From a pharmacy degree to the top 20 Mavericks: Komal Gupta’s MBA journey at Parul University!

Komal Gupta came to Parul University and was able to name a few of the data tools a modern recruiter now takes for granted and was reluctant to speak in front of a room. A year and a bit later, she was one of the Mavericks, the title the university gives to the top 20 students of an MBA batch of more than 2,000. The gap between those two sentences is the story.

She is from Valsad, in south Gujarat, and she reached the MBA by way of pharmacy rather than business. She is a holder of a degree in pharmacy, and her undergraduate years were not spent sitting in classes alone. She had experience as a hospital pharmacist, which taught her about the functioning of a health care facility, and as a Quality Assurance intern in a pharmaceutical firm. She also claims that a research study in college has earned her a patent. When she was enrolled on her MBA program, she already had credentials in hospitals, in an industry, and in research.

One of the traits that she brought along with her was from college. She refers to herself as a topper, meaning she was always very serious about her academics. This proved to be more important than she thought it would be, as the Mavericks’ shortlist grades and anything else.

Komal wanted one specific thing from an MBA: a course that joined management to the pharmaceutical sector, not a general degree she would have to bend toward pharma later. When she searched for that across Gujarat, she found most institutions ran general management programs and left the specialisation out. In her view, Parul University was the only university in the state offering an MBA in Pharmaceutical Management, and that decided the first question.

The specialisation was the reason she looked; the campus was the reason she stayed with the choice. Having compared options across Gujarat, she weighed the culture, the surroundings, and the opportunities on offer and found all three worth having. Her expectation for the two years was plain. She wanted the degree to open career doors, and a strong placement at the end was the goal she named first.

The choice made sense for where she was standing. A pharmacy graduate already understands the product, the regulation, and the clinical setting; what a pharmaceutical-management degree adds is the commercial layer on top, the ability to read a market, manage a team, and run the numbers behind a drug rather than only dispense it. For Komal, who had worked a hospital pharmacy counter and sat through a QA internship, the MBA was less a change of field than the second half of one. That is also why the analytical training ahead would land so hard: it was the part of the picture her first degree had never shown her.

The first weeks were unfamiliar in a way she had not lived through before. It was her first time away from home and her first time in a hostel, and she needed a little time to adjust to the place, the people, and the pace around her. The adjustment did not last long. She found the atmosphere friendly, and in her reading of it, settling in at Parul is not hard because the people around a newcomer make the effort to help.

She did not chase formal roles. She chose not to stand as a class representative or sit on committees, and she is matter-of-fact that this was a choice rather than a missed chance. What she used instead were the things put in front of every student: classroom presentations, conclaves, and competitions. The presentations mattered most to her. They were where her communication improved, her stage fear shrank, and she began taking a real part in discussion.

As part of the curriculum, she completed a summer internship at VapiCare Pharma in Vapi, a required element of the program that fit her pharmaceutical specialisation. When she lists the people who shaped her growth, the list runs long: the Training and Placement cell, the head of training, and the trainers and the faculty who ran the sessions. The university’s pre-impact and post-impact training, in her view, did much of the work of building her analytical knowledge and her communication.

The Mavericks title goes to the top 20 students of the MBA batch. Komal was chosen from a cohort of more than 2,000, which puts her in roughly the top one per cent.

She reads the tag two ways. It is a platform, a chance to be early in the race for the strongest placement opportunities, and it is a signal, a shorthand that a student is well-rounded rather than merely high-scoring. In her words, a Maverick stands out through skills, intelligence, and activeness in an organisation, not through marks alone. The practical weight comes from how recruiters use the list. When companies, including multinationals, come to campus to filter candidates, the Mavericks names are the ones put in front of them first. Komal wanted to be on that list, and she says she prayed hard to get there.

She first heard about it in class. Faculty raised it early and told students that from that day they should take part in everything on offer, because that was what gave them a shot at selection. The university followed up by email. From the start, she understood the tag as a route to a very good job.

The path was long. Counting the pre-impact training, the internship, and the post-impact training, it ran about three to four months. The first stage was an analytical screening round, a written test of around ten questions, which she cleared. A personal interview followed, which she also cleared. After that, the final list was announced with her name on it.

Selected students then went through a final seven-day training in August. They rebuilt their resumes, prepared a presentation, and prepared a research presentation, and each student presented their research before a jury drawn from well-known organisations, including representatives of multinationals. Komal counts that jury session among the most useful parts of the whole program, because it put her in front of senior people from reputed companies and made her present herself professionally. The final selection fell on 22 August.

The shortlist does not turn on one thing. It weighs marks and skills together. The screening took in Class 10 and Class 12 results alongside first- and second-semester MBA performance, and as she understood it, a CGPA of 7 or above was the bar to be considered. Past grades, the selectors looked at how well a student communicates and how actively they had taken part across the first two semesters, including work outside the curriculum. A candidate had to show strength across several measures rather than in one.

The impact training is where most of the preparation happens, and Komal calls it an A to Z package for the interview and selection process. Its value, for someone from her background, was that it covered ground a pharmacy degree never touches?

SQL was new to almost everyone in the group, and the sessions gave the cohort a working grasp of it. The Power BI training centred on building dashboards and on handling and analysing data. The aptitude sessions mattered because Komal had never sat such a test and did not know its format; afterwards she understood how they are built and felt able to compete. Group discussion sessions taught what to do and what to avoid, how to lead a GD and how to carry it through to the interview, and communication ran as a thread through all of it.

Two changes stand out, and Komal names both without prompting. The first is her voice in a room. She started as an introvert who would rather not speak in front of people and found presentations hard. The regular class presentations, the pitch-style work in the final training, and the research presentation before the jury added up until she now handles presentations with ease. She ties this directly to the management mindset, where being able to put an idea or a pitch in front of an organisation counts for a great deal.

The second is technical. Coming from a science and pharmacy background, she arrived, by her own description, with zero exposure to analytical tools. Today she is confident with Excel and Power BI and can build an interactive dashboard from any kind of data, sales figures or otherwise, the sort of dashboard an organisation uses to review its numbers. For a pharmacy graduate stepping into pharmaceutical management, she sees that as a real addition to her profile rather than a line on a certificate.

Neither change, she is careful to say, came from a single session or a single mentor. She credits the combined effort of the Training and Placement cell, the trainers, the faculty, and the training programs, together with her own decision to take part in everything offered.

There is a point in that worth naming. The skills the program gave her—reading data, building a dashboard, holding a room, and framing a pitch are not placement tricks that expire the day she signs an offer. They are the working equipment of someone expected to run things, which is the harder and more durable thing an MBA is supposed to leave behind.

Asked for the moment she will not forget, Komal does not pause. The result of three to four months of preparation came on 22 August, and that date is her birthday. She calls it a beautiful day, a very big opportunity arriving on the one day of the year that was already hers.

The first people she told were her parents. She called them herself, and they were happy. Her own feeling was pride and a little surprise, because the introvert who had found presentations hard was now on a list of twenty drawn from a batch of thousands.

Plenty of first-year students want the Mavericks tag, and Komal’s advice to them is specific.

• Speak up and take part in every opportunity that comes along. It is how fear gets smaller and how a network gets built, and the network, she says, is the real point of management studies.
• Take studies seriously. A student who treats CGPA lightly can lose the chance outright, because marks carry real weight in the selection. Participation does not substitute for grades; it sits beside them.
• Work on communication from the start. Some of her own batchmates, now in the final year, still find it hard, and in her view it is the one skill that can cover gaps elsewhere. The time to begin is early.

Komal’s next goal is the placement she came for. Komal’s next goal is the placement she came for. The companies have come to the university; she wants to join a good company that suits her profile, and she expects that the offer that comes will suit all the efforts that she has made. She states things very straightforwardly: she has done good work, and now she expects a good result from it.

The message of the lady for those students who are considering whether to join Parul University or not is very clear. They will be studying in an environment with diverse culture and an easygoing environment.

Nothing is impossible if you truly want it. Do whatever you want to do, but give your best to it.

SOURCE AND CONTEXT : Based on an interview with Komal Gupta, MBA in Pharmaceutical Management, Parul University. The patent, the hospital-pharmacist and QA roles, the CGPA threshold, and the claim that Parul is the only university in Gujarat offering this specialisation are stated by Komal and are presented as her account. Her parents’ personal details have been omitted. The one line in quotation marks is her own; all other remarks are reported, not direct speech. LinkedIn, the Pharmacy Council of India, and Power BI links carry no tracking parameters._

• Komal Gupta MBA in Pharmaceutical Management student, Parul University; named a Maverick
• Parul University Host institution; Vadodara, Gujarat
• Training and Placement Cell, Parul University Ran the pre-impact, post-impact and final Mavericks training
• VapiCare Pharma Vapi-based pharmaceutical company; Komal’s curriculum summer internship
• Pharmacy Council of India National regulator for pharmacy education; context for her B.Pharm background