Meeting with Current Students - After

(Arun & Shiva (2007 IT), Arun Kumar & Kaushik (2006 CSE), Meera & Pallavi (2007 CSE) met the current batch of 3rd and 4th year students in the college today.)

After much confusion, skepticism about whether such a meeting was required or not and the customary "mike not working" problem, we finally met the students today. At the outset, it must be said that though the agenda about *what* was to be spoken was set and also "who speaks what" was agreed upon (to some extent), it didn't quite come out that way - with the end result being that most of us kept repeating what the others had said. In the end, like a regular decently-made-Tamil-masala movie, our interaction with the students ended on a reasonably high note.

What we spoke -

• Basic Information about next week's event.
• Alumni Club Inauguration.
• Purposes of Alumni Club.
• How Networking helps - be it for academic, professional or social causes.
• Feedback from students about their expectations.
• Getting hold of some volunteers to help organize on Feb 12th.

With the usual clapping by students, we did manage to convey what we wanted to. But when it came to feedback, as is well-established in MSEC, not a single student ventured to offer any, when we asked from the stage on the mike. But once our speech was over and we asked the students to disperse, there was such a massive surge of students who came for "offline" discussions/suggestions that we had to get back to the mike again and request for some order!

A gist of students' expectations (which is more or less in sync with what the Alumni Club hopes to carry out)-

• Info about higher education - the different exams, opportunities after, etc.
• Core companies for EEE/ECE.
• Experiences at work (Ha!).
• Guest Lectures (Of course ;-).
• Coding problems for CSE/ECE/EEE [:D + :( + Hmmm].
• Projects for Final Year (Well, of course!).
• Workshops.
• In-plant Training (We heard hardly any students go for in-plant training these days. During our times, even if we had to fake them, it was at least mandatory :|).
• Paper Presentation (If what we heard is accurate, the students have very little idea about this and hardly anyone is even allowed to attend competitions conducted in other colleges).
• Communication Skills Training.

We also managed to get the contact details of a few volunteers to help us organize the event next Saturday.

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(Post separately in Facebook if required)

As regards the main event, a minor suggestion/information from all of you - The Alumni Meet officially starts at around 5:30 PM, but we had planned on having a "High Tea" (basically 1 tea + 1 samosa :D) at around 4:30 where folks can just hang around and chat with one another (since this cant be done when the main events are going on {or at least isn't supposed to happen :D}). We had also planned on having 2-3 team-based games, just to have some fun. Some of us feel neither of this is going to happen since folks will turn up only for the main event.

Since we're not really sure of this, it'd be great if any of you who're interested let us know - so we can either go ahead and arrange for this (for a lesser number of course) or altogether scrap this.

Please let us know.