The batch strength this year is 114 students for IIFT’s Delhi campus. Another 60 students have joined the IIFT’s Kolkata campus.
Mr K T Chako, Director IIFT, welcomed the new batch along with Prof. Satinder Bhatia, Chairperson, Graduate studies division at IIFT. Prof. Ravi Shankar, Chairperson, International Collaborations and Capacity Development and Student Exchange programmes, Dr. R. M. Joshi, Chairperson, Management Development Programme at IIT New Delhi and Prof. Biswajit Dhar were also present at the inauguration.
While welcoming the students to the institute, Mr K T Chacko emphasized the uniqueness of the choice they had made in joining IIFT. “IIFT will provide you exposure to a host of subjects which are of extreme importance in the field of international business. Students will get exposure to subjects such as international finance, international marketing, international economics, international trade operations and logistics and international business strategy here at the institute,” he said. These subjects have acquired extreme relevance in a fast-globalizing world where one has to be globally-competent in order to be locally-competent. He also emphasized on research as the strength of the institute and asked the students to cope up with the changing business world and to take new initiatives for Corporate Social Responsibility.
Mr Chako also spoke about introducing few more electives and specialization like Environment Management and Innovation Management in near future.
Mr Chako highlighted the fact that IIFT has one of the toughest “conversion ratios” amongst B-schools in India. “We receive more than 45,000 applications for this course out of which only 114 of you have made it here,’’ he said.
Prof. Satinder Bhatia addressed the new batch by sharing the qualities the institute is looking forward to see in them. “Set higher and higher milestone to be proud of. Develop ability to forecast and predict,” she said. She also spoke about the large alumni network which IIFT has.
Prof. Ravi Shankar informed the new batch about the international collaborations of IIFT with various universities. “Collaboration with universities in Brazil and Korea is in pipeline” he said.
At IIFT, 78% of the new batch consists of engineers. What is interesting is that the number of students with work experience has consistently been on the rise. This year, 69% of the batch consists of people with some work experience and 53% of them have more than one year of work experience.
Also, the number of girl students in the batch has almost doubled from 17 in the earlier batch to 32 in the current batch.
