After Satya Nadella, Manipal University is celebrating another alumni's rise to the global boardroom, Rajeev Suri, who has been appointed as the CEO of Finnish firm Nokia.
Both Nadella and Suri are graduates in Electronics and Communications at the Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT), ManipalUniversity.
Suri was tipped to take over as the CEO when Nokia finalised sale of its mobile handset business to software giant Microsoft.
"Satya is just a year senior to Suri at MIT. Both went through the same grind and walked through the same corridors. Today, both are heading top companies of the world clearly indicating that MIT is as good an engineering institute as any in the world," the institute said on its website.
In February, Microsoft had announced that Nadella will become the third CEO (after founder Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer) of the organisation that sells the world's most popular computer operating system.
"Satya and Suri provide strong testimony to the fact that at MIT the emphasis is on holistic development of students. Students who leave the portals of this engineering institute are quality products. Therefore, it is no coincidence or accident that these two MITians have made it big," MIT Director Vinod V Thomas said.
The overjoyed director quipped that two of the top Fortune 500 companies being led by MIT alumni is indeed a noteworthy achievement.
Simantika Mohapatra, a sixth semester student of E&C said, "Year 2014 will, perhaps, be the most rewarding year with two MITians reaching the zeniths of their career. He has set a goal for all of us at MIT."
Another student at the institute, Shashank Sarbada, said it was "most motivating" to know that the former students of MIT are scaling such heights. "It will make us strive to match, if not surpass, the footprints of our seniors," he said.
