With top entrances like CAT and XAT over , the biggest question that would be re

volving in the aspirants mind is " Now that I am through which specialization to
choose?" .Given that the choice made now will be mostly final and will drive ca
reer options and choices in post MBA life . In this regard I will share my exper
ience with you. When I appeared for mba in 2012 , I secured 99.12 percentile in
CAT (Verbal:95.xx ,Quants 99.xx) and secured calls from mdi ,fms,iit b , iit d,i
it kgp, nitie , imt ghaziabad, 6 IIM s. While on the other hand with my snap sco
re I secured calls from Schmrd, sibm and siib . In XAT I secured calls from XLRI
BM, HR and XIMB (both Bm and HR). At that point of time i had no clue of which
among these colleges would give me a dream career because i did my bachelors in
computer science engineering from NIT and for me it felt that all among HR , Fin
, Operations had no relation with what i had known or done previously. With mu
ltiple mutually conflicting inputs I was confused and searched the net on my own
to get to the site http://www.iimjobs.com/ which is for people with experience
to apply in their respective domains for top level positions. I was searching fo
r eligibility in each discipline so that i make an informed choice for future. H
aving made a weighted choice from among the options i had , i found XLRI HRM wa
s the one which suited the bill given that as per the site most top positions in
HR could be applied with that eligibility and with some experience. Now 2 years
down the line , and with some experience of the mba process , I feel some thin
gs need to be made clear to all aspirants specially ones who wish to know from w
hich branch what options you have irrespective of which college they opt for. I
will start with HRM since i had maximum exposure to this function and try to cor
relate with other functions from it , from HRM you can get Sales roles (same rol
e as u get if u opt for sales from Finance , Marketing , Ops), Strategic HR role
s ( roles in which u make strategy for the firm includes decisions on Mergers an
d Acquisitions etc), Corporate HR roles ( roles like creating policy documents a
nd ensuring compliance etc) , Business Partner roles( sits in board mostly , coo
rdinates activities between various HR functions), Consultant( which is more or
less same role as u get in marketing , fin etc with same career progressions the
reafter). As per study subjects , 2nd year is mostly electives u can choose sam
e electives as chosen by fin or mark guys if u have interest in them but u have
to choose some minimum number of core electives for your function this holds tr
ue for all other functions too. In case of fin then the major attraction would b
e investment banking ( please remember u need to have a good decent profile (goo
d acads , experience) for this kind of role in leading companies).Switching from
Finance to Core HR or from Core HR to finance is very rare unless it is a very
very small company where everyone has to everything . Course content wise Finan
ce will focus on Shares and bonds , marketing would focus on theories like HR w
hich will deal with consumer perception and hence you can get marketing roles fr
om HR specialization and same from marketing you can get into HR roles ( general
management) and their multiple instances of the same in companies which has gen
man roles. So this is more or less a peek into world of specializations , I hop
e this article answers at least a few of the queries revolving in your minds and
will help in near future too for making some informed choices of various functi
ons. Thank you and all the best for each of your careers !!