Goa Institute of Management: Interview with Dr. Ajit Parulekar, Director

Goa Institute of Management: Interview with Dr. Ajit Parulekar, Director - Goa Institute of Management is one of the top B-Schools in India. GIM, not only known for providing value-based education but also ace in the extra-curricular activities. The curriculum of the GIM PGDM programme helps the students in their overall growth and make them ready for the industry. Careers360 brings you an exclusive interview with Dr.Ajit Parulekar, Director of Goa Institute of Management. He shares all about the institute, the admissions process and other important aspects. Goa Institute of Management offers PGDM programmes in Health Care Management, Big Data Analytics and Banking Insurance and Financial Services. Read the article to know more about Goa Institute of Management.

Q. Tell us something about the institute; when it was set up, vision and mission

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: Goa Institute of Management (GIM) is a business school in Goa, India offering quality education in the field of management. It is AICTE approved and accredited by SAQS. GIM is also a member of the AACSB. GIM has been ranked 35 for MBA/PGDM by NIRF 2021 and ranked 9 for Private MBA by The Week 2020. The Institute offers PGDM (full-time), PGDM (part-time) and FPM programmes.

Goa Institute of Management was founded in 1993 when Romuald D'Souza who had also served as the Director of XLRI – Xavier School of Management Jamshedpur and Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar moved out to create a centre of Learning and Excellence in Goa. GIM began its journey with a modest setting of few classrooms at the V. M. Salgaocar College of Law and a batch size of 60 students. This was a beautiful 350 yr old heritage campus was situated on the banks of the serene Mandovi River, in the Santa Casa de Misericordia in Ribandar. The building in which the school was is now an heritage conservation area and is under the care of Government of Goa. In 2009, the Institute shifted to a sprawling campus in the lap of nature at Sanquelim. This 50 acre campus is eco friendly and has a state of the art solar power generation and water treatment plant facility.

Vision “to be a preeminent business school at the forefront of management education and research. We will create transformative leaders focussed on responsible, ethical and sustainable business practices.”

Mission to develop responsible and agile leaders at the forefront of cutting-edge business practices

Q. Tell us something about the admission process?

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: The GIM admission process to all four Post Graduate Diploma in Management programmes are strictly based on merit. Applications for admission to full time PGDM programmes are invited from graduates with a minimum 50% aggregate in Bachelor’s Degree. The assessment of an applicant is on the basis of the candidate's profile, meeting the qualifying scores in competitive exams such as CAT, XAT, CMAT and GMAT. Followed by group discussion, personal interview and written ability test.

Q. What kind of infrastructure can students expect at the institute? Please elaborate?

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: The Goa Institute of Management library is well-stacked with a collection of over 24800 management and related books, alongside access to 50,000 online journals. GIM subscribes to all relevant academic databases including Bloomberg Terminals, Thomson Reuter Terminals, CMIE Databases, EBSCO, Proquest, Indiastat, EPWRFITS, J-Stor, Science Direct, Indian Business Insight (IBI), and more.

State of the art labs: Finance Lab, Data Science Lab, Behavioral Lab, Bloomberg Lab, Thomson Reuters Lab

Sports and fitness infrastructure: Badminton Court, Basketball Court, Cricket Ground, Football Ground, Swimming Pool, Table-Tennis, Lawn-tennis Court, Volleyball Court and Gymnasium. We have on-campus residential facilities with single room, double room facilities on offer.

Q. There is a lot of stress that is being made with regard to interaction with the industry as well as companies that recruit. What are the steps being taken by the institute in this direction?

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: We have a strong network of over 5000+ alumni spread across the globe and 25 skill-enhancing student clubs. Almost all our activities on campus are handled by student committees. This initiative has slowly become GIM’s strong USP “Student-driven-Campus”.Our students manage the industry and recruiters. They have been consistently doing a fantastic job. This year we had all four programs announcing 100% placement for the batch of 2022 in December itself.

Q. Internships are now mandatory as per AICTE guidelines. Does the institute help students with this? If so, how?

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: Yes, we follow all the guidelines of AICTE. We support and mentor students for their internships and as mentioned earlier, ours is a “Student-driven-Campus”. Each PGDM program has a placement committee composed of students and a faculty mentor. A host of companies conduct recruitment drives on campus and select students who fit their organization’s ethos.

Q.Can you please share details if there is any collaboration with universities abroad?

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: Our partners include University of Catolica & ISCTE Business School, Lisbon (Portugal), University of Antwerp (Belgium), Lappeenranta University of Technology (Finland), and CUNEF Spain.

Recently we have partnered with the following:

1. Jimma University, Ethiopia

2. KUSOM, Nepal

3. HEM, Morocco

4. FGV, Brazil

5. The American University of Bangladesh

Q. Please share placement statistics with information on the average package, highest and lowest package, number of students placed and details of companies that have recruited.

Dr. Ajit Parulekar: Every year 100+ recruiters visit the GIM campus for the placement procedure. This year, for PGDM degree the highest package offered is Rs, 27.80 Lakhs whereas the average package is Rs. 12.00 Lakhs. The top recruiters are Accenture, asian Paints, ITC, Infosys, HCL, Deloitte, CitiBank, ICICI Bank and many others.

For the PGDM HCM course, GIM maintained its 100% placement record with the highest package of Rs. 26 LPA whereas the average package offered is 10.4 LPA. Talking about PGDM in Banking and Financial Services (BIFS), the placements sets the record of 100% with the highest package of 17.20 LPA whereas the average and lowest package in PGDM BIFS are Rs. 11 LPA and Rs. 7.95 LPA respectively. PGDM-BDA set the new benchmark record of Rs. 30.17 LPA.