Reminisce - Recalling the past

Everyone has an aim in life, and that gradually becomes clearer as one progresses in their college life. But rarely we get the right gyaan about the path that needs to be taken to achieve that target, as our interaction is mostly limited to our immediate seniors or seniors above them, and never with those who have gone the full stretch and have already reached their goal.

Reminisce is a novel initiative in this direction. It aims to bring students like you and me, closer to our alumni and get fruitful advice right from them. Alumni have always been an inspiration for us, for we look up to them and strive to carve out a niche for ourselves and in the process bring distinction to our institute.

Reminisce is NSIT's first official alumni magazine. We (Myself, and Ankur Verma- Founders of Reminisce) have split up the magazine in 5 categories,

1. Management Studies(MBA/PGDM)
2. M.S / Research
3. Entrepreneurs
4. Private sector(people without master's but great work-ex)
   
5. Civil Service(IAS/PSU service)

to serve to queries and common doubts of the respective field aspirants directly. After a lot of brainstorming we framed up a questionnaire for each category, so that alumni can directly provide pointers to juniors. Most of the questions are such that even we, fourth years have never been able to find an answer to, hence can best be answered by our illustrious alumni. The responses have been taken from alumni having great profile and sufficient industry exposure. Alumni that have contributed range from 1993 to 2005 graduating batch. The video below is a teaser as to how the magazine is developing as of 28-March-09[shown on NSIT Alumni meet].

N.S.I.T./D.I.T.'s First Official Alumni Magazine

We have presently a whole team of 20+ ebullient NSITians working on each and every aspect from Content gathering, Compiling, Designing, managing the work flow, etc. We are trying to make this magazine as informative as possible, and also make it completely funded by college so that it can be distributed freely to all students in college.

Personally, I have been receiving great feedback from alumni and also from peers and juniors and many are asking when will the magazine be released. For this, I would like to say that magazine is taking time only because we do not want to compromise on quality. We are still awaiting few replies, and as and when we get it we will be heading towards the printing press :) .

After the placement manual, for which also I received some great feedback, it feels nice to be involved in creating something substantial again, that would really help the juniors make some informed decisions and also better plan out their path. For me, It has till date been a great experience talking directly to highly illustrious & meritorious alumni of ours either on mail, on phone, or conducting face to face interviews, and while discussing their responses within team, interacting with team members from first to final year, having team meetings, collaborating on how the work is progressing at different ends, etc etc.

The best part about the magazine is that it's completely evolved from scratch in BH-1. I would particularly like to name few people without which this magazine would have never been a reality. First of all, Ankur Verma who along with me is the founder of this magazine. Pratik Prakash(ICE - 4th year) doing the excellent work on editing front, Neerav and Siddharth(ICE - 3rd year), who are working day and night on the design part of the magazine , Parasu Kishan, the relationship head, and Animesh Garg (MPAE - 3rd year) managing the team of 1st and 2nd years, and helping us in Administration work.

I would also like to say plenty of future opportunities are there to take Reminisce to great height, and we have hereby started and taken the first step. I hope that future editions of magazine keep coming and both alumni and students keep adding value by contributing to the magazine and the culture we intend to begin in NSIT. Juniors who would like to take the magazine further are most welcome to contact us on mail or group.

How you can reach us / share your views

1. Mail
2. Reminisce Site
   
3. NSITlounge Thread
4. NSIT-Reminisce group
   

Comments/feedback/Appreciation most welcome. Cheers!!

Elections'09 and the youth

Almost all of us have witnessed the charisma of Obama on various news channels, and how he just sweeped the youth of their feet by his inspiring speeches, which finally became the prime reason of his historic victory.

And now it's election time in India. Seeing the results by courting the youth in America, the political parties here have already set their eyes on how to gather more public attention especially of youth. If the 2004 general elections was fought on the platform of the aam admi, then the forthcoming 2009 Lok Sabha elections is going to be all about luring the young voters.

Rahul Gandhi nowadays is going full throttle campaigning Gujrat. Even back here in Delhi, and at many other metropolitan cities, like Bombay and Lucknow huge banners of Rahul Gandhi have been put up alongside bridges or at crossroads. I have also seen some of the other ministers posters like that of Kapil Sibal & Pranab Mukherjee in markets, and other public places.

But the one that has both shocked and impressed me most is the "Advani for PM "campaign. Consider this, Mr. LK Advani, even at 81 years of age is running for the post of prime minister. Now that's something commendable. I doubt if any country had an older prime minister or president than this. He has started trying out weights at a gymnasium :P, launched a personal website(on his 81st bday), chats online to reach out to students.

I usually get these ads on Orkut. And on some digging I found that advertisements similar to these goes to approximately 2000 websites mostly visited by Indians via google adsense. That's quite a lot of easy bucks for google.

Actually, all this is a positive sign. Hopefully political parties will now start taking youth more seriously and won't just play pitiable vote-bank politics after all we comprise approx. 30% of India's population. what's your say?? Cheers!!!.

The End of Vacations.

So, finally my last college vacations are ending, and thank God I have lived to see this day again.. which I thought would never be possible as the vacations never seem to end.

So, what did I do in Vacations?? Oh, this is as tough a question as "What are your weaknesses" in an Interview. Ya.. because you have to speakout an answer even if you don't want to answer it.

First of all, My Congratulations to President Obama. He surely has and will pump doses of fresh Oxygen in US Economy. Talking of Obama, I still could not understand why the term Black was being associated with Obama more than his first name on 20th Jan by Aaj Tak, the totally f* up news channel. I don't expect FBI to arrest me for this, like they did in US for some blog articles regarding racism.. Oh no.. not that word again.

I did manage to change the subject but not for long, and a question always has an answer.
I spent quite some time travelling to Punjab, Mathura, and MP in the vacations.. as it's the last time I would be able to meet my old family members before starting with my job with D.E Shaw & Co. at Hyderabad. I also started reading some management articles online and really feel how much more inclined I am towards Management aspects of thing then towards hardcore coding thing. I also developed a taste of reading more Psychology based Novels, and those who have read some, kindly advise me more of same.

I have also started work as GreenHat Ventures Campus Associate and in effect I will be again contributing my part to improve the college placements by boosting inhouse talent and skills, and making my juniors more aware of opportunities and improving their Career Quotients which we engineers usually lack because of our Mind-set. But more on that later. For those who thought "again" was wrongly written above, I am more than pleased to tell that I have written a placement Manual exclusively for NSITians, keeping in mind what are Software companies expecting from NSIT grads, and it has been received with much appreciation.

Also the MBA season has long gone, and my personal congratulations to all friends who received calls from IIM's and especially those who scored a BLACKI. Hail-o-NSIT that recorded 250+ IIM Calls, with 2 100%ilers(last updated in March). Ghosh.. we have outskinned IITians. Cheers.

I also had a little taste of outsourcing this month, just for the sake of it by providing Online Tuition to children in US and also getting a good pay for it. One only needs a mike, decent net-connection and the right opportunity for it.

Thus went my last few weeks at home. Please keep posting comments, so that I am encouraged to write more.. Writing is a good habit, in retrospect, this makes me think why didn't I started writing earlier.. Oh lazy me... Nevertheless Cheers again!!! Tata.