‘The kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel’, that’s how Socrates described his approach to education. A learning process where knowledge dissemination was a collaborative effort and at Krea, year on year, this is the ethos learners and mentors focus on, and this week was no different.

The first week of August in the Kreaverse has been busy. The students have been immersed in their academic lessons, induction into clubs and societies, organising and participating in events, exploring and discovering new opportunities and continuing to grow, both together and individually. While faculty continue to lead critical research in varied disciplines, that move the needle, across the spectrum, they also continue to break silos between classroom and the real world, and re-invent pedagogical approaches, encouraging students to not just absorb knowledge but adapt it to answer immediate questions and also pursue the path of lifelong learning. The Krea Talk series have re-started with vigour, inviting experts from beyond Krea to bring their knowledge and lessons to the students.

In a brand new chapter of moulding creativity, this week the Ceramic Studio at Krea also witnessed the arrival of six new state-of-the-art Shimpo wheels. The Clubs and Committees have started hosting sessions, slipping into the mode of Kreativity in Action. This weekend, the Outreach Team will be facilitating a session to make life easier for high school students to answer confusing University questions, with a little help from the Krea Envoys. This and so much more has happened over the week in the world of Krea and the spirit to ideate, execute and create continues, unabated. 

Here is raising a toast to the spirit of the Krea community, moving the goalpost with each achievement and continuing to tackle everyday challenges with conviction. And while doing these, let’s not forget to take care of ourselves. Let’s remember to keep ourselves hydrated, carry an umbrella when we step out, put on our sunscreen and keep an eye for our Wednesdays for Wellness Series, in collaboration with our in-house counsellor, Aparna Raghavan.

This week in Clubs in Centrestage, we bring to you the MUN Club at IFMR Graduate School of Business (GSB). The mission of the Model United Nations (MUN) Club is to provide a platform for students to enhance their skills in diplomacy, negotiation, public speaking, and critical thinking and promote global awareness and understanding of current world issues. Through participation in MUN simulations and events, the club strives to empower its members to become effective global citizens capable of tackling complex problems and positively impacting their communities.

On Krea’s social media platforms, in the coming week, we will give you a glimpse of the significant work done by the MUN Club over the recent months.

Club Rush, an introduction to the Clubs and Societies that the School of Interwoven Arts and Sciences (SIAS) was a fun and engaging meetup where the existing Clubs and Societies presented their vision and agenda to the fresh cohort of 2027. Here are a few snapshots from the event.

From securing job opportunities at reputed organisations to pursuing higher education at renowned foreign universities, students from the Cohort of 2023 at SIAS have already embarked on their quest to conquer new realms. From promising job roles at Ernst & Young, TVS Capital Funds, Karkinos Healthcare, Aakash Byju’s, Lumiere Education, Social Beat to higher education pursuits at University of Oxford, King’s College London, The University of Chicago, SOAS University of London and so many more, the graduates are soaring and flying to new heights. This campaign on social media offers a quick visual overview of where they are headed to.

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Dr Swathi Krishna, Postdoctoral Fellow, TIFR Mumbai held a session as part of the Krea Mathematics talk series on 9 August 2023. A finitely generated group with a Cayley graph that is a Gromov hyperbolic space is called a hyperbolic group. Gromov hyperbolic spaces (and the groups) admit a compactification called the Gromov boundary given by the endpoints of geodesic rays. The inclusion of a normal hyperbolic subgroup H of a hyperbolic group G extends continuously to the boundary.

This map, known as the Cannon-Thurston map, allows us to determine when the quasiconvex subgroups of H remain quasiconvex in G, in certain cases. In particular, the speaker will look at the case when H is a finite rank free group and G is a semidirect product of H associated with the action of Z via an automorphism f. The speaker discussed this and speculated on a generalisation where f is an endomorphism.

Dr Anannya Dasgupta, Director, Centre for Writing and Pedagogy ( Krea-CWP) was invited by the  Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Jindal Global University to conduct an online writing workshop for design and architecture students of the Form and Structure Atelier. Titled, Full-on-Feelz: Writing Evocative Descriptions, the session was held on 4 August 2023.

How do we describe objects to evoke a look and feel? Are context and feelings important to the work of architecture and design? In this workshop, the participants engaged in some hands-on descriptive writing about familiar objects and images to understand what it takes to write evocative descriptions of different aesthetic styles.

Nidhin M, IFMR GSB PhD Scholar presented a research paper titled, Are ESG Disclosures Relevant for Lenders? Empirical Evidence from India, co-authored with Dr Vinod Kumar,  Associate Professor, IFMR GSB at the World Finance Conference 2023, University of Agder, Norway, held from 2-4 August 2023.  Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure has emerged as a dominant paradigm in the sustainable corporate finance discipline. Stakeholders realise that an enterprise cannot be evaluated only through financial disclosures, the non-financial disclosures also play a vital role in valuing a firm. 

Against this backdrop, this paper examines how ESG disclosure affects the cost of debt (COD) using a sample of 556 Indianlisted firms. The empirical analysis finds that superior ESG disclosure reduces the cost of debt. This study extends the analysis by investigating the effect of individual dimensions of ESG disclosure on the cost of debt and observes a significant negative association between the individual ESG disclosure factors and firms’ cost of debt.

Would you know a 11th or 12th grade student who is curious about university life and seeking answers to questions that will help them transition better from school to university? The Krea Outreach team is organising a virtual meet named, Fresh Off the Boat, looking back at the transition from School to University, where they get to meet and interact with the Krea Envoys, students of SIAS, who will offer them a glimpse into life at Krea University and how they charted their course, transitioning from school to university.

Interested students can register for the event slated for 12 August here, and join in from anywhere.

Click here to Register

The Ceramic Studio on campus, which is part of the Global Arts discipline at SIAS is now home to six new state-of-the-art Shimpo wheels. Kaveri Bharath, Visiting faculty, SIAS inaugurated these on 9 August 2023 along with the student community on campus making some exquisite clayware. Kaveri will be teaching practicum courses as well as workshops on all things clay all through the year.

Dr Gayathri Sampath, Chairperson, MBA Programme and Associate Professor, Strategy at IFMR GSB recently received an award for Woman Mentor of the Year in recognition of her contribution to business and education. Dr Sampath received the award along with over 100 women who were recognised for their excellence in various categories from entrepreneurship, innovation, social impact, and leadership.

Team Communications, in collaboration with Aparna Raghavan — in-house counsellor at Krea — recently kicked off Wednesdays for Wellness, a series on social media, to shed light on self-care. With the beginning of the new trimester and students scrambling to find a sense of balance in their schedules, the first post in the series addressed four time management hacks to boost productivity.

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This latest video series deep dives into the unique academic approach of different disciplines at IFMR GSB, Krea University

In this episode, we have Dr Sathya Saminadan RS, Assistant Professor, Marketing at IFMR GSB explaining the philosophy and pedagogy of the Marketing stream at IFMR GSB. 

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If you have time this weekend, please do check these productions and publications from the recent past, give them a listen, watch or read.