Anupam Kumar's Review On XLRI, Jamshedpur

I took CAT and XAT. I did not receive calls from any IIM's. I had applied to XLRI's BM programme only and because of a 99.72 percentile, I received an interview call from XLRI.

The course curriculum is extremely comprehensive and structured. It is divided broadly into Core courses and Elective courses. The Core courses help build the foundations of business education - introducing subjects like accountancy, marketing theory, economics, quantitative techniques, finance, human resource management, production management and strategic management to the students and then going deep into it.

Yes, Internships are compulsory as a part of the course requirements. SIP (Summer Internship Process) is arranged midway through the second term (somewhere around October of the first academic year) and conducted by the college. An elected Placement Committee guided by the college Placement Office manages the process and very fairly and openly so.

The college has many events going around the year which ensures that the entertainment options are never too infrequent to make the academic rigour unbearable. There are student committees like Finax (Finance Association) and Maxi (Marketing Association) which have their own symposiums (technical conferences or fairs).

The fee structure for the 2009-11 course was around ~10 lakhs. This also included all course books and materials given by the college. I do not have the current fee figures with me. As for Return on investment which can capture the 'feasibility' of the spending the course fee on part of the student, I distinctly recall that the average salary after the placements covered the cost of education rather well.

Loans are pretty easily available from banks situated nearby which offer decent terms. These are called 'scholar loans' typically available to students from a list of top institutes of the country.

The campus life in XLRI is (arguably) the best one across MBA campuses in India. The campus is situated bang in the centre of the city of Jamshedpur which is a small industrial town in Jharkhand, yet it is secluded off the main roads into a quite zone called the Circuit House Area (which typically refers to a clutch of official government guest houses in any city of the country).

The exams are comprehensive and do test all necessary requirement that a student is expected to cover in a course. Generally, exams are open book and allow the student to refer to anything they may want to while solving or answering the questions. More importantly, exams are not one-off events which judge the students.

I recall that the notification is released around September of the preceding year, the form submission deadline stretches for about a month from there and the examination happens in the first half of January.

Most of the courses are taught by faculty who are experienced and well versed in their subjects. Every area like Finance, Marketing, Economics etc. does have a mixture of excellent and mediocre instructors. However, prima facie, every instructor teaches what he or she is comfortable with and specialises in. The faculty are at ease to 'design' their courses and administer it as it suits them.