The seminar room was packed with students, some didn’t have space to sit and many were

trying to
jostle their way in. And then starts a voice, “Welcome to the orientation of D-Street SRCC…” A year
ago, when I had attended the orientation of the same society as a fresher, even a small classroom
was hardly full. Managing and leading D-Street as its Vice President and to bring about this very
transformation within half a year of my tenure has been an extremely challenging task.

D-Street was started with a vision to stimulate curiosity amongst the students in the field of finance
and stock markets. However in the last couple of years, in the lust of the fest tradition, the very
motto of the society was lost. This needed a change. In order to revive D-Street’s position as one of
the most promising societies in the college and to attract and retain a maximum first year crowd, I
realized that we had to incorporate creative and out of the box ideas to deal with the current
situation. I communicated the required shift in focus to my team members and created this belief in
them that the society could revive its position if it did justice to its name. Using stock market as a
selling pitch, we managed to start the year with a bang attracting over 400 first year applications,
more than double the previous year’s and one of the highest for any society that year, and this
energized the team.

We aimed to give our members a wholesome experience and started off with conducting the
knowledge dissemination sessions according to our planned comprehensive course which covered
almost all the basic aspects of stock markets and finance, each of which was followed by an intra
society event, especially designed, to enhance the understanding from the session. E.g. – mock
stocks; events on the lines of bidding and auction etc to name a few. We also organized seminars
and workshops collaborating with professional bodies, including a visit to NSE, a move which was
greatly appreciated. Live trading sessions, sessions on derivatives, writing a research paper, solving
case studies were a few avenues we tried to cover. To encourage investing amongst the members, I
initiated the idea of collectively investing in the stock market as a society. To give an opportunity to
our members to express their take on the stock markets, we started our own blog. And to top it all,
the first years were given complete autonomy to design new events for our annual fiesta –
Sharebait.

All the aforementioned ideas were executed with a hard core focus on learning. I realized that it was
essential to drift from the mundane concept of solely conducting fests. This ideology in itself was the
major out of the box solution to reestablish D-Street’s position and my endeavor to continue to
implement creative and out of the box ideas for the betterment of the society has only just begun.