It gives me great joy to write to you through our alumni newsletter. We now have four batches who have walked out of our gates and into the world, and we have just welcomed our next, a cohort of 240 students who join a story that you helped begin.

I have been thinking a great deal about what an alma mater is meant to be. A school can offer you a degree and a set of skills, and most do. But our relationship with you is much deeper than that. BITSoM is a place you carry with you, not as a line on a resume, but as a part of how you see yourself and the people you choose to stand beside. The bond between our school and its alumni takes root before you ever step into the campus; from the very moment you decide to call this institution your own. This bond was nurtured by your time on campus, but its true strength is felt for the rest of your life – tested by distance and time but deepening all the same.

We are a young community, and there is something rare about that. Not many can say they helped shape a school in its earliest years, when so much was still being written for the first time, from the courses we taught to the traditions we chose to keep. That is a privilege reserved for the few who were there when the school began, and it belongs to you. The institutions we most admire were not made great by their buildings or their rankings. They were made great by generations of people who felt a quiet sense of ownership over the place that shaped them, and who passed that feeling on to those who came next. We are at the very beginning of writing that into our own history, and I believe it begins with you.

My goal for the years ahead is a simple one. I want every BITSoM graduate to know that this is a family they never have to leave, and that the door is always open, in good times and difficult ones alike. A school is ultimately the sum of the people who believe in it. You are the proof of what we can become.

This newsletter is one way of staying close. I hope you will write back.