Ramnarain Ruia College BJMC Review By Aditya Jaiswal

Many people outside Mumbai doesn’t even know about Ruia College or the BMM course but I was certain to do that as journalism is what I thrived for and as Warren Buffet has said do a job that turn you on. My job may not be paying me as much as MBA or engineering students earn but my job certainly turns me on. Ruia was the first step as it was one of the closest colleges from my place and watching it from close quarters since my childhood; I knew I will be studying here at some point in time. So, that’s how Ruia college happened to me as there are many skills that are required to become a good journalist. One has to be good at writing scripts because only then the editor will value the content that you have written. Well, I will agree to the point that BMM hardly teaches anything academically as the course is more of creating stories and how humans in general communicate.

BMM has two kind of studies and they are advertising and journalism. So, in all we had 36 subjects in three years that covered all the aspects of these two things. More than the books what we were taught was perspective about both the fields. So more than inside the classrooms, our sessions were held outside. I will still say that college may not matter in BMM as university matters and University of Mumbai is the only university from where doing BMM is worth. Our studies explored many areas or in simple words it was like exploring the sea of Mumbai because it was that vast. The best thing about the course was that we had to choose one among journalism and advertising and we were allowed to switch after one month of the final semester. So, academically, Ruia college has done great but I would still credit the University of Mumbai more.

Media planner or ad gurus were our teachers who used to share their pictures of working with legends like Amitabh Bachchan, SRK, Leander Paes, and Sachin Tendulkar among others. Some of the faculties were awarded many awards at the national level. So, award winning faculties used to teach us and none of the faculty changed during the course as getting a faculty like this will make the college scratch their skin out of their hairs. So, faculties overall were nice to learn something from.

A BMM fresher can easily earn up to 25k in Mumbai because most of the students of our course have done their internships in large media houses or news publications. Since, I was interested in journalism; I got my opportunity with Sakal which is one the leading Marathi publication houses in Maharashtra. In internship we were paid nothing. Like legit nothing and made to work like animals. I still didn’t give up because I knew that after graduation too, I will be an intern and the only difference would be that I would be a paid intern. The college only provided us internships as there were no campus placements. Some of the interns were hired with 25k while some like me were offered as low as 10k. Hence, I decided to move on and carry on with further studies.

The college doesn’t have any hostel but there were two private boy’s hostel in Matunga. I mean there are many but I know two which were at a walking distance from the college and they were Gurukul Boys Hostel, and MVBS Boy’s Hostel. For outsiders though NM, Mithibai College, HR, KC, and Jai Hind are considered as the colleges to be a part of, so Ruia college had the least outsiders. So, the hostel facility was anyways not required.

Well, I have seen a lot of changes in the college as I have been seeing it from childhood. Earlier it was like an old British School and when I joined the building was the same but the interiors were turned to modern. There were over 10 labs in the college and a small radio station as BMM studies couldn’t be done without that. There was a press release studio as the college has a confession page and we were asked to make stories from there and publish in the yearly magazine of college. Our classes were held in Arts college building as there are just two buildings inside the campus as one was ours and the other one was Science department building.

The campus life here is great because the most intellectual crowd of Mumbai comes here. Yes, it’s after St. Xavier’s but still better than NM or Mithibai which are first choice college of students living in suburbs. The campus event list was never ending and even Arts department had events that I never dreamt of. I used to wait for the annual event Aarohan as that was the one where many competitions were held between the science and arts department.