We survived Vistas 2025 and we’re still recovering.

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We survived Vistas 2025 and we’re still recovering.

Nine days. Ten verticals. Countless new experiences. As participants who were in the thick of the chaos that is Vistas, we bring to you a reflective piece to explore what each vertical truly stood for, beyond the fun Instagram reels. 

What really makes Vistas the ultimate test at SBM? It's simple: each vertical doesn't just challenge what you know- it strips away everything you think you know and rebuilds you from scratch. When you're pitching ideas that sound brilliant at midnight but questionable the morning after, and when you realize that everything you thought you know about business just got turned upside down; you realise it’s as much about learning the new as it is about unlearning.

Corporate Strategy:

Corporate Strategy is where you’re handed the impossible and told to make it sound inevitable. One moment you’re drafting a “phase-wise implementation plan” for a space station, next you’re pitching KPIs that exist only in your Canva fantasy. Our take? When in doubt, add "synergistic value creation" to your sentence. Works 90% of the time. Our real-er take? AI will give everyone the same response, be unconventional but realistic to stand out and be ready to justify why your strategy will work.

Wealth Management:

Wealth Management at Vistas is where everyone suddenly turns into a stock market guru. One moment you’re running a mock trading floor on Excel, the next you’re panicking because your “brilliant” pick tanked faster than you could say Nifty 50. Numbers fly, mergers and acquisitions get thrown around like buzzwords, portfolios rise, egos fall, and somewhere in between, you realise finance is basically legalised gambling with better spreadsheets. Honestly, have some ready-to-use excel templates for your next WM b-fest- they’ll be your saving grace.

Public Relations:

Think this vertical is just about the coolest vertical ever? Well, glad to not disappoint you because you are absolutely correct. From being tasked with defending Kejriwal’s actions to cosplaying Marie Antoinette, Public Relations has got you covered. With a multitude of rounds like Moot Court, Group Discussion and not to forget its flagship event, Networking, PR is fun, chaotic and tests composure like no other. For future PR folks- remember that confidence that isn’t backed by competence is stupidity. If you can separate your personal opinions from the task at hand, PR is yours.

Entrepreneurship Development:

Big business or small, dairy farming or aura farming (sorry, had to), entrepreneurship development is the place to be. It isn't just about framing a pitch for angel investors, but also about making a change in society. Participants go to extreme lengths to find their Eureka, and whether you’re a sardine, a clownfish or a shark, ED welcomes you with open arms. (SZA mentioned).

ED was where our wildest ideas either took flight or crashed spectacularly. The pressure to be innovative while being practical is real, but somewhere in the middle, you actually believe the idea (or, add ‘sustainable’ or ‘AI-powered’ for instant credibility).

Human Resources:

People often dismiss HR as the department of birthday emails and forced smiles but in Vistas, it was closer to a high-stakes social experiment. One round you’re mediating a clash that feels like it belongs on Star Plus, and the next you’re figuring out who’s the natural leader and who’s just really good at nodding.

What made HR fascinating wasn’t the constant judging and diagnosing, but rather the policies and people. You had to read the room, anticipate egos, and make calls that could shift the entire team dynamic. Tasks were built around diplomacy, strategy, and a touch of theater rolled into one. At its core, HR wasn’t about keeping everyone happy (the event heads made sure of that); it was about keeping the game alive and that’s a responsibility far heavier than figuring out who actually deserves the expired coffee vouchers.

Marketing:

If you can’t sell water to a thirsty person, can you at least convince people to get hyped about an alarm clock that screams your CGPA until you wake up.? That’s Marketing in Vistas. Only here would you pitch a jalapeño milkshake as the future of wellness drinks, complete with a straight face and a pitch deck that suspiciously overuses stock photos of happy families.

The real kicker? The tasks weren’t just quirky, they were downright brutal. Campaigns had to be built from scratch, strategies had to survive cut-throat questioning, and every idea was tested until it either shined like gold or crumbled like a group project at 3 a.m. Marketing wasn’t, isn’t and never will be about polish; it was about persuasion under pressure. By the end, you didn’t just learn to sell, you learned to sell the unsellable, and occasionally even convince yourself it was a half decent idea.

Business Quiz:

That moment when you think, “Oh wait… I do know this,” but the buzzer goes off and you’re left politely clapping for the other team? That’s Business Quiz in a nutshell. One second it’s Mesopotamia, the next it’s Coca-Cola’s market strategy, and suddenly you’re wondering why your brain remembers old Vine memes but not the name of a Fortune 500 CEO.

Business Quiz humbles you faster than any other vertical. You walk in feeling like the human version of Investopedia and leave realizing you didn’t know that esoteric business fact from 1987, or that anyone cared. The questions whip between history, strategy, brands, and obscure trivia with the speed of a stock market crash, and the real challenge isn’t just knowing the answer but rather keeping your reflexes sharper than your competitors.

Cheat code: If you don't know the answer, guess the one you thought was too obvious to be the right answer.

Best Manager:

Best Manager? Oh, it’s the easiest vertical out there. A calm stroll through management land, really. Everyone’s cheerful, the event heads are oh so generous, and the tasks? A breeze. Just a few light puzzles, some polite discussions, maybe a PPT slide with comic sans if you’re feeling wild. Nothing stressful at all. In fact, you’ll probably leave with new friends, glowing skin, and a renewed sense of inner peace and satisfaction and definitely 1000x more confident in your abilities as a fester.

It’s basically group yoga with a certificate at the end. Imagine HR, Finance, PR, Marketing, and CS holding hands, singing “Kumbaya,” while you sip your third free coffee of the day. Smiles all around, zero chaos, and definitely no mental breakdowns at 2 a.m. Easy. Blissful. Practically a Thai spa retreat.

Reality check: Best Manager is the crown jewel of Vistas, and it’s brutal. There’s no team to hide behind and no second place. As ABBA said- The winner takes it all. Every probable task from every possible domain gets thrown at you, stock market crash one moment, HR crises the next, PR disasters, marketing pitches, operations nightmares. The tasks are relentless, designed to test not just what you know but how long you can keep your composure under impossible pressure. It’s chaos dressed as management, and surviving it is what makes the title so coveted.

Group Task:

Group Task is less an event and more a rite of passage. Imagine 15–20 sleep-deprived strangers from different verticals locked together for one night, told to invent the impossible, and then somehow present it at 5:30 AM looking like they just stepped out of a grooming ad. Yeah, that’s Group Task.

The challenge isn’t just the task, it’s the delirium. Sometimes you’re representing entire countries, other times you’re building alternate universes from scratch. The only constant is the slow descent into collective madness as caffeine becomes a food group and “quick brainstorm” turns into a three-hour debate over fonts.

By dawn, everyone is exhausted, slightly feral, and standing in front of every event head at Vistas trying to make sense of whatever they cooked up at 3 AM. GT isn’t something you prepare for. GT happens to you. Because you don’t choose GT, GT chooses YOU.

Integration:

“Survival of the fittest” was just a phrase until Integration arrived and made it painfully literal. Three days of chaos, where team leaders literally bought their participants in an auction, stitched together squads of three or four, and then threw them into a blender of deadlines, presentations, and overlapping tasks. Balance wasn’t just strategy, it was survival. (And yes, having a Wealth Manager on your team was basically playing with cheat codes.)

Integration wasn’t about one big challenge, it was about five happening at once, each with its own impossible clock ticking. One moment you’re knee-deep in financials, the next you’re getting grilled harder than a MasterChef contestant whose sauce split. Sleep was optional, stress was mandatory, and the grilling? Relentless.

Only the sharpest made it through intact and rightly so. Because while those who ‘Thrive’ (foreshadowing much?) may be crowned champions, Integration is the one that forges them.

And that’s Vistas for you, a mix of unforgiving and unforgettable. If you're planning to dive into next year's edition, just remember: preparation helps, but adaptability saves you. It’s as much a test of skills as it is of your willpower to keep going. Will you make mistakes? 100% Will it be worth it? Also, 100%

Congratulations to all the winners and the learners. To everyone gearing up for next year - you've been warned. And to everyone still on the fence about participating- stop overthinking it. Some experiences can't be explained, only lived.

See you at the next one. If we survive that long.

Penned By:

Vedanth Shankar - 2420384

Steffi Jecintho J - 2420945

Adi Sharma - 2420904

Designed By:

Srishti Sharma - 2520955