MENTORING APPROACHES FOR MBA PROJECTS

Nowadays business world is becoming more versatile in terms of management, decision making and operational processes. Therefore, it becomes essential for the students of management to learn and gain excellence in handling, managing and drawing inferences from the records and data. The students having interest in Management and Business Administration can learn this by pursuing MBA specialization from best colleges of ip university.

Today’s business world prefers those students who are thorough with the concepts and have practical exposure. Here comes the role of Student’s project. The student project helps each student to apply concepts on real-world scenario. The projects can be individual projects or grouped projects. In group projects it is advisable not to have more than 3 students in a group otherwise it will become difficult for each student to justify their role and contribution in the project. Let’s take some of the approaches that can be chosen to assign projects to the MBA pursuing students.

1. Open-ended Approach: In this approach, project in charge can give volunteer choice to the students to choose title and faculty mentor to do a project. This approach provides more freedom and flexibility to the students. This approach is also known as Student-centric approach.

2. Close-ended Approach: This approach can be used if project in charge feels that student needs guidance at each footstep and they can be made learned by continuous assessment and periodic monitoring. Here, project in charge has all the authority to choose title, decides faculty mentor and also decides upon whether to have grouped project or individual project for the students. The projects are explicitly decided and allotted to the student by project in charge. This approach is also known as Mentor-centric approach.

3. Hybrid Approach: This approach uses mixing of above mentioned two approaches. Here, student can volunteer choose the title but mentor will be assigned by the project in charge or vice-versa. The approach also allows some of the students from a batch to work on projects based on open-ended approach and others to work on projects based on close-ended approach. Close ended approach only used with those students who have either not responded to the instruction or not sure about the project guidelines.

4. Specialization- based approach: This approach will be helpful for those students who are focused on specific type of industry or area and also able to develop a niche for themselves. The approach may include projects that are industry-aligned and provides learning around specialized area. The particular approach can be used along with either of Open-ended or close-ended approach.

Out of all the approaches any of the approach can be used to kick start the practical implementation of the concepts that is being learnt by the student during its degree/diploma course. Moreover, the project can be analytics based or can be based on theoretical framework. For analytics based projects it is essential to have knowledge about research tools, IDE such as Excel, RStudio, SPSS, Python etc. out of the huge amount of data the significant results can be drawn with the help of these tools and techniques.

Therefore, learn, choose and apply is the fundamental methodology and also a learning cycle to comprehend real world business process and challenges. Thus, this can be only achieved by rigorously exploring ideas and working on the projects.

Dr. Akansha Bhardwaj
Associate Professor, RDIAS