04 May, 2014

End of Semester 6

Final end-semester exams have completed and its the time finally, which I had been waiting since past 4 months, since sem 6 began. Now, its time to analyze, rethink of what has changed, what remained static, what I accomplished, how did my graph got shaped, how many checklist ticked off and how many more added, etc in the past semester at DAIICT. And to make it short and precise, the following are the points which I could recall and visualize as I imagine the word "Semester 6" in my head as I close my eyes :

1. Mentor, Google Code-In, a contest run by Google to introduce 13-17 years kids all over the world to open source world and help them making their first contributions.

2. Finalist in first Google Glass Hackathon in India, where a app for Google Glass, 'Damn-it !' was made by +Harsh Kothari , +Vaibhavi H Desai  and me in two days.

3. Delivered 2 talks at Google Women Tech-Maker Event , on International Women's Day at GDG Gandhinagar. Talks included Google Cloud Platform and Getting into Google Summer of Code.

4. 1st ever interview of my life, an internship interview at Google, Ireland. Glad that I survived 3 rounds. Had I cleared the forth round too, it was the host-matching process after that ! Hard luck, yet it was an awesome learning experience ( blogging abt it in detail is on my todo list :) ).

5. Selected for Google Summer of Code again, with organization OpenMRS. I will be working on Blocking Algorithm mentored by +judy wawira .

6. Created a student chapter for ACM-DAIICT alongwith +Prasenjit Majumder , +Ganesh Iyer , +Harsh Thakkar  and +Vandana Ravindran and serving as Vice-Chair at ACM-DAIICT.

7. Co-founder at Women Who Code, WWC - Gujarat. All pretty tech-girls reading this, you will enjoy being a part of this community. I would be updating calender for it and send out notifications shortly.

8. Community Manager at open-source organization BRL-CAD. Discussions and more information about this role is under progress.

9. Reviewer for Scholarships for Women Grace Hoppers Conference.

10. Participated in CLEF ehealth 2014 task 3 on User-centered eHeatlth Information Retrieval. 

11. Completed a term at Programming Club at DAIICT. 

12. Apart from these 11 activities, the entire semester was like a pressure cooker in terms of academics. Assignments, labs, presentations, exams, lectures (:P) , paper,  etc. define the academic -face of this semester aptly.

13. Discovered a new side of my interest. Spic-Macay sessions, I look forward for more sessions next semester.

14. Music Nights, yeah. Attended each and every music night this semester, ranging from FNL, Thrusday nights, Acoustic nights, Raaga and Rhapsody to the Javed-Ali pronight during Synapse. My love for music has taken a step forward. Performing in one of these music nights, added to checklist.

15. Koffee++(a gold-card member at Koffee++ :P) Seriously, I never had been so frequent customer of any coffee shop earlier. Approx. once in every two days ! And the craziest one is, playing scramble alongwith coffee at K++ just 2 hrs before exams ! I was never so chilled out person. Thank you Vikram Sorathia uncle for opening a K++ at DA.  :)

16. Trip to Durg, a memorable one.

Regrets : I wished I had got my passport two months earlier. Missed a trip to Germany. :'(

Next is - Research Assistant at IR-Labs, DAIICT, FIRE, BioNLP, Information Retrieval. Quite excited and looking forward to it. :)

Overall, this semester was like a roller-coaster. Up, Down, Up, Down, Up, Up Up...

PS: This semester was totally incomplete at DAIICT without my alter-ego, my twin Sanghavi Alury. Thanks for being there with me all the time. I love you !