| Friday, 17 January 2025 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Are you familiar with Match Day?
No, it has nothing to do with dating or sports. Each year, medical students in the US await the third Friday of March with keen anticipation. It’s when they learn where they will be doing their residencies for the next several years.
From what I gather, it’s a fairly complicated algorithm, but this is how it loosely works.
Graduating students explore all the different residency programmes available to them, check out the facilities, and meet faculty members. They then register themselves on a portal, rank the programmes in order of preference, and submit an application. The programmes then go through these applications and rank the students in order of their own preference.
After both sides are done, the algorithm does its magic and matches all the students with residency programmes. The third Friday of March is when the students decide which programme they want to go with. Hence, Match Day. (If you’d like to get a clearer picture on how it all works, I’d recommend watching this Youtube video.)
The reason I bring this up is because it’s very closely linked to the subject of our latest Two by Two podcast. In fact, this episode was my first time hearing about such an algorithm; our guest for the week—Varun Nagaraj, Dean and Professor of Information Management & Analytics at S P Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai—used it to illustrate how B-school placements could change for the better in India.
With Two by Two hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan adding their own MBA experiences, this episode is a fun, candid conversation on how Indian B-school placements have evolved over the years, and what needs to change to drive better outcomes for students.
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You can also listen to the 30-minute version of this episode here if you want to get a sense of what we discussed:
Let the ‘grown-ups’ do it
In India, B-school students are a critical part of placement committees and have to take on much of the responsibility for getting everyone in their batch placed. In the US, most leading B-schools have professional teams that run the entire process, finding quality jobs for hundreds of students each year.
Prof. Nagaraj, who came back from the US to take up his position at SPJIMR three years ago, admits he remains puzzled by how most Indian B-schools go about placements even now.
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