Look what IIM graduates are doing right now

Known as the Harvard of India, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA) is internationally recognized for its outstanding management programs. Numerous candidates compete for admission to this esteemed institution every year, but only a small number are accepted. Although getting accepted is a great accomplishment, the real test of a degree is how its graduates conduct their life.

An Indian-origin tech influencer on X (previously Twitter) examined this by examining the professional paths of the best graduates from the IIMA 1980–1982 class. It’s interesting to note that he discovered that the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), the country’s top engineering school, produced eight of the top 10 grads.

Sanjay Bhargava, Vipul Jain, and Sridhar Seshadri were the top three gold medallists from the 1980 group. Sanjay Bhargava, who graduated from IIT Bombay, later joined IIM Ahmedabad. In a career spanning over 36 years, he worked for Citi for 17 of those years, finally becoming Vice President. After then, he worked in a variety of capacities for several companies, spending a brief time in 2021 leading Starlink’s operations in India. He is currently Bharosa Advisory’s principal executive.

After graduating from IIT Kanpur with a degree in engineering, Vipul Jain moved to IIM Ahmedabad to pursue courses in management. He started his remarkable career with the Taj Group as the Chief Information Officer (CIO). He subsequently established his own consulting business and worked for 23 years to make it successful. Jain has founded multiple businesses over his career; his most recent endeavor is an investment-focused finance firm.

Another gold medallist, Sridhar Seshadri, attended IIT Madras for his graduation before going on to study management. Later on, he finished his doctorate at Berkeley, California’s University. Having followed a different career route than his classmates, Seshadri is currently employed in the United States as a business professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Along with the 1980 gold medalists, other noteworthy accomplishments include 1981 batch gold medalist Alok Agarwal, who graduated from IIT Kanpur and worked exclusively for Reliance Industries, eventually becoming the company’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Although he recently left this position, he is still a senior advisor to the company. In a similar vein, gold medallist Jayanth Varma (1982) went in a different direction after graduating from IIM Ahmedabad. He went back to his alma mater and has been a professor there ever since.

The paths taken by these accomplished graduates show the significant influence that IIM Ahmedabad and its renowned faculty have had on its alumni’s professional development. Their successes demonstrate how crucial a solid educational foundation is to attaining success in the workplace.