What if you don't like NIFT MFM course

Dear Priyank,

I took admission in management dept. this year.I just wanted to know a little more about this course, because I am not at all liking this course. First of all a B school must not work in functional timings like 9 to 5 as NIFT management timinngs takes one back to High school.A B school should have a campus with hostel where students are staying like in IIM's, students are called at 11 0' clock night if there is any guest lecture coming.This sort of environment is needed for management education.

And most important about faculties,I am sorry to say that NIFTmanagement faculties require a lot of training I guess.And also some 5-6 faculties are teaching whole management stream..this I feel is insufficient.

I need a suggestion...do I write CAT again and try for MICA or any other top B school?

Dear,

 

Thanks for your candid ( and should I say somewhere true?) outburst. However there are a few things that need to be understood.

First of all the fashion management course in NIFT is not a business management course in true sense. It starts from understanding of the category ( most of it is apparel as it is an evolution from the earlier course - AMM - Apparel Marketing and Merchandising), goes through the quality aspects and deals with the logistics and selling aspects of fashion. Thus it prepares you for a specific stream of business. It deals with lots of 'soft' issues such as color- style- design- visual merchandising etc. which is unlike in any other business management course which concentrate on profit. Here "marketing" is redefined as "merchandising", product is redefined as "category", Technology is understood as "Garment Manufacturing Technology", selling as "retail management", Logistics as "supply chain management", Materials as "warehousing", computers as "ERP",production planning is called as "range planning" and so on. So you see a whole new vocabulary has developed around fashion management. Hence to compare a Fashion Managament course with a B-School course would be imperfect.

Faculty in NIFT should take cognizance of the dependence on product and process knowledge ( Fabrics, garments and Garment Manufacturing) for Fashion Management apart from the fact that apparel retail management is different from a regular retail management course. But I am sure they are doing their job pretty well. The only thing is that most of them are pretty new and not exposed to the vagaries of apparel industry.

About Placements I have written elsewhere in the blog.

If you dont like the course, that is one thing, you should go ahead and take your CAT. But if you have some passion about the business of fashion this is the right place you are in.