My journey from Associate to AVP – EMBA graduate Mayukh Chatterji’s story
Imagine this – you bag a promising job at an incredible organisation. You then decide to pursue an MBA from a globally renowned business school and, what do you know, you immediately get promoted at work and jump up the corporate hierarchy as an Assistant Vice President in the same company. How does the sound of it make you feel?
Well, there’s a lot that goes behind this hardworking journey.
Mayukh Chatterji (EMBA 2021) is one such SP Jain graduate who accelerated his career growth with the SP Jain EMBA while also fine-tuning his creative talents. He channelised them into the life he wanted. Let’s find out how, as Mayukh shares his journey:
Professional Career:
I finished high school in 2007 and left home to obtain a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the West Bengal University of Technology in 2011. After graduation, I wanted an MBA degree, so I began studying for entrance tests. However, the universe had other plans for me, and after college, a much more independent life commenced with my first job in the IT sector at Tech Mahindra in Pune, India.
I worked as a Software Engineer and learnt programming, algorithms and data structures, but more importantly, I got an insight into how a sector operates as a business. Having a work-life balance has always been of utmost importance to me. Despite other personal endeavours, I always made sure that work didn’t suffer and won awards at Tech Mahindra for contributions to my project!
In 2016, I had the opportunity to move to Georgia, USA and work on a brand new application in Tech Mahindra from scratch. I learned and coded websites, APIs, and chatbots and got a deeper insight into how business works in other cultures and countries. The differences were pretty eye-opening, and I soaked up all I could. Now that I was a professional for a few years with a stable job, I felt I could financially afford to pursue an MBA.
Before I did that, I moved to North Carolina with a new job at Deutsche Bank in 2018 as an Associate Software Engineer in Support & Operations for the bank’s Authentication space. This new job provided oversight into how a financial institution worked, even though I was working on the backend of everything.
Post my MBA, I got promoted to an AVP designation in the role of a Business Analyst, where I currently learn and work on new things from my ten years of experience in tech and an MBA from SP Jain.
My journey at SP Jain
I had already researched a few Executive MBA programs with weekend classes. In 2019, I came across SP Jain’s EMBA Program. A senior of mine from college, Debmalya Sen, who had completed the weekend EMBA program with this school, gave an absolutely smashing recommendation. So I went ahead and began my MBA journey.
In a couple of months came the pandemic and locked us all in our houses. It was tough but working from home did prove to be a great boon in these times. Luckily, the batch I was in had some pretty amazing people from all over the world, and everyone was super kind and adjusted to each other’s time zones to complete assignments and projects.
SP Jain’s EMBA course was intensive and full of information and knowledge. Some pretty amazing professors made learning seem really easy. Regular feedback and assignments – group and individual – had us on our toes the entire time, along with exams every two weeks. Interacting with so many professionals from different backgrounds definitely provided a substantial boost in confidence, clarity and perseverance. Through the program, I befriended coffee and even managed to participate in a short film competition with some friends in India called The Verge!
Towards the end, the Group Project simulation before the final individual MBA dissertation challenged us, giving us a hint about what was coming our way for the final individual project submission. I completed the final individual ABR project on the idea of a new start-up. The research, questionnaires, interviews, analysis, data, and rifling through published literature came together, and I managed to pull off a decent final presentation in front of my allocated ABR professor and industry expert.
I owe a ton of gratitude to my family, friends, girlfriend, and batchmates who helped me sail through this challenging weekend and all-nighter MBA program in ways more than academic ones.
So, who am I outside my career?
Even with ten years of professional experience in the IT industry, I have always felt the need to tend to and nurture creative habits and tendencies simmering within me and give them an outlet. While in school, I started playing the guitar and have never stopped ever since.
Tech Mahindra had tons of cultural activities where I participated with the official corporate band. I played the bass guitar and rhythm guitar and sang backing vocals in the band. I had also written poetry and short stories on a blog in college and persisted in that while writing my first songs. After work, I would sit and read, write, learn music production and recording techniques, and start creating scratch recordings at home, which would balloon into full-fledged songs over time.
I never quit these habits – they allowed me to think better, work better, relax better, and escape on the more challenging days. I have published two books, Poetry-Overlap and Tomato Sun, and released an album with six original songs called ‘Out of Words’ through my music project Indigo Train, doing all the artwork myself. I go boxing, perform music at open mics, dance Salsa/Bachata/Merengue, travel and watch tons of documentaries to keep knowing as much as I can about the world and its people.
Quotes I live by:
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” He thinks misplaced value is the cause: We feel a void in our lives, and we attempt to fill it with things like money, possessions, and accolades. We think these things will make us happy.” – Henry David Thoreau
“If people have a day job, if you find one thing to do as a passion project and just keep building on it, just keep watering it, keep giving it attention, keep giving it focus and you can escape and you can be self serving and be okay” ~ Joe Rogan
“What you allow is what will continue” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
“Things you own end up owning you” ~ Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
Wish to know more about SP Jain’s Executive MBA program? Click Here.
Read more stories from SP Jain’s EMBA students and alumni.
