This post has been pending for a long time.

I was getting all kinds of enquiries about Great Lakes, the kind of student profiles we have here at Great Lakes, the kind of faculty that teaches here, and the most important of all, the placement scene! – Basically the usual “What is in it for us” kind of questions. The objective of my post here is to reason what sets the Great Lakers apart… Why and How are we different from the rest of the B-Schools.

• One – Year course- the only other college offering the same kind of course is ISB. The common link between both the colleges being Uncle Bala, who is one of the founders of ISB, MDI and also
  Great Lakes. One year MBA makes certainly more sense, specially for those with prior relevant work-ex – You save one precious year of your life
• International Focus – Our entire curriculum has an international focus to it. We study Chinese language and both US and Indian forms of Accounting – Indian Accounting taught by an Indian CA; the US GAAP being taught by a US based Accounting Professor
• World class faculty – We, at Great Lakes, have professors flying down from the US to teach us various courses. 90% of the courses that we study here are taught by professors from Kellogg School of management, Carnegie-Mellon University, Stern School of Business, Georgia State University, University of Miami, Stuart Graduate School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Florida International University, University of Rhode Island, San Jose State University, University of Illinois, IIMA, IIMB, and so on…
• Quality of Student Interaction – We have students with an average work-ex of 3.5 years. This being the case, the wealth of practical knowledge Great Lakers bring to the table even before joining Great Lakes is exceptional. This thereby, leads to high quality peer group interactions and brings in newer perspective to different dimensions.
• International Affliations – Great Lakes is affiliated to Stuart Business School, Illinois Institute of Technology for its PGPM course. We also have MOU with Nanyang University, Singapore and Collaboration with Yale  University. We have recently signed an MOU with Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai, thereby enabling us to have value additions in technical expertise that IIT has been able to gain in past few decades.
• Research Outlook– With Dr Venkat R Krishnan, Director Yale – Great Lakes Centre of Research, at the helm of research activities at
  Great Lakes, we have already marked our presence in Management Research. We organized the first Yale Great Lakes International Conference on 24^thDec ‘06, which was a run away success with academicians from across the globe participating in the same. We have also announced the setting up of Kotler – Srinivasan Centre of Marketing Research, thereby developing our collaboration with Stanford University also.
• Luminaries – Great Lakes has been known for the luminaries visiting the campus. Interactions with them have been profoundly insightful and they not only enthralled Great Lakers with their charisma, but also have been extremely motivational, showing us the path ahead! In terms of Academicians, we have had the privilege to listen to the some of the stalwarts of Management education throughout the world. The list includes Dr. Bala V Balachandran, Dr. Philip Kotler, Prof C K Prahalad, Prof Seenu Srinivasan, Prof HayaGriva Rao, Prof. Sudhakar Balachandran, and many others. Some of the eminent personalities at our campus are:
  • Ms. Indra Nooyi, CEO & President, Pepsi Co,
  • Mr Ravi Venkatesan, Chairman, Microsoft India,
  • Mr Ratan Tata, Chairman Tata Group,
  • Mr Adi Godrej, Chairman Godrej Group,
  • Mr Lakshminarayan, CEO Cognizant,
  • Mr Vivek Paul, Former CEO, Wipro
• Industrial Interface – In a short span of two and half years, Great Lakes has been able to build its brand equity, with Industry across verticals accepting and praising Great Lakers and their efforts. We have been able to achieve 100% placements in the first two years of inception and had 7.2 LPA as the average salary last year. This year, we have had more than 81 companies participating in Fall Project Phase, which is a testimony of the acceptance industry has shown towards Great Lakers.
• Last, but not the least, Great Lakes is a student-run school. Here Students are given a lot of freedom to decide what path they want to take. For instance, the students are the ones who decide what electives to be taken. Hence, the course structure is very application-oriented with a lot of focus on the latest trends in Management. Even though it is a one-year course, the total number of courses offered are 40, with the total number of teaching hours being around 950 hours, even more than what some b-schools teach in 2 years.

After having said this, Its our duty to warn you that the course is no piece of cake… The scope for learning is tremendous. But, an equal amount of effort has to be put in. For instance, for every one hour of class, there is 4 hours of pre-reading involved!! You have to slog… to see the fruit in the end!

To know more about various student profiles check out http://www.glakes.org/student-profiles.htm

Hope that meets most of ur queries… In case, you would like to know something more, do feel free to ask

Cheers

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