First crop of School’s doctoral programme picked up by LSE and France’s IÉSEG

That the Indian School of Business (ISB), seeks out the best teaching material from some of the best universities and business schools from across the world is well known. Nothing unusual about that. But when the best schools and universities themselves line up to hire its students as professors, it is an altogether new and different game.

And that is exactly what happened when ten globally well-known universities and management schools vied with each other to hire students from the founding class of the Fellow Programme in Management (FPM) at ISB recently.

The institutions that rolled out final job offers to two students (the full strength of the class), included the likes of Erasmus School of Economics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, University of Amsterdam, Cass Business School, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE),  and IÉSEG School of Management to name a few.

Soon to graduate, the two doctoral students in accounting, Saipriya Kamath and Pratik Goel, settled for LSE and IÉSEG School of Management respectively. Saipriya’s research interests are in corporate governance gatekeepers, information intermediaries, impact of regulation, innovation, behavioral biases, and risk disclosures. Pratik, who is headed for Paris come September, to join IÉSEG as Assistant Professor in Finance, Audit & Control, is into corporate narrative disclosures, CEO behaviour, and regulator communication and rhetoric.

The thesis committee members for Saipriya’s research comprised Professor Sanjay Kallapur (Chair), and professors Divya Anantharaman, Krishnamurthy Subramanian and KR Subramanyam (members) while the committee for Pratik’s research comprised Professor Sanjay Kallapur as the Chair and Professor Hariom Manchiraju, Professor Shivaram Rajgopal as members. 

At a recent event to felicitate them on their success, the two doctoral students were ecstatic on their placement and attributed their success to the rigour of the programme, the support from the faculty and the rich research experience at the ISB.

The FPM was started by ISB in 2011 as a full-time residential offering. The founding class admitted two students while the subsequent classes currently have 14 doctoral candidates undergoing the course and six more expected to join in August.

A young programme by any standards, the FPM however is not for the faint hearted. “There were days I wanted to leave it but a lot of people who believed in me pulled me back from the brink. I am eternally grateful to all the members of my committee who have been very generous with their time and have helped me become the person I am today. I have a simple advice for my other FPM colleagues ‘Don’t give up’,” said Saipriya.

“The journey hasn’t been easy but it has been exciting and rewarding. ISB entrusted its faith in us and we reciprocated by placing our faith in ISB. The best part about being at ISB is the phenomenal exposure I got whether it was by attending the innovative courses or by attending top conferences. I was privileged to be a part of the various research and teaching consortia,” said Pratik Goel in an overwhelmingly emotional address.

Speaking at the felicitation ISB Dean Rajendra Srivastava said: “Good doctoral programmes attract good faculty and if you have good faculty you can have good doctoral programmes that will attract meritorious students.” Expressing his joy at the glorious beginning by the FPM programme and the high benchmark set by its founding class, the Dean went nostalgic recounting the early days of his own career and how his research interests were rekindled by the several doctoral students he had guided. “Truly they become a part of the family and in fact an alter ego of yourself”, he said. Surely the successful placement of the two students would go a long way in establishing ISB’s name globally.

He wholeheartedly welcomed the graduating students to be a part of the ISB family and offered them space to work with the research centres and institutes in ISB.

Programme Director Professor Sanjay Kallapur recalled the initial challenges in setting up the FPM.  He credited its success to the conducive research ecosystem, the School’s top-notch resident and visiting faculty, and the general atmosphere of thought leadership at the School. 

With the soon-to-pass out founding class of the FPM, ISB can indeed, now boast of a robust management research ecosystem, that includes close to 50 resident faculty, almost all of them educated in reputed American business schools, 180 plus visiting faculty from global universities and schools, an active calendar of seminars and conferences, and a busy line up of speakers and thought leaders making their presence felt on the campus.

All this adds up to the quality of teaching and exposure that students can expect on the campus, not just in the FPM, but also in the one-year Post Graduate Programme (PGP) in Management and other courses that ISB offers.

FPM faculty are affiliated with top schools like Kellogg, USC Marshall School of Business, NYU Stern, Emory University, UCLA Anderson School of Management etc. The successful completion of the first batch of the FPM in fact adds to the already formidable management research credentials of ISB. The Financial Times had ranked the School at 62 globally and the most research productive management education institution in India in 2015. 

Likewise the University of Dallas which publishes the global research ranking has rated the research contributions by ISB faculty among the top 100 in the world during 2011-15. ISB was the only Indian management education institution to figure in this prestigious list at 96^th rank. While clearly, all students at ISB have the opportunity to learn from this top-notch research faculty, the FPM doctoral candidates in particular are in a position to work with them on research papers and conference presentations among other things.