Why I deferred IIM Ahmedabad for the Young India Fellowship?

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

One year ago, I was being interviewed by Prof. Chaubey in the final round of my Young India Fellowship application. I was due to fly to New York two weeks later to start working, instead here I was giving interviews for the Young India Fellowship, the Teach for India fellowship and later the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. Prof. Chaubey took up an aphorism I had used in one of my essays and we went back and forth over the origins, the philosophical meaning and the Chinese culture that was embedded in it. The quote read,

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” — Lao Tzu

My reading of the maxim was that the protagonist, afraid of ending up where he was heading, needed to choose an alternate path to explore himself and probably find a better destination. When I had to take a call on what would be the next step in my career, an important call that too, this idea took hold over my thoughts.

Let me tell you a little about myself: I graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 2015 and started working with Deutsche Bank, for their Investment Banking division the same year. After working for a couple of years, realization dawned that I didn’t want to perpetually continue in this field. I wanted to explore other possible areas of interest. This field offered me the position of a small cog in a big wheel, where my contribution was almost insignificant. Even if it were significant, I was only helping larger institutions get their debt financing plans in line. I craved for something more tangible as an outcome of my work.

I began my research on the Young India Fellowship early on, in July 2016, which was much before I sat for my CAT examination for Management School. To be honest, I did not work hard towards the CAT and it was merely the hangover of my GMAT preparations that helped me crack the exam.

The thought of IIM Ahmedabad as the potential peak of my academic life did not appeal to me. I found it easier to list out the pros and cons of the decision that needed to be made now that I have made it through both the programs. Here is that list, to help future cohorts of confused prospective Young India Fellows:

The obvious career related or financial pros of IIM A are the ones I wouldn’t mention. The one significant one to me was that I would have a solid foundation for a career in India. I just didn’t want to make a choice that geographically constrained me, at least not yet.

The other cons of me choosing IIM Ahmedabad were,

● Conforming to the ‘IIT-IIM’ ecosystem. The trend of entering the IIT stream and then letting the stream take you to the same IIM seemed uncourageous.

● Repetition of social structure. (This is a fact for me because around one-third of IIM graduates are also IIT graduates and therefore there was limited new social intellect I would be exposed to.)

● Dream of education abroad unfulfilled. (My fellow mates from school had gone on to do their undergraduate degrees abroad and some of my IIT friends were doing their masters abroad. It’s not a matter of copying them, but I didn’t want to look back and say that I didn’t try to get the best education of the world and effectively ‘settled’ with my dream)

● Monotoned capitalism. (Most IIM graduates that I had known had monotonic views on a career and it was usually linked to a rat race for the best paying job. I don’t deny that that in itself was also a factor in my thinking, but the question that kept coming back to me was this: isn’t a career supposed to be more than just that? What’s the point of life at the end of it all?)

The pros of the Young India Fellowship and Ashoka, on the other hand, were almost diagrammatically opposite. The obvious pro was the well structured curriculum and the stellar faculty as well as access to resources. The only obvious con for me was an opportunity cost, which was rather financial and that of investing time into the program at an early stage in my career. But in the long-run, as economists say, an equilibrium will be reached.

The pros of me choosing the YIF program were:

● Non-conformity. (As a student of science, economics and finance, liberal arts was a new territory. It also led to me charting out a new path, where I was in charge of changing directions.)

● Novel social structure. (Ashoka and YIF for one, have such diversity in terms of professions, regionality, culture, age, educational background and more, that I still pinch myself)

● Dream still upheld. (The academic learning here is unparalleled to anything I’ve experienced before, both in pedagogy and content. It’s a great platform for me to extend this further to education abroad, even if it’s still an MBA.)

● Alternate career aspirations. (Folks here have aspirations that range from the social sector, politics, corporate, to design, drama and the arts. This rubs off on me to keep an open mind)

These laid the basis for me to make a decision. A key learning that I had during this decision-making process was that my well wishers were split in their opinions and it was a herculean task to mitigate their worries. Luckily the deferment option was available to me, which I took up and still have the option of joining IIM Ahmedabad in 2019. Although, I now have a job offer with McKinsey & Co. and this was something I would have wanted out of IIM A as well. I am going to now play my career life year by year and hopefully not disappoint myself!

Prateek Rastogi is a part of the 2017–18 cohort of the Young India Fellow program.