'Our syllabus is flexible'

The Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University's University School of Management Studies (USMS), began with specialised courses in management last year. The courses included MBA in Banking and Insurance, MBA in Real Estate and MBA in Disaster Management. On completion of its first year, talking to RAYANA PANDEY, R K MITTAL, dean, USMS, highlighted the need and relevance of such specialised management courses.

What was the idea behind this course?

Last year, we started an MBA course in Banking and Insurance and Real Estate. Both sectors are growing at a very fast pace and the pro-active steps of the government are driving up the demand for these fields.

Even the Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is expected to grow along with boom in retail sector. Therefore we planned to provide a course which can enhance the managerial ability of the professionals who are already in this line and they be able to take decision based on market forces.

The response too is good. We had earlier planned to take in 40 students but due to the demand we had to raise the number of intake to 60. Our intake for this year, too, will be 60.

What does the syllabus include?

The course in itself is interdisciplinary in nature. While law, economics, management and finance is common to both, real estate covers construction architecture, laws relating to real estate, construction technologies, project management, research methodology and Banking and Insurance focuses on accounting for managers, electronic banking, financial derivatives, treasury and risk management, general and life insurance among others.

Do you have any collaborations for these courses?

MBA in banking and insurance is in active collaboration with the Accumen Insurance Education Services Limited -- a leading consultancy firm in Banking and Insurance.

The MBA programme in real estate is in collaboration is with the School of Planning and Architecture. They are providing us with academic inputs for the programme along with sharing of faculty.

What is the composition of the class?

For the course in real estate, we have people with average work experience of 8-10 years. The class includes Chief Consulting Officers, Landscape consultants, Project managers and so on.

Banking and Insurance, on the other hand, has professionals with and an average work experience of 2-3 years. For their convenience, the classes are held on weekends. Most of them have their own businesses. Others are not necessarily from banking sector but aspire to join the financial services in future.

Do changes like the recent hike in cash reserve ratio and repo rate by the Reserve Bank of India, find place in your syllabus?

Changes are bound to happen in such dynamic fields and we have a flexible syllabus.

We have many papers in our course taking care of such changes. More to the classroom discussions, the students are required to prepare presentations and projects on these developments and analyse it through discussions and debates.

Further, if the happening requires a change in our syllabus we do it with the advise of experts from the industry as well as our faculty.