Whole of last week I have been doing shopping, at least a lot of window shopping. I have been to malls as well as road side shops, seen Reebok to Rebook(spoof brands). As a consumer the only thing that concerned me was the quality of the product I am buying. Though at times one tends to get biased by the brand name, what matters in the end is the quality and functionality. If the product is good enough you don't mind shelling out a few extra bucks. There are times when we do get ripped of in the name of a brand. What also holds true is that a non branded product can also be pretty good and worth every penny.
It's my favorite past time to develop analogy between situation which are miles apart. In the past I have compared electronics experiment setups in the lab to problems we face in real life, I know it's geeky.. but I am a geek bloke \m/. This post is one more classic example of how a simple idea can picked up from one place and put in another more complicated plot to help us get a better picture and understanding of the whole scenario.
I am student of the second batch of BITS, Pilani, Goa Campus. And here I stand without no regrets whatsoever. When I joined BITS I knew it was a new college and was very well aware of it's consequences. There were no expectations other than that of quality engineering education. There has been a lot of buzz among final year students about placements. Despite our best efforts to contact companies and foster awareness about our new and vibrant campus among the recruiters there hasn't been much response. Students like myself and many of batch mates who have put there heart and soul in what they like have been met with disappointment because their dream companies have not come for placements. All those long hours spent in the lab or on the streets of Mumbai looking for small components, while your friends were sleeping in their rooms or playing some computer games seem to be a waste now. Ones tends to think that after all these efforts, we all will end up in a BUS like the rest of the lazy bums who had fun and didn't do much all these years. We start blaming the officials responsible for not taking the required initiative to promote the campus.
The whole scene seems depressing and hope seems to be lost.
Let me give you another perspective of the whole situation, an approach from the employers point of view. He is no different from us. He is also a shopper out in the market to buy (... yes I said BUY) fresh new engineers. From his years of experience he has a blind trust in the famous brands like IITs, BITSes, NITs etc. But deep down inside even he is looking for talent(quality). He is looking for people who can take up the job at hand, make profit for his company. I agree that if one has the backing of brand then it's easier to get noticed by big companies. But if you have a brand tag attached to your collar, it doesn't give you the liberty to take things for granted, coz a a poor quality branded product never sells.
All of us here at BITSg had assumed that we have a good brand tag pinned to our collars and now that we have realized that it's not the case, we should not be disappointed, instead we have to improves ourselves to match up to the standards the buyer is expecting. Many of us have seen here at PS2 that ones inside a company it hardly matters whether you are from BITS or a a local college. All that matters is your competence in finishing the job at hand. So if think you have it in you, hang in their lads, some recruiter who realizes your potential will pick you up sooner or later. Hard work never goes waste, it's just a matter of time. Hold one to your passion, it's tronics for me, it may be mech for someone else.
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hey sid tht is another f9 article u have written and u have said rightly nvr leave ur passion.418221
Well, personally I don't agree with some things you said in the post.
Overall let me be very clear.
1. Brand name sells.
2. Advertising is perhaps the most important thing.
3. Packaging is important too.
If you think BITS brand name ends with getting your first job, then you've never lived the spirit of a true BITSian. And if you haven't lived the spirt, you can't expect more from it.
The mistake in recruitments at Goa is a lesser "self-made" brand name and less advertising. I don't count advertising from students because that's now how things work in this industry. It has to be driven from the institute, and they've been miserable at that front. The number of companies visiting campus is NOT less because of bad packaging, the students are brilliant and their profiles, research experiences show it.
Every venture in this world has a break-even time. Wait for that. Things don't happen in a day. You seem to be unhappy because you want to assume that things happen in a day/year or a few years. Our placements are better than ANY 5 year college in India (be it even IIT Guwahati in it's 5th year). Be proud of that.
Also, life doesn't end at placements on campus. You know that from the earlier batch all those who were selfdriven to do better, used the brand name of their alma mater to get into amazing off campus jobs.
Brand name takes you EVERYWHERE. I have a friend here who did his engineering from UMinn and was rejected at several companies without an interview. He applied with the SAME profile and name Hv'd university on it, and he got a call AND a job. Whether he can sustain it or not, depends on his packaging. But in our case, I am sure BITS provides as good a packaging as any university in India and that includes IITs. I've seen these students of other colleges at close quarters and I can vouch for this fact. There is no low quality involved if you were never tested by your dream companies. It's preposterous to reach this conclusion.
Life is how you want to see it. Though you say that you've no regrets, you seem to say that BITS provides low quality education or atleast that students there take life for granted once they get a tag associated. Well, I've seen really motivated students and real big jerks too in all the college students I've come across. And that includes Harvard too.
Wait for the right time. Sometimes it is better to sit back and watch out for what's happening in the world. Just something, poor quality branded product doesn't sell, but we aren't poor quality - we know that, once we are out in this world and realize that NUS MS EE students don't know how to design a clock in Verilog and another Stanford EE (BS and MS) student does not know how a MOSFET works. And these are my personal experiences. Poor quality is an individual trait, not something that can be blamed on the brand name.
Couldn't agree more with your post.
About the brand well frankly it matters but what matters more is the Quality of students inside.
To this fact i will pose a question. A Brand can get a customer to its store may even prompt the customer to buy 1 product but if it is a DUD then people will them self stop buying it and the "brand" will be nothing more than name. On the other hand if the product is good then the "brand" will be made itself.
Here i am not saying that Quality of education in the college is bad. What i am saying is how many people make full use of that education? How many of us bunk classes, copy assignments, fudge values in practicals and make a 100 page report by copy pasting anything and everything we can find on the net? A lot of us take pride in being bitsians ( and we should), but in doing so we think that by clearing BITSAT we made ourselves worthy laying the claim to a plum job or a high ranked university.
Even the brand of BITS was not made by people by just sitting around and taking pride in being bitsians. It was made by the hard work and toil of its esteemed alumini.
We have seen how big brands have come from their highs take for example IIT KGP or even BITS itself from its ighs of 80s and 90s.
Hiding away from a problem by not turning your face to it is a thing which ostriches do. By accepting that there might be a flaw and correcting it we can plug the leak , ignoring it may only doom us to a flood.
Nice blog, informative and very very interesting comments.
Sid bhai, nice post. It pisses me off as well when both, people who've not done much and people who've done a lot, have to compete with each other. By 'done a lot' I mean 'done a lot of practical work'.
A company will naturally want the best practical worker. But how does it know who that person is? When nVidia comes for placements they can't possibly ask everyone to make a circuit, or design a chip. They only way they can evaluate a student is by looking at his grade - and this is the sad part.
Most of the time our grades are nowhere even close to being representative of our technical abilities. The people with high grades usually get the job. Now I'm not saying that all high-graders are muggers. In our college itself we have several examples of 'knowledgeable' high-graders.
The brand name of BITS certainly gives us a boost-up when compared to other colleges. When a company comes to BITS it doesn't know for certain if it will get a high-CG student who also really 'knows' his stuff.
What the company understands is that by-and-large, it will get a good student. Maybe not the best for the job, but then what yardstick should it follow?
I get a high while soldering, and I love the taste of grease and grit in my mouth. I'm not going to 're-package' myself just to get a job. To me a highly paying job is only a bonus. What really matters is satisfaction.
"A company will naturally want the best practical worker"
Infact, my experince is completely against this statement. The jobs they give you company may be challenging but they may not test your creativity, creativity that was involved in doing all that practical work.
You don't need a gem of tronics to debug down the RTL and check why a node isn't togggling. U don need passion in tronics to do that. A ghotu can do that too. And its obviously hard to find one gem. So why would anyone take pain in serach for one ?
Tronics is our passion!! And I think one's passion would come of greater use than gettting job with merely any creativity.
Coming to brands...
Brand gives an exposure to its product.
Come on! its a new product and itl take time for the buyers to bilieve in wat u potray. Or to believe its as good as its pervious products.
Cheers!!
a think adi made a v good point here, we (me and desa) were talking abt passion for elecs and stuff, but does the company really care, huh ?
i think all they r looking for is obedient soldiers to follows orders, and follow an already laid down pattern of work
I guess i fall into the 'jerk-whos-done-nothing-but-waste-time-in-gaming-and-other-ridiculous-pursuits' category. For this reason, i hope and pray what akash said is true, that brand name somewhat undoes the relatively ignorant lives that some of us have been leading.
But i must add, i have not a mote of regret.
I am sick of hearing this phrase 'passion for tronics' . How do you define it ... electronics is more than doing something on PIC or PSoC. So plz dont blatantly say that comp. dont care abt the passion fo.....
dont take me wrong but i m fed up of negative posts almost about everything. ..
What is electronics!!!!???
and waise who said
"electronics is doing something on PIC or PSoC"
@bloke -
I think 'obedient soldiers' are the only ones they can employ you as for six months...I suppose design ideas, etc take longer to work out..
@reddy -
"You don't need a gem of tronics to debug down the RTL and check why a node isn't togggling. U don need passion in tronics to do that." - Maybe not passion, but I think (atleast after some detours in 'tronics') that fault detection and stuff sometimes requires far more skill than the design itself...although it might not be so self-rewarding..
BTW...wasn't this about branding?? :P
people peole , i think v r off track now, chuck it, i know all of us love our work, so just do it, worry abt brand later on
hehe!
Mandar :) how do you know am working on fault detection [:P]
Brand is something how you use it,has its advantages nd has its drawbacks too.
Fr example,it gives a positive impact on d employer but than on the other hand u expect something out of it.
The point is i belv dat BRAND or a certain specific college helps u in getting better exposure nd those who din make use of it lost an opportunity to learn a few things other than curriculm & as akaash said, its not ur first job that decides who you really are...
Its your whole career that"l reflect your true knowledge or eagerness to innovate.
What we call a mugger is actually a hardworking student who belvs that his academic abilities are his true abilities,ppl mite differ in this opinion but than thats his point of view & he lives upto it & the fact that he is hardwrking covers up to a great extent.
What i belv in is if you are in a gud university, u shud break d shackles a bit, try to do smthing that you want to do rather than just sticking the same old approach bcz i think these are some yrs which gvs us independence to explore things, if we do not do that here,then we wont get another chance.
How much knowledge you have is a relative term,a mugger has different kinda knowledge & a practical wrker has differnt,as long as both are happy with what they are doing as pointed by desa that its more imp that "we should enjoy" what we are doing rather than "we are doing it jus for d sake of doing it".
shit happens!
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