The Oasis English Press spoke with Saksham Jain, the Oasis coordinator of the Operations and Strategies Club, to discuss its activities and plans for the upcoming fest.

Saksham explained that the general work of the club, founded about three years ago, involved giving members exposure to the domains of operations and strategy. As an example, second-years were recently given a project on data handling, data scraping, and the efficient use of Power BI, a common data analytics software. They also focused on external collaborations to provide members experience. This year, Saksham added, they tied up with a PIEDS startup, seeking mutual benefit and revenue generation. He detailed that the club was providing the workforce to help the early-phase startup with its outreach, tasking juniors with contacting other campuses to spread the word about the product, a protein drink alternative for Indians. He added that this provided a great experience for both the juniors and the club.

For Oasis, he stated that the club was organizing a ‘minor event’ primarily for publicity and for participants to have fun. This year’s event would be called the ‘Blackout Challenge’ and would take place on Day 1. Saksham commented that it would serve as a replacement for their former event, the ‘BITSian’s Game of Life’, since the club wanted to introduce something new.

He described the event as an escape room with a unique focus on operations and strategy, such as solving clues related to a failing business.He stated that the concept had been formulated by his juniors, who had been asked to develop an event that both the Coordinators  and participants would enjoy. He said that the event would be free to register for teams of three to four, with no cash prize, as the goal was ‘simply to have fun’.

Talking about the club’s preparations for the fest, Saksham noted that they had been ’quite smooth’ and were in their final phase, although one issue was that they found it ‘very difficult’ to align their event with the fest’s theme while staying true to the club’s values so they eschewed it and decided to take a different direction. He concluded by inviting everyone to come and enjoy the ‘fun event’.