The Darden School welcomed a group of over 60 students and two faculty members from the S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR) in Mumbai, India to grounds this August. The visiting students were all second year MBA students, focusing their studies on marketing. While at Darden, they participated in a customized International Partner Program, designed to complement their own curriculum at S.P. Jain and explore marketing in the United States.
Darden Professor Rajkumar Venkatesan served as the program lead and taught many of the class sessions. He shared “We are happy to form this association with a premier business school in India. The students from S.P. Jain are very engaged and bring a perspective informed by their experiences in a different part of the world. The three week program aims to be an exchange of ideas among the faculty in Darden, and the students and faculty from S.P. Jain. We hope the program will lead to exciting opportunities in case study development and global immersion experiences for our faculty and students.”
Professors Robert Carraway and Ron Wilcox also each taught approximately one-third of the class sessions, which included Stratsim simulations and project work with local entrepreneurs in the i.Lab incubator program through the Darden Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
S.P. Jain student Jai Singh Banga provided the following thoughts about his experience at Darden:
I got an opportunity to be at Darden School of Business for 3 weeks for the Global Fast Track Program of S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR). Being from an entrepreneurial background, I was amazed by the facility which Darden provides to those who are inclined to start their new venture. They have an excellent incubation center called the i.Lab which catapults budding entrepreneurs, helping them direct their efforts efficiently.
We studied and discussed a case on Relay Foods and I realized that my venture in India is similar to theirs. The Darden Center for Global Initiatives, upon request, arranged a special visit for me to Relay Foods to get an in-depth understanding of their business. This visit proved out to be very fruitful.
Overall I had a blast at Darden and got a very different perspective from what we learn at SPJIMR in India.
