It’s always fun to meet new people. I met some seniors from college yesterday who had joined college the year I was born. It was interesting talking about the changes our college has gone through in the past two decades. And also how the seniors’ careers have shaped up over the years. Clearly, the IT boom changed the shape of on-campus placement opportunities as well as the natural choice of students for jobs. I believe it has changed some more in the past few years with product companies becoming more attractive to students than companies providing IT services. And if this article is anything to go by, the recession hasn’t had a very bad effect at all. It puts our college at the 4th position in the number of placements. Although a lot of my friends were pretty sure that these results were ‘as farzi as our college’, I do not go with them on this. We always used to get a lot of core engineering firms for recruitment as Jaipur is very close to Delhi. Also, we never used to have any banks coming over (at least in my time). IT firms usually used to recruit fewer students from our college compared to the other NITs too. So, the companies in sectors which got hit by the slowdown would not have been missed anyway.
Met some fellow startups on Saturday to discuss SEO and SEM. Although a lot of people showed interest when I first posted on the HydStartups Google group, not many people turned up. This was good in one way, as the discussion got a little deeper into specifics rather than just idle banter. Mamtha from InvestmentYogi and Rama Raju from Gap Miners also attended, got some useful tips from them. I’ve started implementing some of these already on TripNaksha too. I would have loved it if Syed (he writes a tech blog TNerd) could have come (he’s an ex-Googler who worked on beating SEO cheats), but he’s moved to the U.S.
Went to another of Evam‘s plays this saturday. This one was called ‘An idiot for dinner’ and was an adaptation of a french movie on which the hindi movie Bheja fry was based on. It was a lot of fun too. So, that’s how another busy weekend went by.
Last weekend, I’d met the T.I.E mentor assigned for my idea. The meeting was supposed to be for one hour but we got kept chatting for a little more time. My mentor had worked in the U.S earlier for more than two decades before coming back to India for good. He then ran a popular pub in Hitec city for some time and then sold his stake at a pretty good profit. Although I had a small 10 slide presentation ready, we really didn’t get past the third one. His review was that although the problem we identified exists and is a big one too, the solution we were offering might not really be enough. So, I have to work on it again now.

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