Looking back at my time at SP Jain Global, the experiences that shaped me most weren't the ones I expected.
I'm now a Senior Market Research Officer at Sharjah Cooperative Society, one of the UAE's largest consumer cooperatives. My work covers pricing studies, competitor benchmarking and category performance, understanding how shoppers respond to price movements and turning those insights into recommendations the business can use.
The industry project was where everything began to come together. The brief we got was open-ended: help a business grow without simply spending more to get there. That meant market and competitor analysis, mapping the ecosystem, and building a framework to track performance and attribution. What stayed with me wasn't the final output; it was learning to work with incomplete information, ask better questions before jumping to answers, and present findings to people who needed a decision, not a deck.
Much of the coursework carries over into what I do today. Applied Statistics underpins almost every pricing study I run. Consumer Value Management shaped how I think about what shoppers are actually paying for. Omnichannel Business is impossible to ignore in retail today. The Blue Ocean Strategy simulation was the first time I had to defend a positioning decision with data instead of instinct—something I do regularly now.
Another highlight of my time at SP Jain Global was AdSight, an entrepreneurial project I started with two classmates. It's an AI-driven marketing initiative helping SMEs optimise their presence for AI-powered search as discovery continues to shift away from traditional search engines. SP Jain backed us throughout the journey, from ideation to implementation, and that support played a significant role in turning the idea into reality. The School also gave us opportunities to showcase our venture through the Industry Connect and Entrepreneurship for Disruptive Launch competitions, where we won both. Building something from scratch taught me lessons that no case study could.
The Master of Global Business (MGB)'s multi-city model meant learning how businesses operate across different markets, not just reading about them. Finishing on the Dean's List was a wonderful milestone, but the real value lay in the breadth of challenges the program exposed us to.
To future students: treat your industry project and every interaction with industry partners like a real job opportunity, not an academic exercise. Say yes to ambiguous briefs, and build something outside the classroom, even if it doesn't succeed. That's often where the greatest learning happens and the best opportunities emerge.
Rohith Harikrishnan is a graduate of SP Jain Global's Master of Global Business (MGB) program, specialising in Digital Business Management. He is currently a Senior Market Research Officer at Sharjah Cooperative Society in the UAE.
The map lied: What four markets taught me about marketing
Creating Our Own Blue Ocean: A 9-Day Journey with Dr Umesh Kothari