The chain-reaction of self-improvement

There is a famous 21/90 Rule: 

"It takes 21 days to form a habit and 90 days to form a lifestyle". 

Recently I went through 21-days of meditation [thanks Pankaj Ballani for sharing whatsapp tasks for abundance and self-improvement everyday]. One of the tasks asked us to jot down some of the habits that we wanted to inculcate but had been procrastinating it forever. This was my favourite task - I had a long list of todos that I wanted to add to my lifestyle. The next day's task asked us to prioritise from that list and start acting upon it. 

My first item on that list was to have a healthy lifestyle - which included two major asks - 

A. Physically more active - Exercise 4-5 times a week, take staircase instead of elevators, walk etc.

B. Eat healthy - Cut out on processed junk food, midnight snacking, sugar, cheese, etc.

Initially it was daunting to go to gym - 24 hours were too less for me in a day to include it! :P I had to actively make adjustments to my work schedule and following the golden rule, I made up my mind that initial 21 days would be difficult. I promised myself a big reward after reaching 21-day milestone. Within a week, I started enjoying going to gym - I saw some regular faces and made a new friend- Neha, my gym-buddy. Rightly said, having a good eco-system will boost you towards excellence and I added Neha to my eco-system. If I missed gym in the morning, she enquires about it when we cross each-other on the floor or accidentally meet at the water-station or the washroom. It pushed me not to miss gym the next morning.  

After successfully finishing 21 days of gym workout sessions, I started playing with my mind the chain-reaction game. As a reward for the first todo, I walked towards the second item on my list, -reading more books.

Being a millennial, I am addicted to audio-visual means like watching Youtube, Ted Talks, documentaries or listening podcasts on my walk to work or cycling in the evenings for getting new ideas, inspiration and learning facts. This is followed by reading online news, articles and blogposts on Medium - which is less time-consuming, concise and easy to skip-and-skim through the content. I was never an avid-book reader until I realised that most of the successful people I have come across had the habit of reading books. So I had added on my wishlist "reading more books" as a habit that I wanted to include in my lifestyle.

I gifted myself two books which were recommended by intrapreneur community at Deutsche Bank: 

1. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz
2. The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America's Leading Design Firm
Book by Jonathan Littman and Tom Kelley

Inspite of having a rough week at work, with some items on my plate at risk for the next release, I was able to spare time and read through the Sprint book in 5 days [the review for which will follow in the next blogpost]. 

As a reward to reading first complete book in 2019, I decided to move to the third item on my list - i.e. writing blogpost. If you are following this blog, I am sure you would know my love for putting my thoughts to words, but also have noticed a sharp fall in the number of posts after campus to corporate transition. But I have been disciplined enough not to break yearly streak on my blogpost (even if that means posting on the last day of the year ;) ) So, the third item on my list is to be like a college-kid again and start sharing more blogpost. 

As a tribute to the 21-days Chopra meditation sessions, the last day they asked me to share my experience on the group, but here I am sharing how it transformed my life-style on a much bigger platform. With this item also getting ticked off my todo, the forth item is to improve at public speaking.

I think that public speaking and being a good leader are two very closely coupled traits. And the journey of improving both of them is like walking on an asymptotic curve. For readers who aren't from engineering background or not well at maths, geometry and calculus -what asymptotic curve  means is you are always on the tangent which approaches the curve, but never touches it. [ lim x -> ∞] There is a scope for improvement even fot the best public speaker or the best leader. And I ain't anywhere near the best - so I have a long way to go. I was a part of Toastmasters club - which I absolutely loved, but recently having moved to another location of work in Pune, it is difficult to travel 10 kms to attend a meeting once a week. To work towards my forth goal, I wish to re-join Toastmasters Club [maybe some other community club if not Deutsche Bank corporate club] to be on the self-improvement path on that facet of life. Finger crossed for that goal!

Dear readers, let me know [email: kesha(dot)shah1106(at)gmail(dot)com] if you want access to the 21 days of meditation which includes 15-20 mins time commitment everyday to complete two exercises: 1. a small task 2. a guided audio meditation. I could not close my eyes and sit calmly at some place for 5 mins also before Day 1 of meditation. It has been a transformational journey for myself over the last month. 

2018 Flashback

Hi All,

Fully sinked into being a corporate professional, I admit, life has not been same as it was during university days. One of the biggest changes I see is the LACK OF TIME I find in all aspects of life- being anything to pursue my hobbies or getting time for blogging. This is evident that I have written absolutely 0 blogs here this year - what a shame on myself! I find myself constantly juggling between trying to relax on weekends and have a lazy day or to get something valuable learnt or delivered from the two days I get off every week. 

Lately, I have been spending my weekends on my first startup - FinCrack - through which I run a mentoring program for CFA candidates to help them nail the toughest examination of Wallstreet. Being from a tech background and learning about in the field of Finance by pursuing CFA over the past 3 years, I had faced many challenges. However, I didn't actively track them and found the solutions googling and having trials and errors. It was until recently, in August 2018, that I received my CFA Level 3 results, and aced with more than 90%tile, that I received a lot of comments and queries and questions from fellow candidates. In hindsight, I feel, having a mentor, especially for someone like me who likes to self-learn would have been very advantageous. And I wanted to give that luxury to my fellow generation CFA exam takers. Hence I started FinCrack - more details in the next post.

2018 has been a wonderful year - with few key highlights below:

1. Job switch - from Technology Associate at Morgan Stanley to Business Analyst at Deutsche Bank.  

Being known as techie and geek girl since my undergraduation,  life took a turn when I got placed into Morgan Stanley. My interest in Finance grew from that point and I started pursuing CFA. From that time itself, I wanted to have an exposure to a role which is more inclined towards business and gives me a deeper understanding. That wishlist is checked.

2. CFA Level 3 exam clearance with more than 90%tile

Out of ~12.5% who qualify for a charter, I wanted to be one who clears all 3 levels of CFA in first attempt and in consecutive years. Voila! I made it.

3. FRM Level 1 exam given ( Results on 3rd Jan 2019 - Fingers crossed)

The intent was not to make an alphabetical soup, but I just managed to gain one more ingredient ;)

4.  FinCrack - My First Step in Entrepreneurship Journey

Always a dream to be an entrepreneur, I took my first baby step. Being an engineer and someone who studied finance through CFA and FRM, I faced challenges and thought to pass-my-knowledge on in a better way. I was able to handle the initial setup to the getting customer to deliver content all by myself within a month. 

5. Campus Hiring

Being on other side of the table in an interview room made me much more aware about myself and the responsibility that I had on every candidates' career as well as on my firm. I went for hiring as a panelist to 2 universities this year - BITS Goa and IIT Guwahati.

6. Re-joining Toastmaster

Toastmasters is an organisation that I always wanted to get associated with and had benefitted from my past experience attending the meeting and taking up several roles. I rejoined TM club with Innovative Planning as the new Pathways.

Before the year ends, I didn't want to break the streak of posting blogs and here I am, check marking the blogspot journey.

GHCI 2017 - What is your access modifier?

While I am attending GHCI 2017, I am off-work, but the “nerdy” side of me is never off-programming. So, today I decided to apply Object Oriented Principals, not to Java code for a change - but to my experience at GHCI.

I have information classified into 3 abstraction layers.

1. Public:

Print “Hello, World!”. Yes, the entire world, this is for you - you can know about my GHCI experience here at - https://keshashah.blogspot.in/2017/11/ghci-2017-day-1.html

2. Protected:

This layer comes with a twist. For you to access this information, unlike OOPs, you do not need to inherit me ( I don’t really mind inheriting you, until I get a place in your will ;) ) You can have access to this information if we all inherit from same parent class “Morgan Stanley” \m/

If you are authorized to view, you can drop in a request/email id to view it when you open the link below.

Khufiya Khazzana: Postmortem of booths:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x4dsNOlJ9fvem3vvuFhdz1Hrxcfi55-d2OE7OAX3Vvk/edit?usp=sharing

3. Private:

You can add - static, final, abstract, singleton, volatile or whatever keyword that you can think of, coz the information is only with “I, Me and Myself” :P
$chmod 700.

Please don’t ask for information link here, because I don’t have any - oh, you had wished that reader!

If you really wanna know #3, I don’t mind some chocolates or cookies. India is corrupted and I have no plans to eradicate bribery ;)

If you like the articles above, I don’t mind you sending an email to my boss saying how awesome I am - just kidding! You can following me on either of the follow to get more updates about women in tech, the cool things that I am a part of or random musings.

1. LinkedIn: https://in.linkedin.com/in/keshashah
2. Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kesha.shah
3. Blog: https://keshashah.blogspot.in

GHCI 2017

On 16th of November 2017, more that 3000 women technologist made their way to BIEC, Bangalore to arrive at THE largest celebration of diversity and inclusion - none other than Grace Hopper Conference India. This is not a "feminist movement"- no grudges against Men In Tech - Its just that a bunch of people come together on these days to find solutions to the much ignored problems around women. I started from Whitefield at 7 am and reached the venue around 9 am- That's true 2hrs of travelling within Bengaluru (which is just 2x I do everyday!)

The location this year was a well-selected destination, spacious and ventilated - especially for the career fair exhibition centre. After registrations, I headed towards the key-note speaker where Pankajam Sridevi, MD at ANZ, had some great tips for Women In Tech. I am a secret admirer of this lady, from the time I met her during the roadshow for GHCI at ANZ, till today. Co-incidentally I heard that "right" words from her, during the "right" time. I wish to meet her today and have a mentor-mentee bond throughout life! She is how I would see myself in coming year - my #roleModel

"Be the change, don’t wait for someone else to help. Carry your own power." - Pankajam Sridevi

"Learn Listen Link" says Geetha Kannan

The volunteers and staff that make #GHCI17 happen:

After that, I headed towards Morgan Stanley booth area, where I represented the firm MS, explained people visiting the booth about the work that MS does, my work, learnt about their interests and connected them to right resource for opportunities here. There were about 1030+ women - from both campus and co-orporate world. It was so amazing to hear their experiences - each one had a different story to tell. 

              

Not all faces from a huge crowd looked new - there were some old faces as well. We had like a mini-reunion of DA-IICT folks - though not all!

It is almost like a ritual that I meet Geetha Kannan , Kamala Srinivisasan, Telle Whitney and some great leaders at GHC every year now.

I did get a chance to pull out some time and head towards conference centre, where there were posters, lectures and sessions, where my friend Heena was presenting her poster.

After lunch, I moved around different booths at career fair - to get a flavour of work they were doing. I also got a chance to visit Red Hat Booth, the open source organisation that I am closely associated with. They immediately recognised me and warmly welcomed me. For readers who are not aware, I was awarded the first-ever Women In Open Source Award in 2015 and was also invited to their annual Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, California. That was my first-ever to States.

I also did get a chance to meet Suswar Ganu, at Deutsche Bank. When I interned in Morgan Stanley, I worked on the application which was written by him a couple of years back. Now, when I am working as FTE, mostly on credit valuation adjustments of swaps - he was the one of the "first" ones to work on Interest Rate Swaps with RBI about 10 years ago. Such a co-incidence, that my work has always been in the same domain as his..

There are some amazing stories of meeting other inspirational folks as well, but the post is running too long, so I will conclude it here. It was an amazing experience to be part of GHCI at Day 1. Looking forward to DAY2 - I am writing this as I am on my way to the venue :)

Technophilia - 1st Prize - Why am I not happy?

Technophilia is a techno-innovation challenge at Morgan Stanley. This year, we came together and created a Robo- Venture Capitalist. The valuation of pre-revenue(startup) companies is very difficult, due to lack of publicly available financial statements and negative cashflows. The private equity investor often undervalue(Hotmail) or overvalue(Flipkart) the true value of the company, either for PE or IPO or M&A. Through this challenge, a team of 5 grads came together for a month and built a POC which gives the credit rating of a startup and its valuation with good probability. The proprietary algorithm evaluated the startups based on various parameters in these 6 categories: Leadership, Market Competition, Product Innovation, Financials, Social Media and Branding and Transparency. The app was made using R-Shiny framework

Out of 80+ ideas that were submitted to Technophilia across all locations in India, 17 got selected for implementation. All teams were provided 1 month of implementation time. The ideas were then presented to ED across Mumbai and Bangalore, out of which 6 teams made it to the finals. The final judging panel were MDs of Morgan Stanley and each team were given 5 minutes for presentation and demo and 5 minutes for audience+judge's Q&A.

Robo-Venture Capitalist secured 1st place amongst all ideas and implementation that were done this year. It was well -received by the panelist and the audience. We are planning to make the POC into a prod-like product with several inputs from IBD division.

The winners were promised an Ipad over email. So, after winning the challenge, we were all excited to receive much-awaited Ipads. But, we keep waiting for the much awaited Ipad for 1.5 months after the final event, until which we had no clue about the product. On enquiring with the organising team about the version, they answered diplomatically  that they weren't sure, but would make sure its "latest" one. Finally, after abt 2 months, we received our prizes - BUT IT WAS A HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT FOR ME.

My father asked in an excited voice - "Beta, is it 64 GB or 128 GB?". I down-counted him and replied in a low voice, shaming over the pride I had for my firm " Its 32 GB and just Wifi (no cellular connectivity)". Who calls such a thing "latest" to the "developers" who had put their blood and sweat to develop an innovative challenge POC beyond their daily work?

The management should realise that developer needs BETTER CONFIGURATION. Just spending about 5k per participant, i.e. increasing the budget by 25k, they could have provided everyone with 128 GB. Or atleast 2k*5 = 10k, it would have been upgraded to 64GB atleast.

PS: My phone has 64 GB RAM and I do run out of space on it !!

Showcase - Show you talent - 1st Prize

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy - I am sure you might have known this sexist (:P) English proverb, but the same extends for Girls too :)

The university days, are ofcourse filled with fun, activities, cultural events, movie nights, etc every other day. But, gone are those days when you enter the professional world!

Showcase is a theme based act/skit performance challenge, organised annually.

2016: Theme: Anti-Itching Lotion Act

(PS: You can find me at 06:20- 07:30 in the video)

Though, we did not win the competition, we did learn a lot from our mistakes and promised to make a rocking entry back again the following year.

Fastforward....

2017: Theme: The Unreality of Reality Show Act

(PS: You can find me at 03:55-04:40 and again from 06:12-07:15 in the video)

This year, we had a bang-on performance with securing 1st place amongst 6 teams that participated.. :woot: :woot:

Work hard, party harder... \m/

Stay tuned for more updates of Showcase next year ;) 

Great Indian Developer Conference, Bangalore

Before the dawn of 29th April 2016, over 2000 enthusiast woke up early and in a busy city like Bangalore, fighting with the traffic made it to IISc from across the city on time. They gathered to attend the Great Indian Developer Conference -a summit that provided them an opportunity to meet like-minded people, brainstorm about the best practices of playing with data and discuss about upcoming trends, new products and cutting edge technology in the industry. The conference is divided into 4 tracks across 4 days. Day 1 was about .NET/Cloud, Day 2 was about Web/Mobile Development, Day 3 was about Java/Dynamic Language and Day 4 was about Data And Analytics.

Honouring the job and work schedule, I had to choose one track among the above tracks. In the advent of 21st century, with Internet connecting all different parts of the world and creating humongous data every millisecond, which can be either structured, semi-structured or unstructured, I have been always interested to learn more about how the data is collected, stored and retrieved. Having performed research for a year in the field of Information Retrieval, having papers published in 3 esteemed international conferences and realising the 3Vs- volume, velocity and volatility of data, I chose to be a delegate on Day4 - for Data and Analytics track.

We arrived at the location venue before the registration had started. The conference began on time, was well organised and had a sorted registration to make the process easier. They provided all delegates with a guide which provided exclusive information that would be useful through the day - like agenda and speaker and session details. After having breakfast and networking with other delegates, we headed towards the following keynote sessions.

Session 1: Data- Whose Responsibility is it Anyway? -Amod Malviya.
Amod talked about the importance of data and why should they be treated with due respect, what are some major challenges that a firm faces to manage data - how to capture it, what to capture and how to incorporate data as one of the main part in SDLC. Data is a raw state and processed data is called information. This distinction is generally not clear, which is one of the root cause of challenges. Other challenges are that data is looked upon retrospectively and quality of data is often broken and the developer has to scratch his head through the logs messages to understand data. In the end, he talked about a possible approach to overcome with these challenges.
"Data is the only true intellectual property an organization has!" - Amod

Session 2: The Seif Project - Doug Crockford
Sief project is a safe and effective relationship management module, which has its development spread across 5 major steps - i.e. Node, Protocol, Resource Manager, Apps and Helper Apps. Doug is one of the main propagators in the early era of Javascript. He talked about how the security in the web grew from passing a password in URL [1st time in Dec 1994 in RFC 1738 - Url: //server:password@host:port] to a very secure method having complex cryptographically secured ways of passing password.
"A good software takes time to develop - the less you estimate, the more it takes!" - Doug

Session 3: Modern Data Technologies - Aditee Rele
In this session, Aditee walked us through how the technology has transformed from the early Analog times to the recent digital times.  She talked about the frequency with which data is generated, different sources of data generation and a bird-sight view of how the buzz words to a layman like Bigdata, Cloud, Machine Learning, Hadoop, etc has the power to manage a large scale of data. She talked about how the database warehouse building, designing architecture and deploying has become easier from 3 years to 3 months to 30 minutes.
"The data processing is growing from Reactive > Realtime > Predictive > Transformative" - Aditee

Session 4: Artificial Intelligence for Efficient Financial Market - Sivasankari Ramamurthy
Being a full time technology associate at Morgan Stanley, probably this was the topic I was eagerly looking foward to - how can AI make the financial markets efficient. Since the operation of every financial firm is divided into 3 major office - front, middle and back. Hence, it makes sense to see how AI fits into each of these and make lives easier.
-Front office: Advisory services, trade analytics and portfolio modelling.
-Middle  office: Risk Management, Corporate Actions, Post Trade Analysis, Portfolio Accounitng and Trade Execution
-Back office:Complaince and Due Diligence,  Regulatory reporting and Clearing and Settlement of Trade.

Session 5: Broadbridge - Naren Ramakrishnan
Naren talked about Broadbridge, which is a technology services company focused on global capital markets. It is the market leader  enabling secure and accurate processing of information for communications and securities transactions among issuers, investors and financial intermediaries.

After the keynote session, there were a series of 5 simultaneous tracks - amongst which, a delegate can choose the session which interests him the most. More details about them are available here. It was a day filled with energy, enthusiasm and keenness to learn, to know the cutting edge technologies and interacting with the experts from industry. About 29 companies had their booths setup, where they explained about what do they work upon, how one can relate to it and about the career opportunities with them.

Lastly, I would like to conclude with some acknowledgement. Thank You Morgan Stanley for providing us an opportunity to attend this conference, Thank you Salt March for organising GIDS conference and of-course, the sponsors for making this event more successful.

I know this blog has gone a bit longer than expected, but thanks for reading through it. Please provide your feedback or any questions you have in the comment box below. :)

Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship

I am too late for this post, but its better to be late than never. :D

Dr. Anita Borg was not only an accomplished computer scientist who developed cutting edge systems, she was also passionate about dismantling barriers that keep women and minorities from entering this field of work. She founded the Institute for Women and Technology, began an online community for technical women called Systers, and co-founded the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. We’re proud to keep her memory alive through the scholarship program.

21st July 2014, one of the most memorable day of my life, when I received a mail stating "Congratulations!  We are super excited to let you know that you've been selected as a scholarship recipient of the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship - Asia Pacific for 2014. " along with an invitation to the Scholars’ Retreat on September 16th to 19th, 2014 at the Google Tokyo Office. 

 I was one of the 23 girls from the Asia Pacific region (including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Srilanka, Australia, Japan, Korea, Singapore) and among 7 girls from India to be selected for this distinction.

 

This scholarship is awarded to "the women in computer science who have strong academic and research background. In addition to the leadership qualities, they possess to inspire and encourage other women in the domain of computer science."

The retreat at Tokyo, an awesome experience. An opportunity unparalleled so far as networking and up-gradation of skills are concerned. It was a unique platform studded with interactions with people with different languages, different cultures and different research background. 

The summit included various talks on latest topics pertaining computer science, motivation for women in computer science, leadership skills so and so forth. Some speakers who were highly experienced with functioning of startups threw open new horizons on my career.

There were some fun-loving collective efforts and brainstorming group activities for strategy building and planning.

 

The coolest thing was "The Robo War" where we were randomly divided into teams and were asked how to prepare sumo robots by building up the physical model along with coding part in just 3 hrs.

We also had a chance to have an office tour at Google office, which is located at Roopongi Hills, the posh area of Tokyo.


After serious deliberations through out the summit, my evenings used to be fun filled, whether sailing on the cruise, or enjoying the parties or roaming around the city with Japanese scholars or personifying with the local Japanese life.

In a nutshell, it was an excellent experience and invaluable exposure. Google attaches highest significance to women, their diversity and leadership skills. Now, in Japan I witnessed the practical application of these values, as I saw Google aiming at presenting every scholar to be a role model to their community to inspire other women. 

I returned home with my kitty filled up with unique experience, rich knowledge and firm determination to put in untiring efforts for development of women in my homeland, the Google and Anita Borg way !

Basic Technology Training for Women

Under Anita Borg Pass It On Program, a workshop is being organized for considering necessity of women to learn computers and internet by creating awareness regarding the power of these technologies to make life easy.

Venue: Computer lab, IET-AU

Date : 22^nd march 2015

Time : 1-5 PM

So here are the minimal topics to be known to a woman to use a computer proficiently in her daily life, which are as follows:

1. Basic computer parts recognition

2. Offline Applications

3. Internet and Online Applications / Smartphones  usage.

International Women's day

Women TechMakers Gandhinagar is an IT community, which encourages Women Power to the IT world, More and more women in IT.

As a part of this initiative, We are conducting an event in honor of International Women' Day, 2015 

Here are some event details :

Date: 21st March.

Venue : DAIICT (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute), Gandhinagar.

All important information are given in this doc, Click Here

 

Goal of the event :

In honor of International Women’s Day, Women Techmakers Gandhinagar is teaming up with Global Engagement and Philanthropy to celebrate the impact of women leaders, showcase achievements and highlight opportunities to inspire change in technologies around the world.

From innovative speakers, robust service projects and mentoring opportunities for our next generation of young women leaders, we are supporting the advancement of women in IT industries.

I would be delivering talks on Talks on Anita Borg Scholarship and Women in Open source.

Please do share regarding this event within IT students and IT developers.

Women in Open Source - Red Hat

Red Hat as a company has been an advocate for women in technology and open source and wants to recognize women doing great things around the world. In a bid to recognise this , it has instituted the Women In Open Source Awards .

The 2015 award finalists are chosen for their remarkable contribution to open source, the academic awards being open to women who contribute to open source while enrolled in college or university. These award finalists are some of the best and brightest in the industry and has been chosen carefully by a elite jury from over 100 such nominations received worldwide.

I take great  pride in mentioning that I am one of the 5 finalists from over the world. 


For detail about  the award you can visit : http://www.redhat.com/en/about/blog/vote-winners-first-women-open-source-awards



The final selection for the winner is through public voting. Voting closed on 6th March 2015 and winners shall be announced in the Red Hat Summit to be held in June this year at Boston, USA.

Thank you everyone for your support.

Morgan Stanley internship

Hi,

I can't believe it has been about 3 months I haven't had written a single blog ! It seems I am behaving as the busiest person in the world. I missed blogging.

I have joined the firm Morgan Stanley and interning there since January 2015. Its a 6-month project, which I am supposed to complete as a part of B.Tech training project. I am working on a project called fPod with Client Servicing department under Investment Management.

fPod is Client Services Application which get feeds from various different Transfer Agents & Fund Accountants on daily and monthly basis for different Fund Families. This application caters to the most important International Fund Families for the Investment Management Division like SICAV(INVF) - Europe, ITM - Japan, OEIC - UK, etc. We are also in plans to incorporate the biggest US Fund Family into fPod as a future initiative for next year.

I am not diving into the technical details of the project, but the project is based on the problem to move away from FTP to CXF Services using marshalling and unmarshilling of data and maintain cache on services instead of file System.This was challenging as performance also needed to be taken into consideration. The existing FTP system took 10 seconds to download and parse files, which is now reduced to less 2 seconds. :) A performance enhancement of 500% and at the same time, moving away from FTP which had security concern is the biggest achievement. The code will going through code review for next 2 days and then QA followed by UAT and production. I am so happy that I would be able to see my work merging into the mainstream and go live before my internship completes and will be serving all our fPod clients with a better experience. :)

I had a tough time relocating to a different state (Mumbai), finding accommodation, understanding the problem, business cycle, learning the technology stack and delivering my best. Infact, you would be surprised that for one full month I was surviving on a poor internet connection, a mere-shitty-mobile data pack! On top of that, my mobile malfunctioned and I was using not-at-all-smartphone for a fortnight with no internet connectivity at new apartment. Phew ! Now, almost everything is settled, I am settled and have kind-of adapted to this new life !

I wish to write more about Mumbai, my experience meeting people, travelling in local trains, finding accommodation, food, roaming around the city, etc. Stay tuned for a post on it. Right now, its the Anita Borg experience, which is on my mind. I have been delaying it since September, but I guess next round of the scholarship is to be announced soon, Girls aspiring for this scholarship, you need not wait long :D 

DAIICT - A flashback...

Hey ! Merry Xmas....

While this year is coming to an end, and now when I look back, I can not only visualize the last year, but also the previous years, since I joined DAIICT for under-graduation. I checked-in the K101 room of Women HOR DAIICT on 15th July 2011 and checked out of it on 1st December 2014. For some reasons, I am planning to visit the college this week and the thought of going back evoked nostalgic memories of last 3.5 years. I don't know what this post will turn out to be. I am jotting down random thoughts that strike my mind. Let me put this post as a mere experience, which can reach out to a larger set of audience, with whom I didn't have an opportunity to interact with directly. Ideally, I wanted to write a dos and don'ts that I realized in last 4 years, but my friends has beautifully described it in his blog and my views are completely on the same page.

I am often questioned - ' why aren't you at IIT ? ' To your surprise, I didn't even appear for the JEE entrance exam and IIT was never an option for me. I had not even joined any coaching institute or crash course for AIEEE. But, my perseverance and luck landed me to 23.188582, 72.628658. DAIICT was one of the best university for typically - me. It is just 35 kms from my home, just a 45 minute travel time to reach my second home. Its the best combination of hostel and home life I could have ever imagined. With less than 2 washing bars used in 4 years, most of the weekends spent eating ghar-ka-khana, changing 5 mobile phones and lots of resolutions, here goes my under-graduation life. 

I think I made the most of my under-graduation. To sum up in few words, the journey of past 3.5 years was some great friends, some cordial relations with faculty and staff, some awesome projects (9+ with learnings and memories attached with each one), some research taste (2 papers published and still more in process), part of some great communities, co-founding some clubs and chapters (Women Who Code, Gujarat and ACM- DAIICT chapter), some awesome achievements, some life-time awards, memorable tech-fest (ifest) and cultural-fest(synapse), winning many competitions, some scholarships, attending meetups, participating in workshops, being finalists in hackathon, invited as speakers for several events, some awesome internships, some great offers, internationally representing my university, some mentoring and teaching assistance experience, working and using cutting edge technology like Google Glass and smart watch and a lot of free swags and merchandise. This all was parallel to a super awesome academic record with a CGPI of 9.06 on a 10 point scale with being university topper for 4 semesters. In short, a phenomenally high CGPI, with a balance of pretty much all domains of co and extra curricular activities. I cherish a lot of my 'firsts' in many things during the under-graduation course. The experience it gave me was impeccable. It was a combination of positive and negative experiences, but none of them were a waste. I learned a lot over time from the bad encounters.This span of 4 years completely changed me. Its hard to recognize Kesha, who just entered the university. DAIICT has kind of made me more confident, brave and courageous to take up any position and challenge that life puts forth.

Resource Centre (the library) was one of my most favorite places on-campus. I can't imagine a day without having a visit of RC ! Why ? Coz it gave me some peace time, some inspiration from fellow people, a lot of freedom to pursue my dreams, and to use up 70% of my free time efficiently, for myself. DAIICT has a great alumni, and friendly seniors. Its famous for 0% ragging. I remember myself being in anti-ragging committee and I hardly had to spend any time towards it. It has the combination of best students and best faculty.

DAIICT is a great university. I find it lenient in terms of academics, particularly lectures. If you don't like to attend lectures due to any reason -  find them boring, or too lazy to wake up at 8:30 am ( most of us were all-nighters), but you can somehow manage to get a good score by studying on your own from textbook or video lectures online, then nobody questions you here. Only the labs and assignments were mandatory components. Of-course, it differs from course-to-course, but this was the overall scenario. As a freshman (maybe sophomore also), I was a sincere student - attended each and every lecture, did assignments quite before deadlines, my notes circulated in class and was a topper. The freshman year was all used up exploring new horizons that I could experiment in the upcoming years. Sophomore was actually a turning point, where I felt the change from nerd to geek. This was the year where I started trying my hands on new tools/technologies amd contributing to open source. Junior year was the best balanced life and final year, which is half done now was all roaming and full of trips ! 

You may find other universities as flexible as this, but two of the main reasons of joining this was the unique course that it offers - ICT and placement scenario. My class had a bunch of 240 awesome students. So, this was helpful from placements point of view. I remember the orientation week, when mostly 70% of the time people were talking about placements, companies visiting the campus, average package, highest package etc. I see DAIICT as a plus in three ways: 1. There are a number of companies visiting campus every year. Though, there is a  scope of still more dream category companies to come, yet the pack that comes is appreciable. 2. The records and graphs have been positive and a constant increase. Every year, it performs better than its past year. Thanks to the placement cell! and 3. The most important one is - there are just 300 students competing for 3-4 positions that a niche company usually offers as opposed to 1500 students competing for 4-6 positions in universities with many domains and many branches. Your probability is 1% as opposed to 0.002% in other colleges. So, if you want some industrial exposure before masters or settle with a job, this university is for you! :D

Just a small piece of advice to future DAIICTians. Never have your two following lists empty - ToDo list and Bucket list. Be passionate about computing. Always try and explore new things. But, at the same time, don't try to grab everything you come across. Some events are just bullshit and a total waste of time, energy and efforts. Bullshit events for me can be important and interesting for you. Everyone is different. Analyze what is good for you. Step out of your comfort zone. Never run behind collecting certificates and things just for the sake to include in your resume. Don't get your strings attached with anyone. People patch-up and break-up easily (which I can't). I resolved to be single and independent when I entered university and I was able to live upto it with full expectations. Trust me, its possible. I tried and I have been successful. Although, I would appreciate one in twenty couples from my class, but those kind of true relationship rarely exists at this stage. Try to get in good company of friends. Make some good friends from seniors, Mtech, MScIt, PhDs. Have some people in surrounding who motivates you, supports you and helps you through your thick and thin. Learning and helping should be symbiotic. If you think its not happening, there is a pinch of envy or anything just cut the thread. Looking around, you will find many people like you, who are passionate and willing to learn and help.

When I entered the college, I had many role-models from seniors like Ishani Parekh, Aakriti Gupta, Megha Tak, Nikhil Marathe, Aditya Bhatt, Viranch Mehta, Anil Kishore, Siddharth Kothari, BSRK Aditya, Smit Sanghavi etc. It feels so great that I am leaving this university as a role model for many juniors. The best moment of recent semester is 12 am onwards, when juniors come to my room for some technical queries or just guidance and tell me how much I inspired and motivated them. I have got some fan list before leaving daiict ;) Summing up, DAIICT had been a beautiful journey, a journey from which I won't like to erase any episode and never regret any chapter. Finally, wishing me future endeavors. :')

Thank you mom, dad and bro for your support and unconditional love throughout. I love you !