A 23-year-old student from the city has become one of the youngest to qualify for the MBA programme at Stanford University. The Stanford Graduate School of Business in California, one of the best B-schools in the world, has the highest ratio of applicants to available seats and lowest acceptance rates.
"I am very fortunate to get selected for Stanford's MBA programme straight out of college. The admissions committee advised me to work for another year as they felt that I would get more out of Stanford's experiential learning curriculum. So I worked in the digital team of Magma FinCorp Ltd. I am now set to join Stanford in September," said Harsh Chamria. He will be one of the youngest students at the prestigious MBA programme where the median year of experience is four years.
Harsh studied in St James School in Kolkata till Class VI before going to Doon School, from where he went to Appleby College in Canada on an exchange programme. After passing Class X, he decided to return to his family in Kolkata for Plus Two course because he knew he would thereafter go abroad for graduation. "I did not want to stay away from home for 10 years at a stretch. I was getting homesick," he confessed.
He passed Class XII from La Martiniere for Boys and then went to Cornell University for electrical and computer engineering and developed a prototype of mobile payment system with a classmate. "I was always interested in the convergence of telecom, network and finance and Cornell offered the right course," he said.
After being awarded entrepreneurship in engineering fellowship (Cornell Kessler fellows) in junior year, Harsh partnered with Silicon Valley startup Bling Nation located just behind Stanford. There, he pioneered the idea to combine social-media connectivity at the point-of-sale and developed blueprint for web-interface to be used by partner merchants to identify consumer groups, run and measure the effectiveness of customized promotions based on simple analytics.
"In my last semester in college, I developed and implemented low-cost college sales strategy at Cornell, growing business to over 1,500 customers and 12 partner merchants. I also expanded the college ambassador programme to Stanford, Cornell, UT-Austin, and University of Knoxville," Harsh recounted.
After the admission committee at Stanford advised him to gain professional experience in India, he joined family firm Magma FinCorp. Harsh's father Sanjay Chamria is the vice-chairman and managing director of Magma FinCorp, one of the largest asset finance companies in India with $2.7 billion in assets.
Over the past year-and-a-half, Harsh developed an innovative online lead-generation sales channel for the car loans business, implemented a full-scale online credit-underwriting solution in top-10 cities of India based on success of online lead-generation pilot targeting $1million business in the first month of operation. He also created a cross-platform digital strategy comprising branding and sales initiatives.
"Magma's business has grown manifold in the past decade. But as a brand, it had not quite evolved. So I helped Magma's first corporate brand-building campaign, targeting potential investors, employees, and evolved customers. I also developed a brand new website, social-media web properties, display-media and keyword-search campaigns that led to a quantum leap in the organization's digital presence," he said. After the MBA, Harsh intends to return to Kolkata to either start a tech-venture of his own, or join Magma.
When not chalking out new business ideas, Harsh is busy at the gym or dancing salsa. He was part of the Salsa troupe at Cornell University and ran the half marathon in Mumbai. "I am passionate about fitness and love to dance," he said.
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