Tales of a fresher : A flashback (Part 1)

Jobs, woes, trials, errors, rewinding time.....

4 years back, a lot of things happened, and a lot was decided, not forgetting to mention, from my side of course!

• I was declared a competent computer engineer by a deemed university.

• I was NOT going for higher studies. (I could feel then, the disgruntlement and the disappointment in my parents, who had already assumed that their only difficult daughter would make them proud by cracking CAT or GRE and do MBA or an MS from a reputed university! NO! SORRY! THANK YOU, was all conversation I had with my parents in those months.)

• So there I was a free bird, now ready for a job! (Little did I know, it was going to take me a while to go through some trials and tribulations, before I get one!)

Not all what I had decided happened immediately! 2006 was supposedly a bad phase in my life, excluding the good times I enjoyed in my college. Once I graduated, the ground reality hit me hard that getting a job was not a cake walk! I found myself, one measly tadpole swimming in an ocean of experienced job hunting frogs, all waiting to get a decent job! A lot of rude coaxing from different sources (my parents, my neighbors, my relatives and a lot many whom I did not even know personally) forced me to think about belling the CAT. Not that I was going to do MBA, but the attempt to think so helped me escape the ‘disturbia’ of being labeled as ‘jobless’ and being plagued by annoyingly meaningless questions like ’Why beta?, 'Are you not attending the campus interviews?’, ‘Arre tumko pata hai, #^$&*&$ ke bete ka TCS me ho gaya hai!’, ‘Tumko thoda aur try karna chaiye!’, ‘arre, aise kaise nahi hua tumhara campus interview me? Sabka ho raha hai!’,and blah, blah, blah! Sometimes, excessive concern becomes a royal pain, especially when it starts hunting and haunting you day in and day out! The funny thing was I did appear for CAT (wherein my scores are highly confidential, they cannot be shared!), but to make myself ‘useful’, I joined the same institute as a CAT instructor at Baroda center.

Surprisingly, I was doing well for myself! I enjoyed teaching as much as I loathed preparing for CAT! The experience was grueling but fun. Learning different brain teasing aspects of my favorite subject Math, exploring new fields, making notes before the class, facing a batch of strangers and trying to make sure the knowledge transition is successful, conducting group discussions, reading a lot of books and getting drained at the end of the day was something that I had started enjoying. It was a time, when I totally forgot that my job as a CAT instructor was only going to be a temporary phase, and I was duly reminded one fine day by my father that I had to appear for my CTS aptitude test and interview! A strange dilemma that was! After getting rejected successively by TCS, INFY and TECH MAHINDRA, I was not even sure if appearing for CTS campus would be worth my precious time?Somehow, I went ahead, driven by instinct and the mysterious Chinese box opened out to pop out with the ‘Year of Yes!’ Oh well, I was soon to become a Cognzitian!