Early Birds

Integrated courses that initiate the race to an MBA after class 12 may be one way to avoid the mad scramble at the post-graduate stage, but they present their own set of problems.

- Pranit Sarda

Depending on which estimate you go by, there may be between 4,500 and 5,500 management institutes in the country. And we are not counting the unapproved ones. Yet, getting admission into one of these – the approved ones – is not a walk in the park. Along with the mandatory bachelor’s degree (or equivalent), you would also need work experience and have to pass an entrance test to get into an institute worth its degree.

There is another way to pursue a Master of Business Administration (MBA), for long the most coveted rung of the education ladder, which allows you to skip a few of those requirements. It is by opting for an integrated management course after class 12.

Integrated management programmes are five-year courses that have an under-graduation (UG) and a post-graduation (PG) course rolled in one. The advantage here is that the student does not have to reappear for an entrance test after UG, for the PG course. Very simply, the student enters the university after class 12, and exits with a Master’s degree after five years.

The Indian Institute of Management-Indore (IIM-Indore), established in 1996 and among the top six elite IIMs, introduced the Integrated Programme in Management (IPM) in 2011. Split into three years of UG and two years of PG, the course is designed to provide holistic and pragmatic education. Gopal Varma, a fourth year student of the IPM at IIM-Indore, explains how with an example: “To learn corporate etiquette, we were taken to a five-star restaurant for dinner so that we could learn how to behave in such an environment.”