Back in College after 10 years

College always creates a nostalgic feeling. You think about college and all the good memories comes. College plays an important role in your career. Principal and teachers are the guiding force to jump start your life. We cannot thank enough to them. Couple of years back I visited college in one of the college’s reunion “Nostalgic”. I felt like I should connect back to college, I was not sure how could I do that. After an year I had an idea of guiding student with their final year projects. The idea was simple, I had a decade of industry knowledge. I can put the current software development practice and experience to student’s project development. I along with my business partner decided we should go with it. We both discuss on what all should we include in and shortlisted few things that should be there. One of the top thing was complexity of the project. We thought of making the project complex and unique, thus they will have a good learning experience.

We thought of talking to the Head of Department in Information Technology. We had an hour long discussion on how to go about the idea. The methods we will follow and the Head of Department was very curious and helpful to us.  We took the appointment of our principal and she gave us the green flag to go ahead. We immediately thought of having the projects started. We had an introduction meeting with all the students who were participating. We asked them if they have any project in there mind and some did had. Once the project was allocated we had some online systems in place and some follow up emails. We thought we were all set, But it was a totally different experience. My respect to all my teachers went up because I had to keep a lot of patience. However we had long project sessions conducted over the weekends with the help of teachers and lab staff. It was tiring long days for me, my business partner and my colleague. We had to keep answering questions all day long and keep solving the problems. However we stick to the plan and followed the rules we had set at the start of the year. The year long project came to an end and every one had competed the project. We are waiting for the results now.

It was a great experience for us. We thoroughly enjoyed being in college for those many weekends we had. There was up and downs and we felt as if we are re appearing for the exams. While helping the students I thought if we all can just help the students. Make use of the technology available. Even if you are not in the country conducting a talk via online video conferencing. There can at least an idea pool of things that can be done in college and you get a chance to be back in college. I always enjoyed to be in college and hope to see few of you reading this in the campus.

I would like to end this story by words that meant a lot to me. It was during one such meeting with Principal Madam, She said

This is all we want from alumni.

I really thought that moment college never expected any thing from me and it will never expect. After all things college had given me, it is just asking few hours in few days of my time to help many students. It in returns gives me the feeling of belonging.