When I look back in my career, there are certain decisions which I felt were bad after I took in short outlook, but they proved to be great in long run.
This story goes back to 1994, when I did not get a seat in Engineering (BE/BTech). Well if you know the charged atmosphere in 1994, it seemed to be a bad bad thing. Then one of my good friends Sameer told me that he is writing an aptitude test at APTECH, Nellore and that they will waive the fees based on what we score. We both promptly wrote the exam and got 50% discount in fees. After 50% discount also the fee is quite high - around 15,000 Rs. But we both were charmed by tie clad instructors, OHP class rooms, clean AC Lab (of course running MS-DOS 5). There used to be 3 hours per week classroom instruction and unlimited lab. We used lab extensively, often playing computer games. Then I got a chance to meet Vijay, one brilliant chap who introduced me to C Language. We both bought "Let Us C" by Yashwant Kanetkar. We did overnight reading of the entire book and within next week, we purchased "Pointers in C". Then Vijay infected me with another series of books including TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident)programs. That made me a mini hacker in Aptech, and was almost kicked out of the institute when I put a TSR in the autoexec.bat and it never allowed to boot. For all the pranks I played, I had terrible guilt. I was not thinking of any career.
After that I got a bit serious and joined JNTU College of Engineering, Anantapur for MCA(Master of Computer Applications) degree. It is big college with huge buildings and very scarce manpower. We are again forced to do our first practical lab exam on paper. Imagine the plight. But there again APTECH helped me. I continued the left out course from APTECH Nellore at APTECH Anantapur. There I could use lab until we got our Windows NT lab at our college (by Sem 4). Aptech Anantapur was less glamorous and instructors are just passed out engineering grads, waiting to enter IT industry. Almost everyone who can spell software used to get H1B for Y2K those days.
With that background when I joined IT industry in 1999, I found every single thing I studied helpful. Be it my MCA project at Syntel or the architecture I had to create. I dont claim it to be cutting edge design, but the fundamentals I learned about computers in 1994 were helping me do things fast. It was like a smooth ride to open any technology be it J2EE/ EJB or Threading or working as fill-in DBA in Informix, there seemed to be nothing that I found difficult.
Thanks Aptech and thanks Daddy and Mummy for paying such exuberant fees for the financial difficulties you had. It is never a waste of money.
I am not sure how Aptech or other institutes are doing these days.
8 comments:
Nice post from the heart Vamsi. Instead of resigning yourself to the situation, you took it head on and came out successful. It is very inspiring. Well done.
Agreed ! Most of the time, it seems the good old fundamentals come in more needy than anything that came along the way.
I still remember the teachings of an old geography teacher about life lessons, much more than lot of them who came after him.
Thank you Sukumar. You remain inspiration for many of us.
Thanjs Ranjit. Fundamentals are always handy to solve anything. After all a complex problem is a series (and parallels) of much simpler problems.
Yes vamsi.. my father used to never leave me during annual days.. he sent me to the nearest computer center right from 7th std, where i was taught BASICS.. and the next year, to another computer center, to learn about other things, like dos, windows, FOXPRO etc.
But, we were mostly interested in Games, particularly, DAVE and Prince..
The games were often deleted by the instructor and we used to find dos commands to store it secretly in some place..
But, all that found to be very useful, during my college days, where i could easily grasp C easily..
What a person learns in his childhood ends to be base of his entire life..
Btw, i did not learn about Hindutva till the end of my college life .. LOL ..
Senthil, thanks for your comments. I am glad your fundamentals helped accelerate learning C Language. Hindutva - No comments as we both know where we both stand on that philosophy.
Vamsi,
Do you have any info on the current status of Computer Centers..
The IT has advanced so fast, but it seems most of the Centres are unable to cope up.. (probably NIIT, APTECH etc may be exemption)..
I am asking this, bcoz i havent gone to any major training institutes..
I feel, the computer centers should diversify their course curriculum, like PHP, Ruby On Rails, and other Open source technologies which would be easy to implement in real life situations....
Hi Vamsi, I think you know me. Good to see you here. And am glad you made it big. I have done well for myself. Let us keep in touch.
My blog is http://idle-spotz.blogspot.com
Post a Comment