Thanks APTECH

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.