Since one of my friends is a recent alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, I might be able to share his experience with you. Here is what he has to go through,

• Because he arrives with a former IT experience of about 4 and a half years, it was particularly difficult for him to attend classes, mostly early in the morning.
• The classes usually lasted for almost 100 minutes, each of them particularly coupled with long cases, assignments, and course lists.
• He was not entirely familiar with the concepts of Operations and Management, and the basics of Finance.
• Later in time, it took him off guard and unwary.
• It was particularly difficult for him to become accustomed with the course structure.
• However, what he did like in the course was subjects such as WAC, and relevant others that were basically non-technical in several ways.
• After only a long time since then, he began getting more involved in his study structure.
• In fact, he also genuinely took help from various younger students whenever he could so as to ace some of the toughest subjects.
• Moving forward, he acquired better results than the 1st semester after only contributing time to some of the most difficult subjects.

He still mentions that his sophomore year onwards, the study structure in fact went in a very convenient manner. But, the 1st semester generally did not go well for him.

The top-paying companies, generally belonging amongst the regular recruiters, are the multinational banks, usually offering job roles like investment banking (IB). Alongside that, the roles in Financial Marketing (FM), also pay well, considering the base destination is overseas. Now, this is in terms of direct conversion and not PPP.

There are several of these firms which are as follows:

• Goldman Sachs (mostly both IB and FM), Morgan Stanley (IB), J.P. Morgan (IB), Credit Suisse (mostly IB), BAML (IB and FM), and UBS (FM and Equity research) are to name a few handfuls among a slightly huge list.
• HSBC and Nomura commonly offer high-paying posts as well, given that they usually operate from overseas.

In addition to the aforementioned companies, there are various other recruiters, mostly scattered in the private equity arena (and a few handfuls in venture capital) who often choose to recruit rather sporadically and are common and pay well. Carlyle, Blackstone, Apollo are to name a few of them.

Nonetheless, the recruiters of the companies listed above usually pay typically anywhere between 35 to 60 LPA as the base salary. Astonishingly, the bonus is often over and above this amount.

Yes, there have been mentions of having at least 78% in Engineering for general candidates for admission at IIM Ahmedabad. They may have created the shortlist based on these criteria. The thing is that most of the IIMs want to improve their diversity in the batches as the majority of the students who apply and eventually convert to IIM Ahmedabad are engineering graduates.

So they keep such informal cutoffs to increase diversity. But unfortunately, due to such criteria, many bright students are kept out of the process. Many universities also have toppers who have scored just 65%. But to keep in mind, it is not a mandatory criterion.

IIM-A's PGP-FABM is a two-year full-time program that covers allied areas such as agriculture, food processing, commodities and rural development sector, and rural infrastructure. The fees for the batch 2021-2023 are 28 lakhs.

• One of my friends studying at IIM Ahmedabad said that a certificate doesn’t mean you will get a good placement offer.
• If you are taking a loan then be careful as your placement is not certain. Getting a collateral-free loan would be easy but paying it off will be a real task.
• The most important thing here is your financial goals and if getting a certificate from the IIMA PGP-FABM program fits into it then go ahead.
• As the fees for this program are too high, I’d say think about it and only go for it if you are highly interested in this field of study.

However, if you are still dicey about whether to opt for this program or not I would suggest you to invest in attending a course conducted by Pavan Bhattad’s Brainival. It is a 2-day workshop in which he discusses speed reading, mind mapping, memory techniques, and ideas generation which was initially conducted in Pune.

The course fee for PGPX at IIM Allahabad is not 17 Lacs but 28 Lacs including taxes. I am assuming by worth you mean the ROI of the program. In that case, I would like to tell you that the average package for PGPX graduates is about 28 lakhs.

Apart from salary packages, there are other advantages of pursuing this course. The people who opt for PGPX Programme have at least an experience of 5 years and maximum 7-8 years. They join the PGPX program with a long-term objective of changing career tracks into mid- or senior-level management roles. So, the peer learning opportunities are great for this program.

PGPX-IIMA is considered among the top executive MBA programs not just in Asia, but across the world. So, it surely is worth it.