Bijapur talk contd.

Okay here's the detailed dope on the Bijapur talk.
I uploaded a whole lot of photos into a Yahoo album , which comes across nicely as a slideshow. I haven't been able to upload the videos due to a technical problem.

The college is called Dr. PG Halakatti College of Engineering and is run by the BLDE Trust which runs a whole lot of educational institutions in Bijapur. There are a small group of young enthusiastic lecturers there who do a lot of extra stuff and they basically set up my talk. These guys really impressed me. They are quite happy to be in Bijapur instead of migrating to Bangalore. At the same time they are energetic and enthusiastic and want to do something good for the local students. They have been running a placement service for the students in the college and in that connection they called me. They put me up in a nice hotel there (I didn't expect such a nice place). On the first day I met the principal and then sat with them and discussed the talk and logistics. The talk was restricted to CS, IT and EC students but still that would have been abot 150-200 students so we decided to do the course over 2 days, repeating the same thing for a fresh bunch of students on the second day. There was a common session on the first day for all the students to get things started.
The talk was about various things related to getting a job: background about software companies, the written test, group discussion, interview, resume, on-campus and off-campus recruiting. I had spent some time on various websites so I got to know a little about about some of the details of the interviewing process. One thing I was happy about was how effectively these students are using the web to help them prepare for jobs -- pretty much all the question papers of all the companies can be found online. Its a great way to share information so that everybody benefits and improves and the overall level goes higher.
At the training session, another person, Mukund, also gave a talk. He talked about a technical topic (networking). He was one of my reports at Juniper, and he was the person who put me in touch with the people at Bijapur.
On the first day the sessions did not go that well. The students were pretty quiet and did not particapate much. I came up with some stuff on the fly to get them to particapate more and it helped a little. Nevertheless the session was quite successful and the feedback (we passed out a feedback questionnaire) was quite good. The next day I emphasised more on involving the people and the response was much better. At the end of the day we did a mock group discussion with some of the students particapating and the rest looking on. It went very well and I think people really benefited from seeing hands-on how the dynamics in a group discussion work.

Some notes on the photographs: there are two photographs with a group of us standing on the road -- this is the group of lecturers who organized the whole thing.
There are some photographs of me and Mukund interacting with the students during a tea break. Priya was not very appreciative of some of these photos :-)
I feel quite mortified seeing some of the photographs of me talking -- my posture is terrible. I have a particularly bad posture when I hold the mic out to someone to talk -- I put my hand on my hip and thrust my tummy out in a very ungainly way. Defiintely a learning opportunity for me. The beard looks very bad in some views.

I think the students rarely get exposure to someone from industry and someone with some level of polish and communication so overall I think it was a pretty good experience from them, both from some hard facts as well as the general exposure.

I came back from the talk on something of a high, but haven't pursued this direction much because of getting involved with Arghyam. However I feel quite attracted to the idea of being like an independant consultant. I feel I don't have the drive and people-ness to be the leader of an organization, and at the same time I have enough thinking skills (ahem, Arvind) and general smarts and ambition to do something good. So an independant consultant seems like a good midway option.

There was one more interesting aspect to the experience -- the situation of having to be in control or to keep the attention of a roomful of people. I'm sure you would agree that this could be quite an unnerving experience. Luckily these students were amenable people (if not downright silent) so I didn't have that much stress. One of the things that helped me was having done the Landmark courses. Not from learning from the courses per se, but from watching how the course leader managed the whole experience. I was completely dazzled by the way the did it and unconsciously learnt a lot and adopted it as my gold standard. I felt a couple of times during the Bijapur course when I was hitting the high spots that I was like a Landmark Forum leader myself and dazzling the kids. Not that difficult actually since as I said these were people without a lot of outside exposure, but nevertheless a very good feeling and yes, good for the ego.

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I'm off to Vizag tomorrow (today actually, its late Sunday night here), will probably get a couple of posts in from there. Till then.