Wonderful experience

Fantastic college, facilities, atmosphere, faculty and peer network. Only disadvantage that the campus faces is that it is located in Jamshedpur, so it means a fair bit of travel to reach there from Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or Hyderabad.

I gave the XAT exam for entering XLRI. XLRI's HR Progam is its flagship program, which led me to choose it.

Well Structured curricula, fantastic professors who are renowned in that field (like Dr. PK Padhi for Labour Laws, Prof. Gurunathan for Compensation, Dr. Sumatoke Bagchi for Performance Management, etc.) Electives were interesting including HR Analytics, International HRM, Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship, etc.

Yes, the college had a fantastic Summer Internship Placement program (Called SIP for short). The placement committee organized it over 4 days on campus when the best recruiters across industries had come to the campus to recruit students. At the time (2013), average monthly stipends varied between INR 30,000 to INR 80,000, with a few outliers.

The batch witnessed a 100% placement ratio. Companies from all industries visited campus. A sample set includes FMCG (HUL, P&G, ITC, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Marico, Colgate, L'Oreal, etc.), Consulting (McK, BCG, Accenture), BFSI (Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS, etc.) among others.

Due to multiple societies and associations, there are multiple fests organized on campus. ENSEMBLE - is the flagship inter-college technical fest. VALHALLA - is the flagship inter-college sports fest. MAXI FAIR is one of the most famous marketing fests in the country.

It is quite expensive as it is not subsidized by the government in places such as the IIMs. In my batch, 2012-14, the fees for the 2-year program was INR 13.5 lakhs. Add to this the costs of travel and other spends. The senior batch had fees of INR 12 or 13 lakhs and the junior batch had fees of INR 17.5 lakhs.

Yes, there are plenty of scholarships that are offered on campus. There are different scholarships for SC/ST candidates. There are other scholarships for the excellent performers from school with a sound overall profile. Some of the scholarships include - Aditya Birla Scholarship and the OP Jindal scholarship.

Campus life was fun to say the least. Lots of extracurricular activity, especially sports. Events throughout the year with each association organizing an event. SPICMACAY, SIGMA and CII Yi also organize a bunch of events. A lot of case study competitions happen on campus which lead to PPIs and PPOs.

In the first year, we had to share a room between two people. In the second year, we did get independent rooms. Though they have constructed new hostels by the time we were about to leave campus. The infrastructure is fantastic. The food is good. Obviously, with mess food being repetitive, it may come across as ordinary on some occasions and sometimes it was ordinary but it was good overall.

Strong and passionate alumni network. XLRI alumni currently are part of the who's who of the HR fraternity globally. Examples include Leena Nair (Global CHRO Unilever), Rakesh Kapoor (Global CEO, Reckitt Benckiser), Naveen Jindal (Serial Entrepreneur and Founder CEO of Moon Express)

There is high academic rigor during the entire two-year program. The internal assessments are a set of multiple assessments, projects, quizzes and other submissions and group tasks. There would be hectic days because, in addition to the tests, there would be different associations for students to participate in.

Notification was released in August of 2011, Procured the form from the bank; sent the filled form; had to apply separately for the different colleges which fall under the ambit of XAT (such as XLRI, XIM B, LIBA, GIM, etc.), gave the exam, was called for a panel interview and a group discussion. After all this, the selected student's list was announced in April/ May 2012.

Most of the faculty have done their doctorate programs and are very well qualified with a good professor-student ratio. There was even international faculty like Dr. Richard Sibbernson, an American and former top executive at AT&T Bell Labs who taught us International HRM.