My College grows

I did my graduation in Thiagarajar College of Engineering in the field of Electronics and Communication Engineering. I am sure half of you have not heard of such a college, until now. But these days my college is clearly going high. For computer science(CSE) and electronics department(ECE), we got a good set of juniors. So, both these departments are growing up. ECE is running franchise-record number of live projects from industries and organizations. IIT professors are visiting ECE. But the problem is, during their visits they are engaged fully by "the princy and the professors" (wow... I am not responsible for it sounding like "The Prince and the Pauper"). CSE gets open-source activists coming from outside - people like Tony Wasserman. In a few months, may be even Torvalds and Stallman. Stallman visited Tamil Nadu, an year back and Torvalds comes to Kerala once in 6 months. The problem with CSE is their lack of participation in outside events - like ACM contests, Google codejam (ok... I agree it is very difficult), Google - Summer of codes, or Redhat's Lord of the Code.

I do not know about other departments. There are a few good physicists in our college, who are "influential" in Japan. I met Jawahar a professor of Mechanical department, a few days back. He was on his way to attend an international conference. He talked about some band of professors from Italy visiting Mechanical department of my college. That visit would certainly improve its image.

My college has a lot of capacity. Huge enough to be considered one of the best in the province. My college contains students and professors who can easily take us to the helm. But the other side of the population (both students and professors) do not know what is happening around and pathetically do not even care to know. No value addition can be expected from them.

My college is a poor college. Despite its big caliber and acheivements, it does not properly project itself. The students are responsible for it because most of them have low self-confidence that they do not go out often to show what kind of stuff they have. Also some part of the students try to capitalize some provisions and discounts given by the management (it includes monetory gain, a bitter truth). The management is responsible because I have never found it trying to project itself out. Or may be I do not see things clearly. None of the conferences held in my college are sponsered by outside organizations, for instance. This agains loops down to the handling of the accounts by the students, which the management does not like for some real serious reasons.

Anyway, in long run, we will certainly succeed. Before 1950, no body thought Real Madrid would win Spanish Premiera Liga, let alone UEFA champions league. But they won the champions league in 50s and did it again and again eight times until now. Similarly, let us hope, out of all these my college will come up strong one day to be accepted as one of the best.

Techies - What exactly do they mean?

Most of the times we come across magazines and websites talking about geeks or techies, by default everybody assumes that it means only computer guys. For instance, an aircraft designer or a DSP engineer can never become a geek as long as he does not work in any hardcore computer software,like SAP or he is not an expert in any hardcore computer technology, like Data warehousing. Here is one more website that brings about the top paid techies of last year.

Again by techies, they simply mean computer-folks. According to this listing Data Warehousing Architects are the costliest. But who knows??? designers of engines for cars in big car companies like Toyota, Mercedes and Ferrari may have an average salary well above that of any Data Warehouse architects. Are they not techies? They are in fact hard-core techies, but not included in this statistics because for these magazines techies means only people sitting in front of computers.