Details

• India
• MASIMC-17
• Graduate
• WS 2025
• Time spent at the partner university: 7 months
• Contact: Login to see contact information

1. Preparation

Flights: I flew out with Air Arabia through Sharjah for around €320 one way, which was easily the cheapest route and a surprisingly smooth one. For the way back I split the trip, Mumbai to Cairo for about €300 and then Cairo to Warsaw for about €400, which saved me a fair bit. When you land, just grab an Uber to campus (set it up before you fly); it is dirt cheap. The prepaid taxi counters work too, at roughly double, which is still next to nothing. Finances: Sort out a Revolut or similar card before you go; the ATM rates are great and it makes budgeting painless. Once your Indian SIM is active, set up a UPI app like Mony so you can pay by QR code more or less everywhere. The fees they take are substantial but UPI is a must in India. Health: Book a tropical-medicine appointment early. They will tailor your jabs to where you are actually going and give you genuinely useful advice. I went with just typhoid and hepatatis A vaccines (on top of the ones I had done in my childhood). Rabies vaccine might be also worth your while but I acually got post-exposure round of vaccines in SE Asia and India (5 in total) and compared to European vaccines they costed nothing. Some people recommend doing dengue vaccine as well but from what I heard from my doctor, it's not usually advised for people who've not had dengue before (the side effect are harsher for first timers than the sickness itselft). Best if you consult this one with your own doctor. Visa. The student visa is a standard, unremarkable process. Just start it well in advance and you will be fine.

2. Accommodation

Living on campus is compulsory, at roughly €400 a month, but it is fairly inclusive: your books, Wi-Fi, and regular cleaning are all in there. I stayed in the Rainbow Dorms, which most people agree are the best option: your own room, your own bathroom, AC and a ceiling fan. It was perfectly comfortable, with two gripes. First is the noise coming from both the street and the parties happening on campus till late night. The windows are not soundproof so I recommend taking top of the line earplugs with you. Second was the hot water that kind of came and went. There is a shared kitchen and a washing machine in the hallway. The kitchen is basic and not the tidiest, but it has a fridge, freezer, microwave and a water dispenser, and the water is safe; I drank it the whole time without a problem. Laundry dried fine on the balcony. I would steer clear of the other dorms, where the standard drops off noticeably, but it's really up the the institute and changing dorms was impossible for the people who tried. Couples can ask about the married-student apartments; the exchange council will usually sort something out even if you are not officially married, though do not expect luxury. The dorms sit on the new campus, two minutes from the classrooms, and the whole place feels very safe, with security around at all hours. Honestly, once you find your feet, India in general feels a lot safer than you might expect.

3. Academic life at host university

Campus and socialising: The campus is packed with facilities, and all of them are free: a pool, a gym, tennis and badminton courts, yoga, a running track, foosball, the library. The old campus is basically a big park, so you are never short of somewhere to be. Fair warning: the local students throw room parties more or less constantly, so it can be genuinely hard to sleep, especially in the male dorms. The flip side is that they are lovely to exchange students and quick to include you, so between the sport and the parties it is easy to find your people. Dress code: Dress is very casual. I basically lived in t-shirts, long but casual trousers (long is wise in the evenings, thanks to the mosquitoes) and flip-flops or sandals; plenty of locals wear flip-flops to class anyway. Keep it light and breathable and you will be comfortable. Academics and culture: The workload is no joke: lots of reading, cases, and presentations. You can expect something like 50 to 100 pages of pre-reading before each of a course's 15 to 20 sessions, and for every credit (about 5 ECTS) there is usually a meaty group or individual project plus an exam. The local students run on a very little sleep, somehow combining that intensity with a very active social life; it is work hard, play hard in the truest sense. Compared with WU, I found the material broader but often a bit more surface-level, and with that much volume, a lot of people lean heavily on AI just to stay afloat. Grades carry huge weight here because they feed straight into placements, so the competition is right out in the open: everyone speaks up in class, and nobody is sharing their notes. One quirk worth knowing: an academic associate sits in on every session and quietly records participation and attendance, down to who spoke and who slipped out and for how long. I found this off-putting. A note on grades, and I would read this before you arrive. As are genuinely hard to get unless you end up in a strong group, and that is not something you can just arrange: the groups here are not random. Students form them early and stick together for most of the programme, so as an exchange student you often land with free-riders or with other exchange students, and it is normal to end up doing 40 to 60 per cent of the work yourself. One practical tip: try to team up with people who actually have a stake in the grade. For a lot of exchange students the grade does not count for anything back home, so they are simply not motivated to grind on a group project, and you can be the one left carrying it. It is nothing personal, and they are often great to hang out with outside class, but it is worth bearing in mind when you pick a team. On top of that, As tend to go to only the top 5 per cent or so of a course, so getting one is not just about doing good work; it is about playing it a little strategically against the other strong groups, which is tough from the outside. In Term V I really went for it, often leading or outright carrying the groupwork, and it barely moved my grades: mostly Bs, a 3.25 GPA. By Term VI I had built a bit of a reputation, got invited into better groups, put in noticeably less effort, enjoyed myself far more, and my GPA actually came out slightly higher at 3.48. So the honest takeaway is this: either make peace with Bs and spend your energy enjoying the experience, or commit to 16-hour days of classes and reading and maybe come away with mostly As. I would pick the former. Courses I would happily recommend, some of the best I have taken anywhere: Investigating Corporate Social Irresponsibility (Navdeep Mathur). He mostly lets the class carry the discussion but steers it beautifully, and his own knowledge lifts every session. He is also just a lovely human being; he spent time with us, chatted properly, and even had me and a few other exchange students over to his home for dinner. Elephants and Cheetahs: Systems, Strategy and Bottlenecks (Saral Mukherjee). A bit of a showman, with sharp reads on one case after another. His engineering background means he presents companies as well-designed systems, which was a genuinely new way of seeing things for me. Game Theory and Applications (Viswanath Pingali). What a lecturer. After this course I started noticing game-theory patterns in everyday life, thanks to his brilliant business examples. He was the one professor who did not take attendance, and I still turned up to every session I could. Health Economics (Tarun Jain). Really solid: well-prepared, deeply knowledgeable, widely experienced, and his classes were genuinely engaging, built around papers and cases that held my interest. Courses I would give a miss: Data Visualization for Decision Making: long and fairly dull. It might land better with the engineers who make up a big chunk of the batch, but most SIMC students are already pretty intuitive about this stuff. Managing Customer Value Delivery: boring, and made harder to follow by the professors' accents. Fundamental Strategic Tradeoffs and Data-Driven Decision Making: genuinely tedious, more or less the same exercise every session, and a lot of work for very few credits.

5. Every day life in the host country

Transport and travel: Getting around is cheap and painless. Uber, Ola, and Rapido cover most of it, and the auto-rickshaws are everywhere; I was completely at ease taking them, even on my own. For longer trips (to Kerala, Himachal Pradesh and West Bengal) I mostly flew, usually with IndiGo, which is cheap and reliable; for the occasional visit to a nearby state I would take the train, which is comfortable, safe-feeling, and has proper sleeper options for overnight journeys. Honestly my only real worry in India was the traffic, and even that is pretty manageable in Ahmedabad. Travel as much as you possibly can. Rajasthan is right on the doorstep and an absolute must. And because flights out of Ahmedabad get almost comically cheap, I squeezed in two Southeast Asia trips, to Thailand and Vietnam, for under €100 one way on VietJet, plus a swing through South India once exams were done. Do the same if you get the chance. Sports and fun: Mostly badminton and pickleball for me, plus the odd game of cricket whenever my Indian friends dragged me in. There are loads of clubs (football, volleyball, cricket, frisbee), but be aware that a lot of them are geared toward inter-institute competition, and in our year exchange students were not allowed to compete, so even if you are good you will not be fully in the loop, training sessions and all. Casual play is easy to find though, and getting on the pitch with local friends is honestly one of the best ways in.

6. Testimonial

Being dropped into such a different culture was, simply, extraordinary. IIMA is not without its problems: the pressure on students and faculty alike is intense, and the classes, if I am honest, were not the highlight. But it was the people and the culture that made those six months. You meet the whole range of human beings here. Some carry a serious ego and look down on plenty of people, exchange students included; others are as warm and down-to-earth as anyone I have ever met. I made some genuinely wonderful friends, people who had me over to their homes, went out of their way for me, and made me feel like I belonged. The Indian students are sharp and funny once you are in, and the little group of European exchange students I fell in with made the whole experience. Add all the travel, the food, the festivals, and the endless late-night conversations, and it becomes a stretch of my life I know I will keep coming back to. You do have to leave your bubble and push out of your comfort zone to get the most from it, but if you do, it is 100 per cent worth it.