Campus Placement Quotes

The endowment would make a second serendipitous investment when Robert Noyce, a Grinnell trustee and alumnus, offered Grinnell stock in his then-private start-up, NM Electronics.22 Noyce had almost been expelled from Grinnell for stealing a pig and roasting it at a campus luau.23 He would have been expelled but for the intervention of his physics professor who felt that Noyce was the best student he’d ever taught. 24 The professor managed to persuade the school to reduce the expulsion to a one-semester suspension.25 Noyce never forgot the favor, and made the stock available to the school if it wanted it.26 Rosenfield told Noyce that the endowment would take all the stock he’d let it have.27 Grinnell’s endowment took 10 percent of the $3 million private placement (Grinnell put up $100,000, and Rosenfield and another trustee put up $100,000 each).28 Shortly thereafter the company, then renamed Intel, went public in 1971. Grinnell started selling the stake in 1974, at which time it was worth $14 million, more than half the value of the $27 million endowment. Noyce was concerned that Grinnell should have so much exposure to a single name associated with him, and cajoled Rosenfield to sell. He recalls, “Bob [Noyce] was trembling about it. He’d say, ‘I don’t want the college to lose any money on account of me.’ But I’d say, “We’ll worry about that, Bob. We’ll take the risk.”29 Noyce eventually wore Rosenfield down, however, and Grinnell fully exited the stake by 1980. On its sale, the Intel investment had generated a profit of 4,583 percent. Rosenfield told Zweig, “I wish we’d kept it. That was the biggest mistake we ever made. Selling must have cost us $50 million, maybe more.”30 Zweig didn’t have the heart to tell the then 96-year-old Rosenfield that the shares he sold would have been worth several billion dollars in 2000. Perhaps this is why Rosenfield “considers selling to be indistinguishable from error.

Once, enrolled in any undergraduate study program of the Superior University means confidence to be part of a setup where guaranteed job placement is waiting for everyone. It can easily happen with the unique 3U1M Program offered by the university which allows the students to spend three years learning with fun at the campus with all assignments, practical, projects, and classroom studies through OBE (Objective Based Education) and PBL (Program Based Learning) programs. The final year is wholly spent with the experiential learning in the most prestigious public or private sector organizations.

After Chandavarkar shortlisted a few candidates in 1997, Kiran came in for the final interview. All five shortlisted students already had job offers in hand. The interview lasted forty-five minutes, of which Kiran spoke for forty. She spoke about why she wanted to enter pharmaceuticals and how she wanted the company to grow. That ‘campus-placement experience’ was different for Shreehas Tambe. ‘My offer was from Lupin; I don’t think D.B. Gupta [founder and chairman of Lupin] gave a damn about who was joining the company. A general manager had come from Tarapur and we were all very happy because the salary was nice,’ says Tambe, a hefty man with a sense of humour. On hearing Kiran out, he was impressed that the ‘chairperson’ of the company was explaining to a fresher what the vision was. At twenty-three, the idea of working in a pub city wasn’t bad even though leaving Mumbai was not in his scheme of things. ‘I thought it’d be fun to check out the city for two to three years and then come back to Mumbai,’ he remembers thinking. Kiran said she had spoken to his placement manager; she knew his salary and would match it. She insisted that he say yes to the offer right then. Tambe was anxious. He had not submitted his master’s thesis and his supervisor, J.B. Joshi, generally decided where his students would go, which often was Reliance Industries. Surprisingly, after some intimidating remarks like ‘how could you attend the campus interview without asking me’, Joshi encouraged him to join Biocon. He did not conceal his cautionary advice though: ‘Come back after two years, finish your Ph.D and then we’ll see.