Mr. Dhruvil Shah

Dhruvil Shah is the CEO of Parul University, Vadodara, and what makes his story a bit different from most people in that kind of role is that he didn't come in from outside, he actually walked into Parul as a BTech Computer Science Engineering student back in 2008, stayed on as a lecturer after graduating, and has now been attached to the same institution for over 13 years in one capacity or another, which is the kind of loyalty you don't see much of anymore in any sector let alone higher education. On top of the CEO title he also runs Branding and PR as Director and handles Student Welfare as Dean simultaneously, so it's not like the CEO job is the only thing on his plate by any stretch.

His job as CEO covers operational strategy, branding, admissions, external affairs, and student welfare, which is a wider brief than a lot of people probably assume when they hear the word CEO attached to a university, since most people still picture the academic side of things when they think of university leadership rather than the machinery that keeps the whole operation running and growing from the outside in. Dhruvil Shah's main focus is more about brand and media strategy, marketing, admissions campaigns, and the big institutional events that put the university's name in front of people who haven't heard of it yet, and to give you a sense of how that's played out, the student count under his operational watch has grown to over 70,000 on campus, which is a number that takes some serious work to reach and even more work to sustain year after year.

He was one of five founding members of the International Relations Cell and also a founding member of the Entrepreneurship Development Cell, and beyond those founding roles he went and built the Cultural Affairs Department, the Branding Department, and the Central Contact Center entirely from scratch, which means he wasn't stepping into existing structures and tweaking them, he was figuring out what needed to exist and then making it exist, which is a meaningfully different kind of work. The convocation ceremonies he's directed have apparently become one of the largest of their kind in India, and the list of flagship events he's launched reads like he was determined to put Vadodara on the map for something beyond what it was already known for, Vadodara Literature Festival, Vadodara Startup Festival, Tech Expo, AgriFest, PharmaFest, IIMUN Student Conclaves, all of these came out of his department and none of them were there before he showed up.

Under his leadership, Parul University has pulled in a range of names for campaigns and partnerships that most institutions three times its age haven't managed, M.S. Dhoni, Dr. S. Jaishankar who is currently India's Minister of External Affairs, former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, actors Pratik Gandhi, Boman Irani and Vaani Kapoor on the entertainment side, and then corporate figures like Sneha Basu Roy who is Google India's VP of Startup Partnerships, Dr. Ramanan Ramanathan, and Sundeep Singh who is Managing Director at Accenture, all of which points to a branding operation that isn't just running ads but actually building associations that carry some weight. The claim that Parul University pioneered celebrity brand ambassadors in Indian higher education is a bold one, but when you look at who was doing it and when, it's hard to argue it didn't happen here before most others thought to try it.

When the pandemic hit and everything shut down more or less overnight, he led what became a pretty rapid scaling of digital infrastructure and resources across both academic and administrative operations at Parul University and the reason that matters is that a university with 70,000- plus students can't just quietly figure things out over a few months, the continuity had to be maintained basically in real time or thousands of students would have been left with nothing, which is the kind of pressure that either exposes gaps in an institution or shows you what it's actually made of.