Sooraj, Online BBA

Hi, my name is Suraj. I am from the BBA batch of July ’21. Right now, it’s sem 5. So, I am an electrical engineer. Basically, I worked as an electrical engineer for 10 years before, in 2020, starting our own company. So, during that period, it was COVID time, and I was exploring a lot of courses and what to do online, and I got interested in BCOM and BBA. I tried out a lot of things, but it turned out that having online exam flexibility was the best thing about doing Amrita Online BBA.

Okay, so when we started our company in 2020, being an engineer, and my co-founders are all engineers, none of us had a business background or financial background; we were just techies. So, running a company was very difficult for us, having to learn everything from A to Z about business management, information management, planning, everything.

What happened was we initially depended on a lot of mentoring from our friends who had MBA backgrounds, and then some of the online courses that were available on Coursera, etc. And it was, I think, at the end of 2020 that I saw the ad for Amrita Online, and I actually connected first, but then I thought maybe I don’t have the time right now. But due to some product development delays, I found a lot of time and applied for it.

When the classes started, initially, I was attending all the live classes, but unfortunately or fortunately, my company grew, and it was very difficult to attend all the live classes. But the content on the LMS was very useful. I mean, at times, I used to cram and learn. What happens is, I put it on 1.5x and listened to the whole class and the reading material. And that kind of flexibility—when you find time, you can go and do the studies yourself.

Sometimes it happened in some semesters that until the exam, I wasn’t able to see even one single learning session. But the coordinators, especially Lavanya ma’am and Shijay ma’am, were very supportive, and they kept on motivating us not to drop. I mean, I’ve had different times when I thought I should drop it; I don’t have time for this. But then Lavanya ma’am kept on motivating us. So, that motivation is also part of this Amrita Online program, which I really appreciate. That support definitely has helped me to come here this semester.

So, I’m looking forward to more of these courses and to Amrita as part of the Amrita Online program. Initially, I checked up on the courses only because my brother was doing MTech in Amrita at that time, and that’s how I came across the course. When I checked over, I saw that Amrita University’s ranking in India is in the top 20; that is much higher than some IITs also. So, that gave me confidence. I mean, it didn’t take me even more than a day to decide to join the programme.

Even the course fee was affordable, and during our stages in the company where we had difficulties, I took the option of paying in instalments. So, the payment policies were also flexible, and we actually appreciate the amount of support that Amrita Online has given us.