So Much, So Fast

I haven’t been able to keep this blog up-to-date for the last week.  Bad for you, my readers, but good for me.  We have been meeting so many people and opening so many doors all over the place for future IST students to come participate in international internships.  Really quickly, here is the list, we met with Wipro, ITC Infotech, Covansys/CSC, and TCS.    In short, some of the biggest IT names in India.

I am trying to wrap up everything at work.  There is not a lot more that needs to be done project wise, actually, I am 99% done; but the amount of final meetings keeps going up!

  Where did 10 weeks go?  Seriously, I can only remember about 4 weeks of this trip.  I remember week two and three (I basically slept during week one, thanks jet lag), and I remember the last three weeks in one big blur that really seems like one week to me.  So, I don’t know where the other weeks went.  I have project work done, so I know that I was here and alive and doing stuff, but I don’t remember really doing it.  I guess time flies really does fly when you are having fun!

I never knew how lucky I was with this internship until now, the end.  And I know that I don’t even realize the future opportunities that I am going that have presented because of this.  I never thought I would meet so many people that have such influence on the India business market! I am just an intern, how did I meet with senior business leaders at the big companies?

  I had a final wrap up with my manager, Kishen, today.  In case you are wondering, I did a good job this summer.  Anyways, I enjoyed having him as my manager all summer, and we talked, but I really never talked with him about his work and academic history before, so when he was telling me his story, I was amazed.  He went to NIT, graduated with a degree in electrical engineering and electronics, and then worked for three years at a small company.  After that, he was one of the original five people that started Honeywell in India!! Wow!  I had him as my manager this summer!?  I knew he was important, but I didn’t know that he has been here since the begging.   He has spent time all over Honeywell in lots of different areas of the company and in many different positions.  He has also spent about 6 years in the US working, and in other parts of the world traveling too.   He has quite the diverse and interesting work history.  Now, he is a fellow engineer at Honeywell, so he basically does his own thing making sure projects move along, and he puts in his input and advice all over the company here.

  He explained to me how times have changed.  How Bangalore really was the Garden City, and how at one time, traffic was unheard of in the city.  He reminisced about the old days when Bangalore was a nice little city.   But, after living and working in Arizona for almost six years, he is glad to be back in India.

I know before that I said the India job market is very fickle and people move around a lot.  Well, he told me how it is now, is not how it was then.    When he graduated from college, most of the jobs were government jobs.  The private sector was relatively unknown and not a very popular work place.  It was full of businesses he called “Body Shops”.  A body shop would send people away to the US to work for some time and then take a medium percentage of the persons salary.  Not a very inviting job to have.  So, when he graduated from college, when you got a job, it was very common to stay in the job.   Leaving the company and your financial stability was unheard of.  It was almost crazy!   The jobs were very limited and scarce.

  This is the opposite of what I have seen, and the opposite of how I have portrayed this in past blog posts.  Today’s job market here is a very fluid and elastic one, people move a lot more frequently between jobs because there are a lot more available and a lot more room for growth here there has ever been.

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