Monthly Round Up

August has been an eventful month at IIT

There was a second convocation during my stay here - that of our senior batch - in the traditional Jubba-Pyjama attire. Eminent personalities like Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Kapil Sibal were at the occasion. As expected, it was a fun-filled fan-fair of academicians, students and parents.

The counterparts - the junior batch are into the IIT life now - bringing up some nostalgia of what we were an year ago. There was a freshers welcome event by the Kannada Sangha for the people joining from Karnataka this year too...

Placement activities are gaining pace. Companies are coming for presentations, resume uploading has begun, and few practice tests have gone by; and individual preparations are at varying levels. I am still in confusion on how to graft a good non-technical resume that would span atleast one page - with not many activities popping in on that stream.

As a subsidiary of the placement process was the Communication Proficiency assessment - of which I spoke long and boring in the last post itself...

One thing that has been particularly noticeable is the modesty of monsoons - there was almost never a day where it poured throughout - something that Mumbai is well known of. Just like the other parts of the country - rains have been less this year here too.

On a more personal level - my project seems to be making a steady slow progress; and I dare not to refer to it as research in any context. Also, there was a dip in my health graph - coinciding with last year; seems like its a follower of the season changes.

As the Teaching Assistant of Linear Optimization - I did some form of TAship in terms of invigilation and paper correction - solely based on the answer key. 

As far as all other recreational and time wasting activities such as movies and facebook are concerned - they are fine :D. Atleast twice a week I get the advice by friends on reducing such frivolous stuff and concentrate on the more important things!!

    

Communication Proficiency Assessment

In view of the upcoming placement activities - we had a communication assessment - basically a recorded 8 minute one-on-one interview which was later analyzed for various language skills. It basically acts as a self-examination of the way we formally communicate. This assessment was carried out by a company called ValueInc.  

Frankly I had started out with the title - 'The Two Dreaded Interview Questions'; but after getting the feedback for the above assessment, I had to change my mind. Besides, I had been planning to write this post from the day the test happened(which was relatively ages ago..) - but the results came in first.

But I have to succinctly mention about the two famous questions which I feel are never answerable to the best possible extent: "Tell me about yourself..?" and "What are the other activities you pursue in your free-time?". 

The former has a very less margin of error - its a make or break question to create your impression. And for the latter - "I tend to be on my laptop, online or otherwise" never seems to be a very convincing answer!!

Anyway - I drifted away from the topic - low scores in Coherency (one of the evaluation criteria) for that....

I was initially very skeptical about the effectiveness of an 8 minute dummy interview - more so because of the kind of questions like - Which was the recent movie you had been to? What was your favorite character in that? Tell me about your project, What do you not like about IIT etc. Turns out each question had its own purpose - even if it was asked randomly.

To my surprise however - the report-out is pretty accurate. It voices out many concerns that I have personally felt or others have indicated, like that of bad intonation, use of too simple language, creeping native sounds and more such subtle points. So it was not a waste of time or money going through the process - although the results might have been different for different circumstances and mindsets.

Delving into specifics - the test quantifies our communication based on 6 areas - Comprehension, Language Structure, Phraseology, Enunciation, Fluidity and Coherency. Google up those terms to know more - I already feel like I am exceeding the readability word limit and going into the boring length. Accompanying the results was a spider graph depicting the acceptable levels, the excellent levels, and where we stand.

So I got an overall proficiency level of "B"; which must mean around average. There were some low scores in the Enunciation and Fluidity sectors - with suggestions such as Watch English News and Online Lectures, Record yourself and evaluate, Think and Organize before you speak etc as generic remedies. 

There was also another assessment based on a questionnaire to decide our type of learning - mine turned out to be predominantly Visual, over Auditory and Kinaesthetic (surely they do use those high-funda words to make the report look good :D). The report also contains those small and large inadequacies that we have while communicating - Jarring, Slang,, Foghorns, incorrect syllable stress, fillers, false starts, dead pan intonation and many more.(Apparently, I have 26 of those!!)

And finally, here are the verbatim words of the assessment:

"Sumanth is able to convey thoughts and ideas albeit with some inaccuracies and inappropriacies. Sumanth prefers usage of simple structures and has difficulty framing complex ones. Sumanth may have difficulty understanding native pronunciation and sometimes not follow a well-paced conversation."

Sounds just about right.....

To end this really long narrative, here is the link to a funny video played during the report-out - one that depicts the disorder called "Knack" of an Engineer and its effects (from Dilbert Comics):

2 reasons to wake up early

Waking up early has not of late been something I have been punctual at. But that should not be stopping me from pondering about the topic. Be that as it may, there are only two reasons that prompt one to wake up early - Motivation and Fear.

Motivation is something that is innate and drives you to do things - and it can be a definite cause of waking up early. The want to accomplish something for the day can be a strong reason to wake up and start early - and follow a certain order of things. Gradually this becomes a practice. Oxymoronically; there can be a "forced" motivation during early days of our lives - the environment, our family etc can be agents driving us to wake up early...

Fear, on the other hand, induces a compulsion to do something, or imposes a situation that has to be dealt with by an early wakeup. This mode is perhaps more familiar to us from our school days right from when we were kids - Wake up, Wake up; or you shall miss the school bell and lose attendance!! One of my recent ignorance of this factor lead to almost a situation of me getting kicked out of a course for missing a class(well, it wouldn't have been so bad if the class was at 8.30 - this one was at 11.30!)

As we grow - the fear gets replaced by motivation. We grow more responsible of ourselves and our work; and one way of displaying that is to have a schedule that starts early and following it rigorously. Of course, you can relapse into the fear-mode like I have if you grow less responsible - by choice or by habit...

Disclaimers: 

1. The post solely considers those normal beings who have a fixed workcycle that runs in the day; unlike some odd IT jobs and research jobs where people work overnight and lead an inverted lifecycle...

2. I don't claim that waking up early works wonders - but it is a certainly good practice.

3. Well, considering that I am writing this post at 3 in the late night/early morning - I am most probably not going to follow what I have just said :D !!