Nithin Kamath’s Weblog

My College life officially came to an end last week with the PG degree being handed over to me during the 26^th annual convocation of the Mangalore University.

The day (16/Feb) was a happy day for me as the unexpected 1st rank in MCA course meant a Gold Medal came hopping along with the degree certificate!!! Though it personally means nothing much to me, but it means a lot to my family and relatives and I am happy that I was able to bag the medal. After all, these are the things which you carve for…something which assures your parents them that the lakhs of rupees they had spent on the course was not a complete waste!

Moving on…..just miss those college days…..got to know a lot of things…..made many friends…..did lots of experimentation on the PC….and participated in lots of inter-collegiate fests [and won many prize as well!! ;-)]….

One of the few things I learnt by participating in the various inter-collegiate fest was “Enjoy and have fun in any work you do…..and you will triumph by far exceeding what you though you would have done otherwise…”. Though even today when I do something I may look serious, but I really enjoy whatever I do….which is really making life fun.

There are many many things I wanted to write about and that would unnecessarily increase the post size…hence I will cut it short ……and move on to one thing that I was unable to do when in college and am sad about, which was contribute code to the Open Source world! Well nothing much is lost….I can still contribute….I just need to switch gears and move from ‘try to contribute’ to ‘contribute’.

Life moves on…..and now that I have moved out of college……all the past achievements mean very little now………..more responsibilities have come in…….and for the past one year or so the focus has shifted to work side….let me wait and see how it turns out at work…..Overall I am happy that I finished college on a good note…

This morning in our college, we had a visit by Mr Sanjay Singh and Ms Anita of System Domain. They gave a small presentation about the various training programmes they conduct.

Initially Mr Sanjay Singh, having 17 years industry experience spoke on the importance of soft skills. He mentions that even though India has a large student base who pass out every year, only 15% of those are only actually employable. So technical skill should go hand in hand with soft skills. He goes on to mention that by 2008 India will be facing a manpower shortage of 20 lakhs and in the next few years many large companies such as IBM, Dell, Microsoft & Intel are inducting huge amount of capital investment in Bangalore and hence many more jobs will be created.

Ms Anita then mentioned about the Fast Forward programme that they conduct. She gave a few examples on how language plays a very important role during interviews. After that there was a small presentation about the various programmes they conduct and how it will be helpful to us. According to me the presentation, which was a video file; was playing a bit too fast; combined with too much entrance and exit animation for text, meant that I could not read most of it. Well that what I felt, don’t know about others.

Overall it was a nice bit of a change from the daily schedule at college, and was quite good, would have been better if it had been a seminar rather than presentation (about their programmes), but no regrets.