It might be 16 years ago when this blog was setup but I can still vividly remember its origin. We were brainstorming about how we can make IIFM and its values reach out to more students and more recruiters. There were limited options in those days if we wanted to leverage Internet. There was no Facebook, no Instagram, no Twitter. But we had blogs. The Indian blogospheres was taking shape and there were around 20-30 b-school guys creating [a b-school bloggers network]. This is the time when [Sidin Vadukut], [Rashmi Bansal], [Gaurav Sabnis], all were in the early phase of their writing careers and were all blogging from campus.
 |
| Branding IIFM brainstorming goin on. (The picture is shaky but our strategy for branding was very clear.) |
We joined the blogosphere. We created the IIFM blog as a community blog of IIFM students. In fact, it was PFM04-06 batch. (As a batch we were quite aggressive on creating the Brand IIFM. A few weeks at IIFM and we had a brainstorming session with faculty on Branding IIFM:) Soon, it became de facto official blog of IIFM students and alumni, only it was not set up officially by IIFM but passionately by some IIFMights.
We had some clarity about what this blog was supposed to do (apart from being a page to dump all the forwards and random updates from batchmates). It was to be a landing page to anyone who wanted to search about IIFM and was looking for more information than what IIFM official website was providing. We tried our best to reach out to alumni and students to seek their contribution.. our goal was to tell those stories of IIFMights’ success (and inspire prospective students!) which are often lost (or not considered worth sharing) in the cacophony of salaries, compensation packages and ‘profiles’.
But our alumni are often elusive and also not very effusive when it comes to talking about their success. We did not succeed in creating the kind of repository of content we wanted the blog to be but we got what we wanted. There was a place on the web which acted as portal for prospective students to interact with existing IIFM students and alumni.
And we started interacting and influencing prospective students. Prospective IIFM students had a quite a range of questions for those who were already there on the hilltop. For some questions we had answers for some even we were ourselves looking for answers.
“Do you get job in Forest after studying forest management?”
“Will I become IFS officer after completing the course?”
“Are there any girl students there in this course?”
“What kind of jobs do we get after this course?”
“I just got a call from XXXX and IIFM, should I join IIFM?”
The list was endless. We tried our best. Some of the prospective students got different answer to the same questions. It was all dependent on who did you reach out to. We encouraged some to join IIFM; we discouraged some based on what they were seeking from IIFM.
But it worked. Those who wanted to talk to existing IIFM students or wanted to get glimpse of the life on the hilltop they got it by visiting this blog.
Things changed gradually. Social media happened to blogging. And, job and deliverables happened to those who were running the blog. Also, we thought the batches to come later would take care of it. And they did to some extent. But nurturing someone else’s ideas and watering the sapling someone else has planted does not happen naturally.
Many things have changed since I wrote the first blog-post here from not so crowded IIFM Computer Centre on Friday evening. Yet, after 16 years when I see the url or stumble upon it occasionally it opens the flood-gates of nostalgia. Probably, more than anything else.. this nostalgia is the most cherished contribution of this blog.
