It’s been a year since the first “IIFMight in Focus” was published on our IIFM community blog. Now 52 weeks and 52 alumni stories later, we can say that this initiative is starting to take shape on its own. We now know more about many alums beyond their names and batches. And, we hope that these stories have triggered some new conversations, rekindled some old bonhomie and made you smile, cherish and relive some memories. While the IIFM Blog existed since 2004 (and keeps on transforming itself into different forms and functions to survive), the “IIFMight in Focus” series came into existence in July 2020 to showcase the great work being done by the IIFM Community, to capture and disseminate the diverse, yet very impactful, career paths of IIFMights to the internal and external audiences. The idea took shape in the first lockdown from April to June 2020.
One of the key things that we as a small group realized after various rounds of discussions/interactions with current IIFM students, recent graduates as well as “MBA” aspirants that people often do not “understand” the brand IIFM and the lack of clarity undervalues it big time. It is obviously an underwhelming reflection on our Institute which has such a strong foundation and great alumni all over the world who are doing fabulous work after passing out from IIFM. The entire discussion within IIFM alumni community has been happening in the closed networks (WhatsApp, FB, Telegram) which serve great as communication platform but they do not highlight the success stories of our alumni and their career path to those who are searching information on the all-important “Web” which is the life line of today’s world. The online searchers are still the first choices for the students (and recruiters) who are looking for any information on IIFM. So, we thought of highlighting our alumni more prominently on the web and increase their visibility. And this is what propelled our journey to the “IIFMight in Focus” Sunday series.
Santosh (PFM 2004-06) and Rishi (PFM 2005-07) decided to get going and went about looking to profile a selected few alumni in different sectors to showcase the diversity and strength of IIFM. They roped me in to be part of the small team.
The idea looked great, but we had many concerns and challenges. Getting alumni to write 1500-2000 words about himself/herself is not an easy job with all the work pressure! And, if you are chasing senior alums it gets even more challenging. And, then if you want to do it every week.. huh! Many such initiatives have died as the initial enthusiasm peters out. We wanted to prove ourselves wrong. We set ourselves to do this series for at least 50 alumni interviews and we wanted to showcase them in the best possible way to do justice to their incredible journey post IIFM. We needed some process, structure and quality control so we brainstormed and developed a system. The questionnaire template was developed, the sourcing of the interview was planned to cover a wide range of profiles across various batches and we were on. As we moved forward, the challenge started getting more difficult than it seemed initially. People were busy with their work schedules and dealing with the pandemic at the same time; so getting them to take time for our publication was never going to be easy. Fortunately we got lucky week after week even during those very difficult few months our Sunday series kept going slowly and steadily.
After the initial few weeks, it was in early October 2020 that we received a fascinating email. One of the students from the current batch (PFM 2019-21) reached out and said that he wanted to volunteer as a part of this initiative. Between lectures and assignments and what started as a few minutes a week, engaging with most alumni through emails, follow-ups, and calls right now, Rajnish Singh has been an incredible support to get this blog this far. If his tenacity, perseverance, and willingness to learn are typical of the new generation of IIFMights, we should be feeling very proud. In no time, he shed his role as a volunteer and took the lead in the interviews we were getting. As Rajnish moves on from IIFM to his new role as a Young Professional with the BRLPS, he still engages with alumni at various levels and contributes significantly to the interviews we share each week. We are looking forward to some volunteers to ease the burden on Rajnish!
If I look back at the last 52-53 weeks, with more than 50 profiles and more in the pipeline it would seem that the team behind the blog has a fair bit of idea of how the next few weeks will look like. To be honest, sometimes we do have the visibility and many times we do not. The years 2020 and now 2021 have been some of the most difficult ones that we have had in recent history. With the pandemic raging on and individual workloads at an all-time high, getting people to respond to the interviews takes more than a few weeks. This takes quite a bit of follow up and making sure that the profiles come in time for us to have the window to review and do minor edits before uploading the same. In ensuring that we do so, Rishi has been the one person who has reached out to over 100 people week after week and made sure to politely follow-up on Mail/WhatsApp/Calls to get their profiles. All it takes is a bit of an effort, and he brought it in leaps and bounds. There have been instances when it has taken him 6 months to get the profile after starting the first contact with our alums so it has been a real interesting journey of persistent efforts for our team to achieve what we had intended to when we started it in July 2020 and thankfully we have stayed consistent all through the past one year. I work with Rajnish to ensure that the minor errors and edit challenges were taken care of before sharing the blogs with the group. I also ideate with the team when needed to do so.
Running the blog has not been an easy task by any stretch of the imagination. During the peak of the pandemic in early 2021, we were all left shattered, having seen quite a few IIFM alumni succumb to their battle with COVID. This brought in a reluctance within the team to work on profiles, and no one was in the mental state to keep this going. However, we thought it would be an injustice to folks who have passed on if we do not end up offering eulogies, highlighting the incredible work that they did after leaving IIFM. The batches usually wrote the eulogies of the alumni who had passed. Each tribute that the team published is the least we could do to showcase the memories of these amazing people who left us. https://iifmight.com/category/eulogy/
What Next? Where do we go from here?
As you may have all noticed, the blog is here to stay and has a new address from today: www.iifmight.com. The idea behind taking up a domain goes beyond engaging with alumni; the idea is to offer a platform to incoming students who might have innumerable questions about IIFM. Who better to address some of those than the people who have been a part of IIFM?
The blog stays a voluntary initiative, and it is something that ties in nicely with the various cross initiatives that are a part of the IIFM Student and Alumni Affairs Council, as well as the efforts of the association. As the new batches roll in, it would be super to get a few new volunteers to jump on the bandwagon in making sure that this blog continues to share incredible journeys. We can promise the new volunteers that they will sometimes have a trying time, getting hold of alumnus to share their stories, but this will be wonderfully enriching.
We are also hopeful that we would use the new domain to consolidate IIFMight footprints (alumni work, publications, interviews, media bites, hobbies and whatever else one wants to share) in one place and help everyone to connect with the IIFM community across various cities and countries. We would like to thank everyone for being a part of this wonderful journey and we are very keen to hear from you to take it forward together so feel free to write to us on [email protected]
