From an old Bitsian, some microGyaan!

VVR · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 5:00 pm Post subject:

Shalini,

Thanks for educating me on this. I am still learning the modern BITS ID nomenclature and just when I think I have it figured out I come across an ID with a letter that is not on the official BTS explanation (such as a "T" i believe)! I suppose this comes with the territory , where you have so much choice.

The_Shadow · BITSian - Moderator Status: Offline Posts: 4195

I should change that.The ID numbers for all campuses have been unified. My new ID is just like the 1 at Pilani , except with a "G" attached at the end.

So , now its "2006B2A3655G" Cool

VVR · Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 5:11 pm Post subject:

That is more in line with what I saw on the official BITS web site.

VVR · Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 10:00 pm Post subject:

Here is my microGyaan for the day (I should probably downgrade my useless pieces of trivia to the nanoGyaan level)

I am beginning to see an outbreak of PAS (Palacement Anxiety Syndrome) on this forum (and perhaps all similar fora on the web) and any day it could become a pandemic what with the dire economic situation prevailing in the developed world. I can empathize with the students to some extent but it worries me when I see that freshers about to enter college are already afflicted with this condition.

In our days we did JIT (Just In Time) worrying i.e. wake upto the realities of placement somewhere around the late 8th to mid 9th semesters. Today the worrying seems to start in the 1st semester. Paradoxically, in our days jobs were hard to come by even for IIT and BITS grads whereas jobs are plentiful in India even with the recession on.

There is also a lot of handwringing about placements through on-campus interviews. People seem to be disappointed that in the X semester of YYYY year, the on-campus placement was only 70% or whatever. For reference my graduating class in '71 probably had <25% campus placements. Now, do not get me wrong -- I am thrilled to bits that BITS has very high on-campus placement numbers. But it is important to remember that there is world out there made up of smaller companies (that BITS will not entertain on campus) that are looking for people. So, there is life beyond campus interviews. Also, it should be noted that many grads are not in the employment market since they will pursue further studies or start their own ventures (this is the scenario that I keep praying for)

Similarly, there is life beyond Yahoo, Google, Cisco, Microsoft, HP and the like. I keep seeing stats about these big guys. Have you folks considered small and medium enterprises as potential employers? A little anecdote here -- In 1992 Cisco was a $350Million company which even in those days would have put it in the medium-sized bracket. This attitude of working only for the big guys would have you lining up at the doorsteps of behemoths like , HP, IBM, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak, McDonnel Douglas, Digital Equipment, AT&T etc. and ignore companies like Cisco.

How many of you know what happened to Cisco since 1993? How many of you know what is happening to GM, Ford and Chrysler today? How many of you have even heard of Digital, Eastman Kodak, McDonnel Douglas? In 1993, If you were offered a job in Cisco as well as one at Digital which one would you have chosen?

What I am trying to say is this -- choosing the "safe bet" is NOT a slam dunk as they say in the US. (You might have to google "slam dunk"!)

By the way, I have a couple of personal anecdotes about Cisco in 1993 and Google in 2001. Will chronicle them separately.

VVR · Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 10:49 pm Post subject:

Here are the two anecdotes that I mentioned in the previous post.

I think the year was 2000. I ran into a young Stanford Business School MBA classmate of my niece in California. They had both just graduated and were about to start their first jobs. This young lady told me that she will be joining Google and that she would be among the first 50 employees there. I knew a little bit about them since I had just been introduced to their search engine. Afterwards, I remember having a conversation with my niece about the choice her friend had made rejecting offers from big name companies in favor of an unknown startup. The rest as they say is history.

Incidentally my niece turned down an offer from McKinsey's San Francisco office (the most coveted those days) in favor of a small company called Loudcloud started by the man (Marc Andreessen) who wrote the code for the first web browser (Mosaic) which later on became known as Netscape.

The second anecdote. The year was 1993 and I had quit HP to start my own business planning and market research consulting practice. I was asked by HP to investigate a new product idea and I decide to talk to engineering managers and directors of large and medium sized companies to get their views on this idea. The emphasis was clearly going to be on the large companies. As an afterthought I also made a list of medium sized companies to talk to and a company called Cisco barely made the cut.

In the focus group discussions that I hosted in Sunnyvale, CA there was a certain Mr. Jain (I am almost certain his first name was Prem), an engineering director with Cisco. I remember him because he was quite articulate and the rest of the group seemed to respect him very much. Even today, I wonder if it was the same Prem Jain that sold his startup to Cisco, not once but twice (most recently last year) and made 100s of millions in the process. He had retired from Cisco as a Senior VP in 2005 and now with the latest sale is back again at Cisco as a senior VP!

Prem Jain is a 1973 grad of BITS pilani (2 years junior to me, not sure if I had ragged him but cannot say I knew him)! Incidentally, there is another Senior VP in a very pivotal job at Cisco, a fellow by the name of Pankaj Patel, another BITS Pilani grad.

rash · Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 5:55 pm Post subject:

WOHA!

I should've dropped by this post before. That's some amazing stuff!

I had always heard about BITSians being nearly everywhere you go, and I was lucky to experience it myself during my ongoing PS-I at Central Food Technological Resarch Intitute, Mysore (Part of CSIR). Right next to my room, there's a BITS alumni (Class of 76 I think). It was amazing to meet him, and I regularly spend sometime with him and talk about random topics.

vishrutshukla · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 4:28 pm Post subject:

VVR sir,

___/|\___ Thanks for enlightening all of us here!
@rash - Wholely gree with every word of yours.

Aspirants should red this one nd break the jinx.

~Vishrut

VVR · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 7:11 pm Post subject:

And now for some Gyaan that needs to be directed towards me.

This query of mine got buried deep in the bowels of another thread, so here is another try at gaining some insights.

I was doing some rudimentary statistical analyses based on the raw data at the top of this thread and some questions come to mind:

>400 appears to be an incredible score just going by where the distribution curve peaks -- it almost looks like a 6-sigma situation if you consider the entire population that took the BITSAT this year.

I am curious -- there are 54 candidates who have scored more than 400. From your past experience, how many of these do you think will accept an offer from one of the BITS campuses? What is the highest BITSAT score for a current Bitsian that you have heard about either directly or through folklore?

More importantly, can you draw a correlation between the BITSAT scores to the candidates' performance in BITS? I know a statistically significant study can only done by BITS administrators but I am looking for anecdotal info. I had read somewhere that the IIT JEE scores/rank do NOT correlate very well to performance at the IITs aggregated over 4 years.

What I am thinking is this --- a 3-hour exam like BITSAT (or SAT or GRE) should not be the sole determinant of suitability of a candidate. In the US, SAT I and SAT II are used along with school grades, extra curricular activities, teacher recommendations, personal essay as a complete package. What happens if you have an asthma attack on the day of your BITSAT (like what happened to me in 1966 when I was to sit for the IIT exam) and cannot perform to your full ability?

Love to hear back from some current and recently graduated Bitsians on this.

chetan_tg · BITSian - Pro Status: Offline Posts: 272 Location: Goa

VVR · Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 8:22 pm Post subject:

Thanks Chetan,

Interesting.

The lowest score for an admitted candidate went from 283 in 2006 to 230 in 2008. Hmmm.