Friday, May 29, 2009

M. Tech. Projects

Long ago, an M.Tech curriculum consisted of 3 Semesters. Two of them involved course work and the last one involved working in an industry environment.

Even the B. Tech. programme involved summer projects in the second and the third year.

Over the years the student community has grown exponentially. The companies find it hard to accommodate students in such large numbers as useful projects in such large numbers is a problem. Moreover, the students complain about lack of seriousness of the company for the summer project.

The other option is to work with an project with a research bend. Working with literature, addressing a problem of current interest would help a student to work towards Ph.D.

It is moot point to consider: whether a post-graduate student (especially a Computer Science Student) is doing justice to his education by working with an project in a company or working with an academic project.

If one wonders what can come out of an M.Tech. Project, consider Google's page rank technology which was an MS project.

My feeling is that in the absence of a worthwhile project from the industry, a project of academic nature will add a lot more value to the students.

Monday, May 18, 2009

A New Government in Place

Today, the sensex jumped 2000 points to hit the circuit breaker in Bombay. This was exuberance exhibited by the market to the new government about to be installed in Delhi.

Last election around the same time, the sesex shed about 25% or 1500 points to the news of the government being elected.

It is good news for everyone.

A good stock market improves consumer confidence and consumer spending. This helps the companies to sell more, raise more funds, and generally do good business. Good business helps IT companies to sell their services. That results in a booming market for IT professionals. That is good news.

However, this election is remarkable in many ways. The EVMs are a huge success. The results were declared in about half a days time. In the past, it used to take days for declaring the results. Pronnoy Roy used to excel the analysing the data slowly. The new media such as Internet, SMS, Voice mails were are used extensively by the parties. However, BJP which used it more extensively than any other party had to bite dust. It just shows that the message is more important than the medium. In this elections, many old guards lost. Perhaps the citizens are asking for a young leadership.

I hope that the exuberance spreads to other parts of the society and economy and the cheers come back to the millions.