Writing Talent (Not the real, but resume one)

If you're serious about making resume, well, don't be. In case you've done something in your last four years, your pages would be overflowing, if you haven't, well start getting creative.

Core companies would look at your academics, Finance companies would look at your CG along with your aptitude test full of MAL250 questions (probability) - so that primarily leaves consults and other such analytic firms who will actually do justice by investing time in reading through your creative writing paper.

For making your CV, I don't think you need to know anything beyond this blog post by Sohil Bhagat:

http://sohil-bhagat.blogspot.com/2010/02/resume-ing-blogging.html

In case you're still unsatiated by his direct methods try the little roundabout post by Abhimanyu Kothari to get a hang of essentially the same thing:

http://undercurrents-of-the-soul.blogspot.com/2009/09/how-to-make-good-resume-part-1.html

Part 2 and Part 3 of the same can be found on his blog, once you're there.

Now, if you are still scratching your head, stamping your feet, and picking your nose in sheer indignation of the simplicity of it all - allow me to do my bit to increase the mayhem a notch further - here's my creative writing class (*applaud*) but only after an essentially obvious disclaimer -

"Each person has his own way of being creative. Divergent views are accepted as comments"

What is management consulting?

This picture, taken from Wikipedia has nothing to do with the post

I don't have a complete and clear idea yet, but so far I've been able to understand that the main value add of high end management-consulting are as such 3 things:

Eye to Eye

Heard of 'Body Language' anytime? Atleast all those people who have prepared for an interview must have! It's difficult to maintain eye contact with the interviewer while processing all the questions they keep throwing at you (as processing facial expressions requires a lot of brain effort!)

Anyways. I am not talking about that. Here's what I am talking about:

So this other day I was walking with my friends in Connaught Place (CP). Two of us had fallen in steps behind the other two, when suddenly a nice lady walked past me. Out of nowhere I decided to do an experiment. I called one of the two people walking in front of us; our eyes met and suddenly I directed my eye to the lady in between us two. Almost as if my eyes controlled his motor neurons - he looked where my eyes were pointing: right into the face of a total (beautiful) stranger at a distance of ...

This event, in the chill of Delhi winters, rekindled my interest in this field. Here are some good references to get you started:

1. Pauk Ekman - Emotions Revealed (Awesome book, thanks to my Prof. RBN!)
2. Malcom Gladwell - Blink (thanks to my birthday gift by chemical engineer)
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_contact
4. http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm

Please do refer to me if there are any other good books you've read on this subject

I wrote a small term paper (with Menu) last year on Non Verbal Communication. As novice as I might be - let me know if you need a copy :)

Here's a part from the paper which I particularly like:

Some aspects of facial expressions are hard to fake, for e.g. the raised inner corners of eyebrows which come with real sadness (Ref: Emotions Revealed, Paul Ekman)

AIIMS and IIT: Random Coversation

Central Lawn of AIIMS

Background Info: AIIMS is considered as one of the most prestigious medical colleges in India. Out of 100,000 students who sit for its entrance exam (MBBS): 77 get selected making it THE hardest college to get into, in the entire WORLD. Full Info at Wiki. Recently, I was in AIIMS catching up with one of my friends there. His room was to die for, especially in the scorching Delhi heat (for those of you who don't know - every student living in AIIMS gets an AC in his/her room!) After the initial jubilation of meeting after several years was over, we got down to talking.

TND: Top Notch Doc
TNE: Top Notch Engg. (ha!)

TND: "If you take the brand AIIMS away and compare it with any other medical college - there would be hardly any difference between the two..."

TNE: "That is surely becoming true even for the IITs"

TND: "Initially AIIMS was supposed to be a research institution, possibly restricted only for postgraduate studies; but with growing pressure - you can see the AIIMS of today."

TNE: "That is, as far as I know, true even for the IITs.What is the structure of AIIMS?"

TND: "There are students - we, who until their final year concentrate mostly on theory and observing patients. In our final year we have do an intern - right here - in AIIMS, where we treat patients in OPD. Then there are residents who are the busiest people around here - they treat patients, they do research and they help us. Then there is faculty who after years and years of such tough life like to play it a little cool. But then they have a lot of higher end stuff to do..."

TNE: "We regularly hear that one has to wait infinitely long before he/she gets treated at AIIMS. What is the actual story?"

TND: "I think the pressure on AIIMS is just too much. The line for OPD starts from 6:30 AM in the morning. The window finally opens at 8:30 - and you get cards issued for the morning shift till 10 AM. Then you wait for 2-3-4 hours for your turn before the doctor sees you. If you are lucky you are in the doc's room for about 5 mins. Each resident looks at approx 100 patients in a 4 hour morning shift. With that quantity - quality ought to go down. Not in terms of how we treat patients but in how much research are we able to produce..."

TNE (picking up a book on Dermatology and STDs): "You know, I have always been in awe of doctors - I wonder why people always forget medical schools when they talk about the India of 21st century; why do they always concentrate on IITs or IIMs..."

TND: "You surely don't want to read that book before going to Dinner"

TNE (Opens the book, flips through it): "Eeekkkkkkkk"

TNE (After catching his breath again): "I am changing the topic rather abruptly, but I always had this doubt - Do people who come from reserved quote make equally good doctors?"

TND: "Look, not all people who come from general quota become good doctors - and similarly all people who come from reserved category do not necessarily make bad doctors. The ratio might be slightly skewed but then again - the bias you might have has no standing"

TNE: "Hmm. So even here, are there people who study just before exams, or do you guys have to be very regular?"

TND: "Well there exist both kinds of people - many of them study just before exams and others study throughout the year. You cannot check everything a person knows during exam. And what would be asked in an exam can always be predicted. So people who study throughout the year might not have a great edge over others in exams, but then they definitely make better doctors 10 years down the line"

TNE: "Man, that is so true. So what after MBBS?"

TND: "Post Doc"

TNE: "India?"

TND: "Yups"

TNE: "Do people go out?"

TND: "Earlier 30% people used to go out, now it has come down to 10-15%"

TNE (coming out from a deep thought): "You say your curriculum is theory based and does not check the practical knowledge one might have - I mean how can that be possible: You people are doctors for god's sake. You would actually treat patients one day. You are not phony people like us..."

TND: "When I said about our curriculum being all theory, I believe I meant only the written exams stuff and nothing else. We do have a practical aspect (as you said we are doctors here and do treat patients). We have morning postings in the Wards/OPD from 9:30 AM to 1 PM 5 days a week and we learn about patient care from the residents and faculty. When I said that the residents have it rough I did not mean that the Faculty does nothing. They also teach us but they are also very busy in patient care, research projects, conferences and writing scientific papers. We also have regular assessments of our practical skills in the form of ward leaving assessments (Practical exams and viva-voce at the end of our posting in each department) and the marks count towards our final exams.So you need not worry. But definitely things can be improved - everyone knows that they can be improved but no one does anything to change them..."

TNE: "Man, the story is exactly the same everywhere"

TND: "Infact, our performance throughout MBBS plays no role in the college we get for the post doc; it depends only on the marks we get in the exam for post doc."

TNE: "Ah that sounds a little arbitrary"

TND: "No actually, I think we are being too critical about the system just because we have got everything right. Like what you study here in 5.5 years is definitely of great use when you write the post doc exam, the only thing is: there is no direct co-relation between the two..."

TNE: "Yups. AIIMS has got to be one of the best places you can do your medical schooling from, but I guess the point we are making is - despite of that we should not become callous and should continue improving. Everyday...

~~~

Afterthoughts

We engineers lead a fairly simple life. So there should be absolutely no reason why should we sit back and just observe the sorry state of affairs. As far as Doctors are concerned - I guess, they do an extremely difficult job: afterall, what can be more difficult than dealing with life, and death - everyday...

~~~

Some other interesting bits of conversation

TNE: "I've been thinking since last 1 hour - What does OPD stand for"
TND: "Out Patient Department"
TNE: "That is so counter-intuitive!"

TNE: "Are there girls in AIIMS"
TND: "1:5. And all good ones get taken early"
TNE: "We live 1:10 - Imagine our plight!"

~~~

I put his Rs 9000/- Stethoscope to my ear and I cannot but tell you the child like delight I felt. It was the first time I heard my own heart beat. Hearing the beat of life literally gave me shivers.

PS: Is there some law which says: if you hear your own heart beat, it becomes faster?

Doc chose to answer this rhetorical question: The heartbeat does get faster and skips a few beats if you listen to it consciously.

~~~

TNE: "How are your Profs?"
TND: "Oh they are very difficult"
TNE: "Difficult!"
TND: "Ah - sorry - Profs is short form for our exams called professionals"THE : ":O"

~~~ The End~~~

Post Blogging Discussions: Thanks to the friend for painfully going through the entire thing and helping me correct the facts. I had got some of them terribly wrong. Apologies. I guess responsible journalism is difficult ~

The New Look Blogger

Just go to http://draft.blogger.com/home

And then Click on Layout

And then on Template Designer

This thing is really cool. You can play around with background images, sizes ed infinitum

Also explore editing the blog in this new look blogger. Uploading images is like really awesome :)

Blogger has become like Wordpress...

IIM Ahemdabad

Not me - it's Gujju who went all 'suited up' for his 'IIMA' interview :) Gujju is finally going to the Gujju land. Life has come a full circle :) Read the entire interview on his blog (quite interesting)

http://ithinkshuffled.blogspot.com/2010/03/iim-ahmedabad-interview.html

Some things in IT

Have you used Java?

Have you heard of Spring?

No!

Well, than hear it Now!

Spring is the 'new guy on the block'. This new guy is open source as well.

What do you do in Java to create a new object of Class Nishant?
Write something like - Nishant nishant = new Nishant();
Well, with Spring, gone are those days.

Now you don't need to hardcode things. They are picked up, and linked to your code at runtime. Because of that, you don't need to rebuild (recompile) your code for every change you make.

Now you define these objects outside your java code, in an xml file. It is called configuration file. I am not getting into the details of it all, because there is enough of it on net.

My intention is to just make you aware that there is something called Spring.

For small course projects, you may not feel its importance but you must try to seek it out if your project is more than 1000 lines and/or have database calls as a part of it.

Knowing how to write Hello World in Java is sufficient to start with Spring, but you will like Spring more, if you have worked a lot in Java.

The best book on it is 'Spring in Action'. You will understand the whole of Spring, if you read this book. The next best place to learn more about it would be videos on You Tube. The articles on net; I am sure; will always get you confused.

To quote from the book, 'Spring makes it possible to use plain-vanilla JavaBeans to achieve things that were previously only possible with EJBs. However, Spring’s usefulness isn’t limited to server-side development. Any Java application can benefit from Spring in terms of simplicity, testability, and loose coupling.'

I will talk in details about 'Removing Try Catch blocks using Spring AOP' in separate blog. There I will give all the code level details.

Anyways, was knowing about this Spring guy fun?

I hope it was.

As always,
Nishant

PS: Take my advice, if you code in Java, go and look about it.