Gaurav Agarwal, a second year MBA student at Indian Institute of Management-Bangalore, has been made an offer of 105,000 pounds (equivalent to Rs 84.5 lakh; $193,000) per annum by a London-based bank.
The offer is the highest ever to a would-be IIM graduate. IIM-B did not divulge the name of the firm.
An electrical engineer from IIT Kanpur with a masters from the University of California at Berkeley, Agarwal worked with the global financial risk management division of the bank for his summer internship this year.
Agarwal says he was attracted by the opportunities for learning and working in a field completely new to him.
"It is a first-class organisation. Here things are done the right way and mutual respect among employees is immense. I have learnt a lot from my colleagues on the job," he said. "The growth opportunities along with the excellent work culture makes this bank the ideal employer for any MBA graduate."
Incidentally, the investment bank has also made a Rs 30 lakh per annum offer at its Mumbai office to Agarwal's batchmate at IIM Bangalore, Venkatesh Sankararaman.
This is among the highest offers for a domestic placement.
Says Venkatesh, "The summer internship was carefully structured. I was expected to contribute from the start and received appropriate on-the-job training all the way through."
The summer internship is an academic requirement at IIMs wherein students work with firms from across the world for a two-month period.
This year saw nearly 30 per cent of the students doing internships abroad with reputed firms.
Typically, most of the international banks use the internship as a means of evaluating students so as to offer them full time opportunities.
Banks that have been regular recruiters from campus over the years include Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, HSBC, Barclays Capital, BNP Paribas and Bank of America.
The students at IIM Bangalore have already received 10 international pre-placement offers with an average salary of over $100,000 p a and with most of the big firms like Goldman Sachs and HSBC likely to come out with their offers anytime and these numbers are only bound to increase.
This year, the selection for the summer internship programme for IIM Bangalore students is scheduled to start on November 8 and most of the biggies from Wall Street have already shown interest in these students for a 2-month internship next year.