for the ISB family. As the placement season swept the campus by storm, the body established and ran a student-run 100% online process with an increase in average salary over the previous year.
In a year ravaged by the pandemic, running an institution with students on campus, keeping health and safety top priority while providing an uncompromised campus experience seemed daunting but the GSB came through with flying colors. GSB Core, Mohali campus comprises- Anand Khetan, GSB President and seven GSB Directors – Anamitra Sengupta, Bashdeep Singh, Devika Rajiv Sindwani, Harsh Agarwal, Parv Khurana, Pranjal Saxena, Punit Kumar.