A slew of novel initiatives have been keeping the students busy at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC).

On the anvil, in September, is a Student Exchange Programme (STEP). It will see 45 students from the Joka campus spending a semester at premier B-schools in Europe and North America, including the University of California Los Angeles’s Anderson School of Management and Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Spain.

The programme is an integral part of IIMC’s mission to establish itself as an international centre of excellence in management education. STEP will afford students an opportunity to study and learn in culturally-diverse environments. The aim is to broaden their horizons and mould them into global managers.

“The programme, which was started in 2000, has been quite a success story for IIMC. Some of our students have garnered the best student’s award at these premier management institutes. IIMC enjoys a very good reputation amongst the partner universities primarily due to the high quality of students,” said Anup Sinha, former dean of programme initiatives at IIMC.

The Joka-based institute has tied up with 32 universities, spread over five continents and 17 countries, for STEP. Most of the partner institutes are in Europe and North America. Efforts are on to raise the number of American universities in the programme.

Taking a break from the grind of management studies, the dramatics cell of IIMC, in association with theatre group Nandikar, organised a three-day workshop on Journey into Theatre to promote acting and performing arts.

The workshop replicated challenges in corporate life to explore how managers react to them. It impressed not only students, but also the faculty.

“The theatre professionals — teachers, actors, performers, musicians and intellectuals rolled into one — showed us human behaviour from a standpoint different from the one we are accustomed to. This is what education at IIMC is all about — learning in diverse and wholesome ways. It goes a long way in our all-round personality development and self-realisation,” said first-year student Rohan Moitra.

The faculty, too, praised the initiative by the students and Nandikar. “The workshop went beyond the normal forms of pedagogy used to teach communication, giving a more realistic perspective to the students,” said IIMC director Shekhar Chowdhury.