46 Bright Minds, 31 Hours: SBI Orientation Week Part II

By Satyameet Ahuja

It’s time to finish our recap of orientation week! In case you missed it, you’ll want to first read Part I here. Our students had just wrapped up their Day for OTHERS, during which they all woke up at 5am to visit an amazing NGO. This brings us to…

Day 3 – Day of HEALTH

At Schulich, we see two trends – personal health is becoming increasingly important for professional success and incoming classes can quickly adapt to live a sedentary lifestyle while managing academics. In our endeavor to set Schuligans up for success, we wanted to dedicate a day to personal health.

We partnered with a really cool firm – Cykul started by the ex-country Head (India) of Invesco to cover the entire gamut of personal health.

We started the day with a session on importance of personal health and the various cost effective options available to Schulich students to improve on key health indicators.

(Above: Deenanath, Founder of Cykul, explaining the importance of personal health, its uptake in India, how one of Cykul’s annual cycling events has risen to have more then 10,000 riders. Cykul also does an annual bike ride stretching 1,200 KMs.)

Shortly, thereafter, the cafeteria converted into a fitness room, where students undertook a fitness challenge on stationery bikes to give them some understanding about their current endurance.

Having a sense of their current fitness levels, we invited a nutritionist to deliver a session on diet and healthy choices to offer some simple solutions and the day ended with students getting their health checkup done by general physician.

(Above: The nutritionist demonstrated some quick exercises. Students followed suit, including planking which almost half the class was good at)

(Above: Schuligans undertook the endurance test to get a snapshot. This activity will be repeated in the winter term for those who wish to measure and improve their strength)

(Some were left in agonizing pain after the biking endurance test)

The objective was to inspire Schuligans to make the most of the recreation facilities available at the Banyan Tree Golf Resort, where they are housed and to provide another snapshot of their endurance and health parameters at the beginning of term 2 to let them compare.

Day 4 – Day of LEADERSHIP

When no two days of orientation are alike, and when the ice has already started to melt amongst strangers, the last day of orientation week needed to end the students’ welcome on a high. This is exactly why we brought in our partners in crime for the past 6 years – Element Training.

They have carried out facilitation sessions on Breakthrough teams and leadership since we started in India. I was just hoping they wouldn’t break any chairs in the process (to prove a point, the main facilitator broke a chair, back in 2012).

While no chairs were broken, some more ice was. Through a series of outdoor activities, personality assessment tests and a business game based on Game Theory of Economics, the facilitators exposed Schuligans to what makes for powerful teams and powerful leaders.

We particularly enjoy their facilitation because of the importance they place on creating a win-win attitude amongst teams that is a paradigm shift from working in silos while not understanding how someone else’s success does contribute to one’s own success.