The Road to NCST!

After performing miserably in my engineering I was sure the post-engineering period is not going to be an easy one. Average Engineering students after their course completion sitting at home has become quite rare these days, if not unheard of. Companies are now flocking to colleges and now hiring in heaps!! There has not been a better period for getting jobs! So it was really depressing not to have even one offer letter in my pockets after my final exams. I must say that I was the one who prefered to abstain from appearing in any recruitment rounds. The reasons has been many.

Firstly, being an IT engineer it was depressing to see students from other streams getting into thoseIT biggies with fat pay packets. Information Technology and Computer Engineers are being treated at par with non-IT background students when we have slogged at least 3 years specialising in that area itself and they have one or at most two computer related subjects. The other major reason was that I was not entirely convinced with the level of knowledge I had at the end of those 3 years. I love programming a lot and was looking forward to having a programming enriched tenure during the engineering. But to my dismay, I saw the major concentration were in theoretical concepts and that dissapointed me. To worsen the situation, the standard of lecturers is not even worth mentioning. There has been some really knowledgeable persons though, like our Head Of the Department, Prof.G.V. Garje and Prof. Kulkarni. Neverthless the teaching environment was poor. Another major reason was that I personally wanted to do some real programming stuffs rather than doing maintainence work which is usually being undertaken by giants as TCS, Infosys, etc. I'll be much more happy doing some interesting or new with a lesser pay packet. I'm of the view that we should learn as much as possible in the early stages of our career rather than do stagnant stuffs and reuse the codes that have already been used umpteenth times before!
These reasons have never been good enough for most people and I'm sure many of you think I'm blabbering because I dint get a good job but its ones personal opinion which i dont intend to change.

I thought of preparing for the GRE for doing PG abroad and even got the relevant books from one of the friends who prepared for it. After about a week or so my interest vanished as a friend jokingly commented that the way we are doing our engineering we are most likely to end up as worst performing students in any PG course abroad. I dont know why but this thought stuck me and I quit. I was feeling very heart-broken as I dint want to end up in any 'donkey work' job which was the only option that seemed to me. Later I thought of doing MBA so I even joined a study centre for its preparation. But I failed to score enough to get into any A category B-school so I dropped my plans. I took comfort in the thought that we should rather have some experience before going for Management courses.

My friends Amit & Pankaj had taken admission in NCST 2006-07 batch and I got to know about it from them only. Before that I never even heard about it. Amit was in constant touch with throughout his course and he and even Pankaj encouraged me to join it too. I was quite apprehensive about it but Pankaj insisted that it'll suit me most as the whole course is very practical oriented. Later one of my classmates,a good friend too, Deepak said even he is interested to this course so we decided to appear for the exam. We'd the exams on 21st Jan and I'd almost forgotten about when I got the results on 9th March. After that it seemed almost certain that I'll join it. Still I always pestered the two 'seniors' regularly with all sorts of irrelevant questions and during one such interogeration I got to know about the great Parikshak.

I joined the course on the scheduled 6th August and its been 14 days since that. The time spent till now have been quite tough but enjoyable. I met some very interesting and cool people here and I'm sure they'll help in making the time here a lot less stressful. I just wish the ghost of MGPAs and MGPTs dont affect their mental status much!!