Jobs - Preparing for your first break
After this, you find the course and the university you want. This particularly applies for students who do not choose medicine as a course of study. Three or four years later, at the end of the course, you are ready to look at the next milestone in your life - that of finding a job. Many of you get your first job break through your campus interviews and the others - the less fortunate ones - try harder in the job market. During the process, if you look back, you would not have spent even one tenth of the time for selecting your course and identifying your choice of the institute in deciding on 'who would you like to work with'.
Getting it right first time - is not a maxim that can be attributed to your first job. Why is it that you feel that you are in wrong job soon after your first breakthrough? You consider the tangibles like Salary, designation, carreer path, the employer's credentials, choice of location - foreign or local etc., But, have you ever thought about the intangibles?
What are these intangibles? Your own aptitudes, your strengths, weaknesses, your special skills which you developed from your childhood, your abilities which were successfully demonstrated when you were at school or college. What do you do about these? Do you feel that you often shut the door on all these and just chase the money?
You need to spend time on these equally. You could start doing that from the first year at your college. You would get full three, four or six years to understand yourself.
My student years at the English Department of Madras University were very exciting. Other than serving as the Secretary of the University English association during my final year, I had involved myself in many other activities like theatre. These apart I was keen in pursuing English Literature and my dream was to become a diplomat or a professor of English. These dreams crashed. I did not prepare well for the IAS exams and with very limited number of colleges offering M.Phil in English Literary criticism coupled with very few seats available for a Forward caste student. Universities abroad offered courses valued at Rs. 5 Lakhs those days which was definitely not within my reach. There were no educational loans then and definitely not for PG or Research in English Literature ( this has not changed even today).
I knew that my M.A. English was not sufficient to enter the corporate world - that too at a managerial level. I never wanted to be recommended for a position . Six months after I completed my Master's program, I had a discussion with my uncle who used to be in Government Service. Based on his advice, I decided to move into advertising. I met the Branch Manager of an agency called MAA Communications which later became MAA Bozell, and offered to join them as a trainee in Account Management. The deal -MAA would not pay me anything during the time I stayed there and I would not offer them any fee for learning on the job. As the agency was then handling some of the prestigeous accounts from Hyderabad and I had a team of seniors who had come from IIM-A, it was a nice place for me to learn the fundamentals of Marketing and Advertising.
In six months I had to move to Chennai as my Uncle was shifted out of Hyderbad to Delhi. Equipped with a certificate from MAA, I got in touch with my network in Chennai and joined an agency called Profad Limited which later became Profad WCA. There again I was lucky enough to have some good practitioners of Advertising and Marketing both from the client's side and from the Agency as well. After a couple of years of hard work, I got an opportunity from Mudra Communications Limited, which used to be the third largest agency in India. After a year there, I decided to equip myself with an MBA. That is when Loyola Institute of Business Administration inaugurated the course and it was a one year evening course. I moved on to become an Account Supervisor with Mudra Communications in just three years.
A couple of years of work experience added with a qualification from a good institute opened many doors for me. There were two things which helped me get a break after my student years. The first thing was of course the attitude to learn - boundaryless in-depth learning. The second thing was that I found a good mentor in my uncle who could spot the talent and guide me in the right direction based on my skills developed from my childhood and special abilities developed during my stay at school and college.
Always treat your first job and your first three years in any job as an opportunity for learning. An attitude to learn should be the first and sole criteria. Money comes later.
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