My First Year at ISB&M Pune: What the Classroom Actually Taught Me

A year ago, I walked into the PGDM program at International School of Business and Media, Pune ISBM Pune with a fair idea of what business education would look like. A year later, I realized the real learning happened in how I was made to think, not just what I was taught.

Courses like Business Finance, Managerial Economics, Quantitative Aptitude, and Operations & Supply Chain Management gave me the fundamentals. But it was the application that made the difference.

Under Prof. Ajay Ramdasi, I worked on a Business Strategy & Market Analysis project for Bajaj Finance Ltd. - modeling a 3-year financial projection with a 2535% profit CAGR, and designing the "FINAI FastLane" omnichannel growth strategy, right down to evaluating customer LTV against channel-specific CAC. It taught me that strategy isn't a slide deck - it's a number-backed argument.

A Financial Statement Analysis of JK Lakshmi Cement (FY16–FY25) under Prof. S.B. Subramaniam pushed me to look past headline numbers and build risk narratives grounded in ratio analysis and competitor benchmarking.

Working with Prof. Arshad Ahmed on a Swiggy Restaurant Performance Dashboard introduced me to Power BI at a real-world level — cleaning hyper-local delivery data, running correlation analysis, and building a 4-KPI dashboard that could actually inform onboarding and logistics decisions.

And under Prof. Navin Verma, Supply Chain Management stopped being a textbook chapter and became a lens to evaluate how operations decisions ripple into customer experience.

Alongside these, independent work — ratio analysis of Tata Motors & TCS, financial health assessment of DMart — sharpened my ability to read a company's numbers and tell its story.

Somewhere between Excel models, Power BI dashboards, and case discussions, I picked up something more valuable than any single tool: the discipline to move from data to decision, not just data to description.

One year in, that shift in thinking - from memorizing frameworks to applying them under real constraints - has been the biggest takeaway of this journey.

Looking forward to building on this in Year 2.