Forem: Anisha2001

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni Season II: Episode 6- Bringing an Idea to Life

Anisha2001 — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 18:36:00 +0000

The SPECTRUM club is one of the core technical societies of the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneshwar founded in 2015 by Mr.Bikram Keshari Panda(2015 graduate), scrutinizing on the sole motive of Instrumentation and Electronics Engineering branch having a club of its own.

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The first season of the series served as a torch bearer for the students to connect with their seniors contributing in both their personal and professional development. And we have continued to strengthen the bond even further with the Second Series.

The sixth episode of Season 2 was first hosted on the 20th of February, 2022 and the speaker for the evening was Mr. Ramakanta Sahu.

Mr. Ramakanta Sahu is a pass out of the 2010 batch from Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, CET-B. He has completed his Master’s in Business Administrations from IIM Bangalore, with a specialisation in Strategy and Finance. He is also the Co-founder at Stealth Start-up. He has also worked as Strategy Consultant at Monitor Deloitte. He has had a diverse experience in the field of Strategy and management for more than 10 years. Currently, he is positioned at PayPal as a member of Product Management and Strategy division.

He started out with briefly introducing himself, talking about his life and switched over to his professional career. He walked us through his professional life touching up on all the experiences that he has had while working in various companies at various positions. He talked to us about the various career opportunities in Product Management.

Mentioning the role, he went on to explain product management in the simplest terms possible, the first point being that one is not the manager of anyone. Product managers get maximum collaborations from engineers and designers working together in developing a product and they sit between multiple areas of the company acting as a communicator. Product Management is the intersection of three aspects - UI/UX, Technology and Business.

According to him, the engineers focus on hard technical challenges. Product managers primarily distil all the noise in the data in terms of what’s needed and what’s not. They look at matrices to decide what to do next and the things that are important, prioritizing the customers.

He moved on to the next important thing of what a product really is and talked about the various roles of product managers working in such products. He then threw some light on the lifecycle of Product Management, bucketed into five areas. Understanding User needs to solve the market problem and understand what the competitors are doing after having keen knowledge of the product developed. Developing product strategy is essentially understanding the tech feasibility and the product definition with the key stakeholders. Building and developing a roadmap by understanding backlogs and prioritizing the products. Iterative development is essentially where feature product is designed, developed and tested in repeated cycles. Launching and scaling the product is a marketing aspect which is the final step.

After elucidating the whole job aspect of product management, he talked about the roadmap to being a product manager. He advised to always think from customer’s standpoint as that is the most important aspect there is while developing a product. To have a habit of writing is important for it can clear vision of the people involved in the product. Meeting and communicating with other managers provides a plethora of new ideas and opportunities to be worked upon. Lastly, reading a lot of books to increase knowledge on the subject of project management is a must.

He concluded the session by providing some enriching thoughts that would help us in all our endeavors, no matter what we choose to pursue. Those are:

The conference was followed by an interactive Q n A with students asking questions ranging from various aspects of his life to education to career opportunities.

It was an honor to have interacted with him. We wish him all the best for all his future endeavors!

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni Season II: Episode 5- Transitioning from Engineering to Non-engineering fields

Anisha2001 — Thu, 23 Dec 2021 18:34:36 +0000

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The fifth episode of Season 2 was hosted on the 28th of November, 2021 and the speaker for the evening was Mrs. Ashpruha Pujari.

Mrs. Ashpruha Pujari graduated from CET Civil Engineering in 2004 and later got an MBA from Indiana University, USA double majoring in Finance and Supply Chain. Her professional life spans working across industries in Fortune 500 companies like Infosys, Ernst & Young and Tesla. She is currently at Meta (formerly Facebook) where she manages a lot of their Strategic Suppliers across the Globe. She has worked as a Software Engineer, a Management Consultant and a Supply Chain professional.

Mrs. Pujari started off with giving a glimpse of her life as a student by showing a few pictures of her college. She discussed about the confusion faced by students regarding placements which she herself had also faced during her final year. She talked about her journey as a software engineer which played a critical role in her life before MBA which helped her learn many skill-sets helping her in transition to a non-engineering field.

She briefed us about her MBA life with her moving to another country. Working with wide variety of people played a crucial role for her as it opens up mind, boosts confidence and enhances one’s perspective. It gave her an exposure to different lifestyle and economy present there. She summed up MBA as teaching one “How to walk the walk and talk the talk”. It helped in to refining oneself and and presenting being confident to converse about anything and everything, thus forming a great skill-set. Putting yourself under stress-test helps in adding value to your assets.

She walked us through her professional career in Ernst & Young and Tesla, providing a detailed analysis of both the companies. She advised us to always be mindful of where we work as “Its’ not just a company finding you are a good fit, it’s also about you finding whether they are a good fit, i.e., their company and culture.”

She put stress on networking as an important aspect in today’s world. Networking is all about seeking knowledge of work culture of a particular company to understand the ethics here. Polishing your image is also very important as it helps in landing one’s dream job and always having an advantage at hand.

Lastly, She encouraged us to always be on the run thinking about what we want to do next, what we want to achieve next.

The conference was followed by an interactive Q n A with students asking questions ranging from her decision to transition to a non-engineering field to all the pros and cons faced by her.

One of the attendees, Anup Paikray asked about her
How to cope up with the stress in the industry
to which she replied:
“To always stay on top of your game and always know what’s in your control so that you can better it even further. To keep on polishing your skill-set and always have a plan to move forward and not to bother with what one can’t do anything about.”

It was an honor to have interacted with her. We wish her all the best for all her future endeavors!

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni Season II: Episode 3-Progressive Advancement in Data and Analytics

Anisha2001 — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 08:15:11 +0000

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The third episode of Season 2 was hosted on the 24th of October, 2021 and the speaker for the evening was Mr. Siddhant Maharana.

Mr. Siddhant Maharana pursued his Bachelors in Technology in Instrumentation and Electronics Engineering from the year 2009 to 2013 in CET. He is currently working as Data Scientist at Cardlytics with 7 years of professional experience in data analytics, statistical modelling, machine learning and A/B testing. He has formerly worked as a Product Analyst at TATA 1mg and Assistant Systems Engineer in TATA Consultancy Services. He specializes in Data Mining, Machine Learning & Deep Learning.

He started off with talking about his memories in college. After college, he wanted to explore other options before joining a stable company and so was more interested to work in start-ups. He then switched to working as Assistant Systems Engineer and then Product Analyst gaining experience before pursuing his Masters.

His work kind of introduced him to the essence of data and analytics out in the world which further encouraged him in diving deeper into it. He stated that “One has to really understand the business and the economics of the business to really comprehend of whether it’s the right direction.” Being involved in marketing analytics and discovering the challenges faced, he decided on understanding and learning more of the data and mathematics to improve his skill-set. This led him to shift to USA to pursue Masters in Data Analytics. After 2 years of rigorous studies, he is started working as a Data Scientist.

Continuing, he further touched upon the topic of what actually is expected of Data Scientist in the current industry. He explained it as solving business problems in various sectors whether in marketing or finance or production saying that they are all interconnected. The data scientists understand and frame the problems and proceed to find a solution and remove assumption and biases. The need to have a proper hypothesis to backup your data and to understand your end-users serves as key to a data scientist.

It be bucketed to 3 different aspects. The hacking skills- to write a good logic to decipher the data which require programming skills. Secondly, the mathematical skills where all the assumptions being removed makes the solution more robust and helps in figuring the solution. Thirdly, substantive experience which elaborates about how to package the solution that it aligns with the business. The solution ought to have some relevancy and measurability which is very important.

He proceeded further with providing a list of different learning materials and skill sets for students to begin their journey to success in Data Science.

He concluded with reminding students to use their life skills to come up whenever they bump into problems and challenges. He encouraged us to “Be realistic, always take risks and push ourselves further.”

The conference was followed by an interactive Q n A with students asking questions ranging from his decision to pursue Masters to his current experience as a data scientist to which he cleared all the queries with ease.

One of the attendees named Abraar Ahmad Khan asked about
How the work in industry for data science is different from the ones we do in college level to which he replied :
The knowledge provided in college are theoretical tools and techniques to understand and manipulate the data but in industry, we are exposed to real life business problems where that knowledge is used.

It soon changed into a chit-chat session with him conversing with the students about the college life and their future goals, on the whole, resulting in a good conversation.

It was an honor to have interacted with him. We wish him all the best for all his future endeavors!

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni Season II: Episode 2- Establishing the High Road to One’s Ambition

Anisha2001 — Sat, 04 Sep 2021 16:14:27 +0000

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The second episode of Season 2 was hosted on the 29th of August, 2021 and the speaker for the evening was none other than Mr.Ronak Kumar Samantray, the man who pursued his ambition of becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Mr. Ronak Kumar Samantray graduated with a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar. Before taking the entrepreneurship route, he was a senior software engineer at Microsoft. He is the co-founder of NowFloats, a start-up that helps small businesses to get online and discovered. He is also the co-inventor and chief advisor of Bolt, the world's first smartphone charger for motorbikes. He has also co-designed a “Speech Glove” having the ability to recognize finger gesture, converting them to speech. He is also an INK Fellow, 2013. He was also on the Forbes 30 under 30 for his contributions towards enterprise technology.

He started out the session with talking about his journey to CET, his college days being a variety of problem statements and experiences to be solved as he put it and the hostel life helping him in adapting to the brand new phase of his life. He laughed it out by saying “Life has to be a chaotic Jumanji Experience for there’s no fun with it being smooth and sailing. Chaos leads to progress.”

He listed out the three assets he worked on during his college life- Core skills, Understanding people and Hustling. Diving deep, he recalled upon coordinating with his seniors in figuring out various fields and domains in first year, honing his coding skills in the second year and researching in third and fourth year. He considered understanding people’s perspective to be very important as it helps one deal with situations in a peaceful and formal manner. Hustling, according to him, was always a very important, mandatory point as one should hustle everywhere for it helps in overcoming the barriers of others’ opinions and gives confidence to strive further. He exclaimed procrastination and comfort zone as self-created phenomenon in a person’s head.

He then walked us through an insight on his “High Way to Ambition”.

Construct of Ambition
Firstly, he advised us to plot a vision graph with passion being the lever so that it keeps the graph up motivating us to go higher but not without the cost. He believes that One should always have an Ambition graph designed in his head following which he/she works hard to achieve it.

Path to Ambition
There are infinite paths in each person’s life with different routes, all bouncing around one’s ambition. The shortest path never exists in life. Each human is combination of his/her events in life. One must always believe to be the discoverer of his/her own path. The path to ambition should be unique and infinite.

Typical Rise to Success
He described the beginning as a very slow curved erratic graph, i.e., the Hyper Growth Stage or Discovery Stage comprising of chaos, belief in one’s ideas from the very beginning, working as a team and having good mentors to guide us through our hustle. Rising up to the J curve, life flattens out for a certain period which makes one process oriented and structured. Furthermore, operating at a certain height might make one miss out certain things which is where loyalty and predictability come to place and makes one data driven.

He ended his presentation with a quote “Keep your eye on the Light House, Ignore the storm.” elaborating it as Ambition being like a light house to us and storm, the cost we pay to reach it.

He encouraged us to Stutter, struggle and reach our Lighthouse of Ambition.

The conference was followed by an interactive Q n A with many questions from students asking about his path to entrepreneurship, the pros and cons of the business world, his idea and visions for the future, his advice to the young minds with goals and zeal to achieve and much more.

One of the attendees named Abraar Ahmad Khan asked about
How difficult it is for him to take risk if scenario during his college days was compared to his job now to which he replied :
The mantra is to "always decide and do" and not ponder upon the consequences. He believes in going for an idea even if it's risky for he would be at peace knowing that at least he took a chance and did something cool.

The students were eager to hear more from him as it was everybody’s curiosity towards a man whose idea has brought about such a change to the world, motivating us to follow our dreams and aspirations.

It was an honor to have interacted with a person who pursued his passion and turned his ambition to reality. We wish him all the best for future endeavours!

CHIT-CHAT with Alumni Season II: Episode 1- The Engineer’s Conundrum

Anisha2001 — Sat, 07 Aug 2021 12:42:41 +0000

Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club decided to start its very own "Alumni Talk Series" called "Chit-Chat with Alumni".

The first episode of Season 2 was hosted on the 1st of August, 2021 and the speaker for the evening was none other than Mr. Bikram Keshari Panda, the one who along with his batchmates, started this journey of the Spectrum family.

Mr. Bikram Keshari Panda has graduated from CET, Bhubaneswar (2015 batch) and is from I&E branch. He and his friends established the Spectrum Club which has grown to be a family. He is a gold medalist from IIM C and also has been in the director’s merit list. He is an Industry professional with 5 years of great experience in Process Control and Instrumentation. He has formerly worked as a Senior Engineer at Asian Paints Pvt Ltd and is currently working as a Senior Business consultant at Dr Reddy’s Digital Process Excellence team.

Mr. Panda started off with describing his journey from entering 1st year, the foundation of Spectrum and his last days of final year to entering the job sector, pursuing MBA and then returning to the corporate life again. He shared his college photos, reminiscing over the moments he shared with his friends, whether it was a trip or college fests or winning prizes in competitions.

He proceeded with telling us about “CETronics” which was the first event they had organized as a part of Spectrum Club garnering participation from more than 200 students of various colleges that worked as a prime motivation for them to develop the Club further.

He enhanced the synergy of the session by preparing a poll for the students to share their future career goals on and proceeded to interact with them to understand the mind-set behind choosing the same. He gave his insights and guided us on the various domains of IT sector, Core Sector, M-tech, MBA, etc. and also encouraged us to explore various aspects if confused.

He ended his presentation with a quote “Always be Confident. All is Well!”, asking us all to always be confident and focus on our knowledge, to get ready for placements and work very hard for we will end up in the best of places in our lives.

The conference was followed by an interactive Q n A with many questions from students asking about the corporate life, his idea and vision while establishing Spectrum, his views on improving the club and many more but mainly, everyone was eager to know about the man whose idea has become a home to all us members of the Spectrum Club.

The session ended with a group photo as a memory and it was an honor to have interacted with him. We wish him all the best for all his future endeavors!

THE BY-TECH SHOW

Anisha2001 — Mon, 05 Apr 2021 04:18:42 +0000

The SPECTRUM club is one of the core technical societies of the College of Engineering and Technology, founded in 2015 by Mr. Bikram Keshari Panda (2015 batch graduate), keeping an eye on the sole motive of Instrumentation and Electronics branch having a club of its own.
Apart from being involved in a plethora of competitions and technical events, the club organizes various seminars and webinars for the overall development of the students.
One of these is the By-Tech Show organized about career choices on 28th February,2021 and speaker for the evening was Mr. Aman Dhattarwal.
Mr. Aman Dhattarwal is an Indian educator, career counsellor, public Speaker, social media influencer, and a famous YouTuber. He is the young 4 times TEDx speaker, #1 Online IITJEE Educator and also the founder of 4 channels with 4.2 million young hustlers related to JEE and college -.Apni Kaksha, Aman Bhaiya Vlogs, and Apna College.
Mr. Dhattarwal started off with one of the most relatable scenario of a person’s life. The wildest of ideas arbitrarily strikes a student’s mind, including certain successful entrepreneurial ones which are neglected for fear of failure. A safer career option is often opted by the students as advised by various individuals in their lives. When in college, securing a placement becomes of utmost importance following which the financial stability of the job stops the person from seeking a new venture. Hence, the person adapts to the lifestyle and continues so on.
But what about his goals, his dreams, his passion???
People often join a company for the sole purpose of financial gain. This leads to frustration in the near future as it becomes a daily routine they follow not because they want to but because they have to.
He explained this as lack of interest and passion in the field that they work in. Following the crowd is what results in such circumstances and is being observed nowadays.
According to him, successful people portray two attributes- Confidence and Competence. Competence is how good one is at something and Confidence is how good one thinks he/she is at something. Learning to commit and train your brain accordingly is very important no matter however small the work is.
The best opportunities always come at the lowest point in lives. Grabbing it is important. If you fancy earning money, you should be ready to lose it too. Being afraid of failure won’t help in moving forward and with the rise in competition in today’s world, the only focus should be the goal.
He explained it further stating two concepts from the books that he, being an avid reader, has read. One is of the 3 types of people in the book “Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable” written by Tim Grover – Cooler: the good, Closer: the great and Cleaners: the unstoppable. Second is that of the 3 W’s that distracts a person as said by Chanakya in the book “Arthashstra”: Wealth, Women and Wine.
He emphasized upon choosing the right career path and encouraged us to follow our dreams by sharing his own story and few others of pursuing his goals through hard work and dedication. His logic was not to run among the millions but among a fifty with a clear vision and passion to achieve our goals.
He listed out a few helpful practices that would help in our ambition. They were:
• Implementing proximity settings in our daily lives.
• Keeping one’s thought process unique and creative as creative thinkers are the highest paid people.
• Choosing a goal and making it big. The bigger the goal, the more driven one is to achieve it.
• Asking oneself “How am I different from other people?” and working towards making oneself better.
• Prioritizing one’s health as is advised by all the successful people, as is said “Health is wealth.”
• Developing a habit of making notes. Our mind retains only 10% of what we learn so the revision helps in faster memorization.
• “Always be the First or be the Best”. Entrepreneurs generally target the domains that are exclusive to them only or tend to introduce something unique to an existing one increasing its market value.
• Friendships built on business is better than a business built on friendships. When we meet like minded people who share the same interests and dreams, it helps in our development as an individual both mentally and spiritually.

Lastly, he asked us to have a mission statement for our life, to start executing and be consistent in whatever we do because even at our lowest points, there are plenty of opportunities waiting to be grabbed on to.
The session ended with an interactive question-answer round followed by a rap sung by him leaving all the students in awe of meeting their favourite online teacher and getting live advice from him.
The session was a motivation to set out goals, keep moving towards it and the belief that “Ham Phodenge”: We will prove ourselves to be exceptional. We wish for him all the best for the future and to always be the icon that he is.