User:Kapil Rawat
From LakshyaWiki
Hello. I am Kapil Rawat.
Let me start by saying that I am not an engineer. However, as a kid, growing up in a small city like Lucknow, to gain admission into IIT was possibly the best and the only career option I had. And I had been preparing myself for the IIT entrance exam, while in the 7th year of school I won a State level science modelling competition, every year I would get the best grades in sciences and I would always be studying science books one year ahead of my peer group.
I was working so hard at school that apart from occasionally playing football, the only hobby I pursued was public speaking. The principal of my school had great respect for my rhetoric abilities and she nominated me for an international level debate in a 3-day science fair just six months before the IIT entrance exam. As a serious and sincere student, first question I would ask any fellow participant in the fair was - what they intended to do after school. Those 3-days were the biggest turning point of my life, not even 10% of non Indian participants wanted to become engineers, they talked of things which I had never even heard of, fashion designing, marketing, management, finance the list was endless. I was shocked at my ignorance and for the next six months I would relentlessly try to make sense of the liberalisation which has happening in India and how it had impacted the job scene. By the way I lost the debate and realised that I had also known very little about bio diversity.
For six months I was a rebel, possibly the only one in Lucknow who did now want to spend the rest of his life working for NASA in the US. During this period I happened to visit my home town (Dehradun) which is even smaller. I was saddened to see that 1st class post graduates had little more to do in life, than to become clerks in government offices. While the newspapers went crazy about what liberalisation was doing to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore; ground reality in most of India was very different. I resolved that if I was the smartest kid around then I would grow up to become someone who can make changes at the grass root level; create as many jobs as possible.
It was not hard to realise that I needed to enter the corporate sector. I was taking a big risk as I was going to do something which no one known to me had even thought of attempting. My father, who is also my ideal - an honest police officer, who never received a promotion in 30 years of his service, was all confused and it took me 2 months to convince him. At last he said what he had always says and what has continued to be the underlying theme of my life: whatever you do, do with truth, honesty and hard work.
I started my academic pursuit, focused on gaining knowledge which I felt was indispensable in the corporate sector. Over the next six years I earned degrees in commerce, economics, management accounting, finance and computers. With careful planning and a very strategic approach I could study as much in six years as would require at least 11 years for an average student. Armed with my fantastic academic record, I entered the corporate sector. Where, I transitioned from being a sole contributor doing data mining at General Electric, to working in a team on a very high impact project for Prudential UK, to taking a leadership role in setting up a Knowledge Services division in Prudential India.
After finishing my studies and establishing myself professionally I tried to make a difference to school students who could benefit from my experiences. Whenever I went home for vacation I tried to voluntarily organise my guest lectures at schools and colleges in Dehradun. However, the response was not very encouraging.
In 2005, I relocated to Barcelona to purse my MBA at IESE Business School. In my first semester at IESE, I realised that m yset backs were because of lack of understanding of my value proposition by the schools and the immaturity of students. So while in Barcelona I initiated Project Lakshya which is an effort to institutionalise the belief that students can gain incredibly from experiences of professionals, especially while choosing a career.
I initiated Project Lakshya purely because of patriotic motivation. I see this effort as an effective tool to making the Indian education system more efficient. This effort has the potential of making the future generations of India focused, confident, internationally competitive, logical and independent. However, Project Lakshya is an effort which can only be successful when we Indians work on it together and I look forward to you joining the Lakshya community.
If you are interested in my professional profile please visit: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kapilrawat
Jai Hind!
