It was catch 'em young for IIM Lucknow (IIM-L) for the last two days at its campus. The leading B-school brought in selected Class XI-XII students from 20 leading (including four from Kolkata) schools across the country to its campus and oriented them to early management education, a specially designed programme christened as ‘Ocumen’.

At the end Modern School (Barakhamba Road), New Delhi emerged winner based on various competitive events and Modern School (Aliganj), Lucknow was the runners up.

“Class XI-XII is the most decisive period in a student’s life. This is the time one has to make the right career choice. And we thought of providing a snapshot of management to young students through a variety of games, at the same time providing them with a unique opportunity to experience life at a B-school,” Anshul Sharma, a member of Team Oculus, the coordinating committee of Ocumen, told FC.

“The whole idea was to act as an aegis and build a bond between all stakeholders of the education system namely, school students, B-school students, academia and the corporate world,” Sharma said.

Ocumen also saw as many as 40 teachers from the participating schools discussing the best education and management practices from world-renowned management gurus and professors at IIM-L. Professor Archana Shukla of IIM-L conducted an innovative team building game for the schoolteachers and professor Himanshu Rai of IIM-L spearheaded the teachers’ workshop called “Creativity in Pedagogy”.

The two-day-long programme had a ‘Finance Game’, aimed at making young minds conversant with risks and returns and investments, a ‘Marketing Game’, a ‘HR Game’ highlighting the importance of teamwork for creation of a successful enterprise, a ‘Strategy Game’ exposing the students to indulge in strategic decisions that can shape the future of their organisations, and the ultimate winners and ‘Vision India 2025’, a initiative designed to simulate the cabinet discussion environment within the classroom.

Sharma said, “Each student group from these 20 schools had two student mentors from IIM-L staying with them for their two-day stay at IIM-L. At the ‘thought challenge’ session, different cabinet portfolios were allocated to the 80 students and they were asked to come up impromptu with their action plan as the minister of that department.”

At the end of the two-day programme, a Google group has been formed to stay connected with these school students and keep track of their career growth. “We will also get to know how many of them are actually joining management education,” he said.