CDAC: My Second Home (Part Four)
Fruitful Fortnight: Soft Skills
We
had to be in formals and before time for the lectures. For girls, it was not a
big deal. But boys had to go shopping for formal shirts, pants and boots. On 23rd
Jan, the first day of module; everyone was looking descent and professional in
formals. The lecture was conducted by Srinivas Rao Sir. Firstly, he briefed
on the whole module and then took a session on Communication Skills. End of the
session, there was a surprise test (even in Post Graduation!!!). I remember one
question from the test. We had to explain the meaning of words and frame a
sentence. There were 30 words. Take this
test and find what your score is:
Incisive Balmy Discrepancy Tacit Rhetoric
Chortle Intractable Pragmatic Lethargy Odious
Mollify Immutable Contrary Clandestine Masticate
Macabre Topography Spurious Tryst Recoil
Hypothesis Diligence Culpable Fictitious Idiosyncrasy
Mellifluous Dearth Ombudsman Pellagra Immobile
Then
we had a lecture on Team Building (teams were made on the spot) and
Entrepreneurship by Prakash Pimple
Sir. On 25th Jan post lunch, we had Extempore and Group Discussions
by Mercy Ma’am. I got the topic:
Mobiles should be banned in college. The topics were a mix of all subjects:
Dress code (Namrata), Cycle (Neha), Haste makes waste (Madhur), Newspaper
(Nitin), One child policy (Atul), etc. Niket got the topic: Tough situation in
life. Had it been tough situation in CDAC, it would be that one X in most of
his MGPAs!! Abhishek Girkar got the
topic: Walking/Jogging. Anyways, he used to take long walks in the night with
his tab.
We
used to have lectures by Srinivas Sir and Prakash Sir in the morning which
included Stress Management, Campus to Corporate and Barriers to effective
communication, etc. Post lunch there used to be activity sessions. On 27th
Jan, we had to present on the question: Tell me something about yourself for 5
minutes. It was like going back to kinder garden and saying: MYSELF. It was
easier then, not now. Akshay Sir and Shiva
Chaturvedi were to evaluate us. They pointed out many mistakes and also
gave tips and suggestions. So we were getting prepared for the interviews also.
The
activity sessions were not only confined to the lecture room. We had an outdoor
activity also. On 30th Jan, we had to solve the Transportation
problem given by Akshay Sir. It is a team building activity where each
participant gets one short length of half pipe and the group must work together
to deliver a marble down the pipes from start point to finishing point. In our
case, the activity was slightly modified. In place of marble, we had the TT
balls. We were given 15 minutes. For each round we complete, the amount of Rs.
150000 would be added to our bucket. The cost of one pipe was Rs. 1000. We had
to decide on the number of pipes we require for the activity. We had to shell
out money for ground use and salary per member. Every mistake/error during the
transportation would incur a loss of Rs. 3000. So in short this activity
requires a high level of communication and team work. We had to complete
maximum rounds with minimum errors within those 15 minutes. We were divided
into three groups. My group won the activity by making a profit of Rs. 343000.
We made 10 successful rounds with only 46 errors using five pipes. Cheers to
the efforts of my team members (Ranjith, Neha, Naveen, Abhijit, Chandu (Chandra Kumar Yadav), Nitin and me).
On
31st Jan, we had Presentation Evaluations. The topics were given just a day
prior; but we all managed to complete the ppts. New topics like Grid Computing
and Cloud Computing were presented. My group chose the topic: Time Management.
We talked a lot on it; eventually audience gave the expression 'we had enough!’
Even Srinivas Sir cancelled the session on Time Management. On 1st Feb, we had
a session on 'Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving your childhood dreams'.
It was indeed an inspiring video. We created our Personal Blogs on blogger.com;
there were other options also like wordpress.com and tumblr.com. We always
write the first 'Hello World' program
while beginning any programming language. Here we had 'My First Post'. We customized the layouts and posted what we
learnt from Randy Pausch (this was an assignment). We were unique, so were our
blogs; but the content of the assignment was common. We cannot help restricting
the Ctrl C and Ctrl P concept.
We
had a guest lecture from Faisal Farooqui, the founder of Mouthshut.com. A lot
was discussed on entrepreneurship. It also included the SWITCH, now WITCH
companies. We had a session on Table manners and etiquettes by Saroj
Ma’am, our Canteen Head. She gave information on everything; from sitting on
the table to leaving the table, seating arrangements, types of menus, meal
management, etc. The most important things: how to hold the fork and knife, how
to eat, how to drink soup, etc. We promised to follow the same that day
onwards.
On
2nd Feb, we had lecture on the most important topic, Interviews. The
Resume and Cover letter formats were shared and all were damn serious into this
activity. Shekhar Sir took a session on Interview techniques. Johnson Sir took all the management
topics like Project Management, Human Resource Management, Interpersonal
skills, Conflict Management, Personal Effectiveness, etc. It included team
activities like a scenario was given to us and we had to find solutions to it.
On
6th Feb, we had Mock Interviews. The look and feel was like that of
real ones. There were two panels and students were divided into two batches. I
was in the second panel wherein the Interviewers were Prakash Sir and Madhavi
Ma’am. On 7th Feb, we got feedback for the same. The important
points were:
- Be prepared as if the next person to go in is you; and yes always carry a pen with you.
- Do not get over-excited when you know the answers and panic when you do not know the answers.
The
module was complete. Each day was fruitful, building us for the Placements.
Read next : CDAC: My Second Home (Part Five)
Read next : CDAC: My Second Home (Part Five)
Comments
Post a Comment