Interaction with Atul Seksaria

Atul Seksaria, an alumnus of the batch 2009, visited the campus on 10th April 2010. He held the post of treasurer during his days at SOM and was a part of the various teams of Avenues & Continuums and of E-club. His domain expertise is in Financial Services, Capital Markets, and Energy Sector. He was an FMP Summer Intern at GE and used to work as a consultant at S.I.N.E, IIT Bombay. On his visit to the campus he shared his experiences in the corporate world.

After completing his M.Mgmt program, he joined E&Y in RAS (Risk Advisory Services). The Risk Advisory Services (“RAS”) group of E&Y provides risk advisory services to global financial services clients operating in India, including internal audit outsourcing and strategic teaming, regulatory compliance review and support, process and controls review, and functional performance assessments. Talking about his experience in E&Y RAS, he said that in his first project, he was part of a team of seasoned professionals in the financial services industry which gave him a totally new perspective to management. He said that while working as a manager, one needs to be flexible as per the company’ requirements and should be ready for “Grinders-Seekers-Finders” transformation cycle in one’s career.

He depicted with perfection his entire career progression from a student in SJMSOM to a manager and talked about how a typical B- School Graduate progresses in his career path in E&Y. He candidly answered questions from the students like reasons why he made such intra-organizational switch in his career and at the same time highlighted upon the expectations the corporate has from a B- School Graduate in terms of understanding and gauging customer expectations as this forms an important parameter for today’s businesses to thrive in this competitive environment.

He discussed importance of being active in one’s own select set of activities which for him was Barcamp, Headstart, TIE, NEN & Toastmasters. He spoke about how important it is to network among other B-schools students and shared few instances from his personal experiences when such contacts came handy. He also shed some light on the key issues of new business creation & management with the help of societies supporting entrepreneurship like SINE, TiE, and NEN etc.He emphasized on the importance of resume in getting the dream job and said that at no cost should one shy away from spending a lot of time on planning for his resume, implementing the plan & then preparing the resume. He also spoke about the potential opportunities available in IIT Bombay & Mumbai to transform oneself to best suit the job. The session also gave a bird’s eye view of the working in all the verticals of E&Y and PWC, opportunities in finance field.