A year in Cialfo!

I complete one momentous year in Cialfo today and the running joke in the company is that 1 year in Cialfo is equivalent to 4 years in any other organisation and to be honest- I agree!:)

The adrenaline rush of building something new, having the audacity of taking up challenges that have never been done before and charting an unknown path is all in a day for us at Cialfo.

As I look back at my 1 year in the company, I can only look back at pride in what we have achieved. My goal along with others in the leadership team in the company was to drive Direct Apply adoption a project that has never been done anywhere before but one that solves a pertinent problem in the transition of a student from school to university which is making sense of college application process.

In laymen's terms, you can take Direct Apply as being a Common App for World Universities the only difference is that while the common app streamlines the application process only for US Universities- Direct Apply will enable a student to apply to multiple universities in multiple countries within one single platform. Doesn't that sound wonderful?

We started this journey by first going ahead and doing 4 physical launch events for Direct Apply within our community starting with the first event being hosted on 20th Nov 2021 in Delhi followed by other very successful events in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

I still remember vividly at the end of my first 3 months in Cialfo we had so much to celebrate because of how positively our community of career counsellors had accepted Direct Apply. I want to especially give a shout to my amazing team members and colleagues in the leadership who made this dream possible Swati Seth Hiten Shah Shubhendu Chowdhry and of course Rohan Pasari & Stanley Chia who led us from the front.

The next 3 months of the Quarter 15th Jan- 15th April for us were also a crucial period where we actually started building a Student Education Advisor team and an India Marketing team in India to support the DA function which gave me an opportunity to hire some really wonderful professionals and dear colleagues like Pooja Iyer Parul Srivastava (She/Her) Meenakshi Kansal Khurana Malini Jain as our Inhouse SEA team followed by the hiring of Kanika Pahwa Wadhera Deepak Rana and Iqbal as our India Marketing & Events team. Bringing on this fresh set of hands to the team brought in fresh energy and perspective to our Mission DA.

With the team being set in place we were now set to host physical & virtual DA application days across India starting with our events in Ryan Group of Schools across Delhi-NCR, Elpro in Pune, SSVM Institutions CS Academy in Coimbatore and TVS Group of Schools in Madurai. These events impacted 1000+ students across 30+ schools across India and were an amazing experience for me personally. We all at Cialfo were inspired by the impact that Direct Apply was having on the ground for our students & parents.

Seeing DA come to life with so many eager students showing interest in the product was in itself a satisfying feeling for all of us in the team.

Once we had all these student applications on the platform, it was now up to us to work with our partner universities across the world to make this end step work and we are ever grateful to our partners across the globe for working closely with us to ensure our student had the best experience ever and entered their dream colleges as validated by student testimonial below.

And, just like that, a whole year has gone by for me. As Colm Wilkson put it nicely in words for me- " For myself, personally, I am never really aware of timing or anything because I am passionate about what I do, so I have found that if you really love what you do, then time flies.

I would like to take this moment to say a word of thanks to the Cialfo leadership team led by Rohan Pasari Stanley Chia & William Hund for believing all of us in the India Leadership team. Thank you to my colleagues in the India leadership Swati Seth Hiten Shah and recently turned Cialfolk Puneet Soin for being an awesome team to work with.

I would also like to say a word of thanks to my wider India team, I may not be able to tag all of you here but you know who you are Khushnuma Bhadha Ann Gracious Vinayak Sudhakar Chitra S Rutuja Shah Richa Rishi Kasturi Kejriwal Rakhi Bhardwaj Renu Nagpal Sharma Florisa Pereira Imran Sutar Sucheeta Sahu Leela Sai Dev Boddu Guru Janhavi Ruparel Richa Rishi Vanessa Lira Piyalee Chatterjee Tanisha Sharma Aishwarya Garg

Also, a shout out to my amazing colleagues Rilla Roessel Marta Grutka & Felicja Syska Clay Hensley Sandra Tenorio Rachel Levine Tim Munnerlyn Glenn R. Pooja Gupta Pasari Lou Greenwald Audrey DuHaime Robin Smyers Tim Weir Joshua Chong Abeer Ali Sandeep Khanna Roly Srivastava Kirstie Weston Pan Luo Wenya Tan Wenwen Zhao in the global team who have always provided me with support and guidance whenever I have needed it.

The last year has been an amazing learning experience for me and my sincere gratitude to my Cialfo Family for giving me an opportunity to experience this with you :-)

Onwards and upwards team!