First Impressions of SIBM Lavale

Here I was in front of the SIBM building on Senapati Bapat Road at 11:30 AM on the 6th of June 2008 to begin my MBA journey. Excited, enthusiastic, determined, and courageous on one hand and nervous, afraid, cautious on the other. This was my state of mind that day. A minibus took us all the way to the SIBM Lavale Campus which I had been hearing about from so many days. This ‘Lavale’ thing was such an enigma and the anxiety to know what,how, why about it was so much in my fellow batch mates as well as our seniors that the discussions about it had taken to crazy proportions on the OnBoard SIBM 2008-2010 community on Orkut.

The wait was finally over. Over a picturesque surroundings near lavale gaon, about 20 Kms from Pune city lies the beautiful Symbiosis Knowledge Village. It hosts SIBM as well as two other colleges of the Symbiosis society. We completed the hostel joining formalities and were shown our hostel rooms. The boys hostel here is situated at a cliff. Magnificent hills and cool breeze greats you in front of your hostel rooms.

Most of the things here are ‘Work in Progress’! Not to be misunderstood, basic amenities are mostly taken care of and everything else should be in place soon. After all it’s a 300 Acre campus and ours is the first residential batch of SIBM, so some teething problems are expected.
The Hostel rooms are well made. I got a room with twin accommodation. The rooms have a bed with a mattress and pillow, a cupboard, a table with drawers and a chair, each for both the occupants. Moreover, it has an attached restroom with solar powered hot water system, albeit it isn’t working currently, thanks to the weather! They have even provided us with buckets, soap cases and ‘Good Knight’ machines !

The weather here has been rainy for most of last week. I rarely had a chance to greet the Sun! It’s cool, sometimes cold and it’s wet. The footpaths are well made with concrete blocks, lots of saplings can be seen and I can imagine how it will all look some years later when the trees are full grown.

The academic block is around 1 Km from the hostel and makes a good walk. The mess lies in between and serves vegetarian food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yes, I mean vegetarian. Not even eggs for the time being. Once the canteen committee is formed, I hope things would change for the better for us and for the worst for the lavale chickens :)

The academic block has a beautiful building with lots of classrooms, computer labs, large assembly halls, administration and faculty areas and a central library. The library and the hostels are also shared by the SITM and SIMC guys but they haven’t joined as yet. The academic area is Wi-Fi enabled, so you can take along your laptops anywhere here to get wireless intranet & Internet connectivity. Hostel rooms have wired network connections. Mobile connectivity is a big problem. Some rooms do get mobile network in their windows, I am not even that much fortunate. Mobile goes not of the network when inside the room, and mobiles are banned in the academic block. What that means is I can call everybody when I want, but somebody calling me as to be really lucky (I mean I have to be really lucky :) ) to get the call. I don’t know how I will cope up with this!

Connectivity to Pune city is nil with no sign of public transport and with we too not allowed to have private vehicles, its up to the college to provide it. SIBM has arranged daily bus service to the city which should suffice at the moment. We need to understand that it will take time for things to settle and systems to get matured. We all need to make it happen!