Tough question

An enterprising student - a final year undergraduate of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in a well known college of Andhra Pradesh - has just presented me with a tough question.

I would have been very happy had she asked me some interesting problem on power electronics like equivalent circuit modelling. I would have been happier had she posed me a question or two from semiconductor electronics. Happiest would I have been, had she bombarded me with questions on electical and electronic communications..

Of ocurse to all these questions my reply would have been not much different from the one I gave when an imposing elderly professor asked me in a non-exam setting in a premier institute during a demo we made on wireless applications, "what are the dependencies between the mobile mini-browser's capabilities and carrier/bearer technologies, if any?". I was glad that I replied the professor with complete confidence. And my reply was 'I don't know.'

But this girl shot a query from the most dreaded quiver - the one enterprising students start carrying towards the end of their undergraduate courses - the one on career planning!!

She asked, "Which way shall I go? Masters (MTech), or job?"

She is facing the same dilemma as I faced 7 years ago. In both our cases, the genesis of the problem is the job offer from Satyam Computer Services Ltd.
Less ambitious than Infosys, which is announcing plans of adding 20200 (you read it right) heads to their staff in the coming year, Satyam is also apparently staking its claims on the produce of numerous engineering colleges across the country.
In my case, the answer was obvious and clear - I didn't have the interest and stamina for crossing the GATE for MTech. That I nurtured dreams of belling the CAT for MBA but could not make it is a different story.
Ther is no ready answer for this girl. Not only eligible to think of MTech, she has already proved her merit in BE third year itself. She got a good percentile already in her first *trial* attempt at GATE - 98.9~ and a decent All India Rank of 256.

If you jump to the conclusion that answering this girl was also easy and that I told her to go ahead with MTech plans, you are wrong. It was not easy.

Assuming that the girl gets a better percentile in this years attempt at GATE, unless she joins a premier course in institutes like IITs and IISc, as she readies for graduating, she will again end up facing the same Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL, Satyam (may be, even in the same order) offering similar jobs with probably a better salary, which, considering inflation, works out to be nearly same. Add to that the "opportunity cost" of losing the salary for two years. It is a loss.

I would have considered the fact that MTech leaves a candidate with in-depth knowledge of a specialized subject and hence the candidate has a better chance of getting a job which is close to that subject and her heart. But the case of a dear friend of mine who studied Electronic Communications in the one and only IISc, presently working in J2EE technologies discouraged me from discussing in those lines.

While I was busy with these thoughts the girl put forth some more discussion points - obviously naive and typical of students who are enterprising but uninitiated to the vagaries of life.

Despite the complexity of the question, I spelt out the answer as a crisp and clear discourse. Summarised, the discourse reads: "You are poised to get a good percentile in your next attempt at GATE. Join the best institute in the best specialization available, for MTech. Concentrate on getting the best out of student life, especially from one of those hoary institutes where you will spend your two valuable years in. Have the aim of increasing your knowledge. Higher education will always be more satisfying."

I ended the speech with this famous line of RW Sockman, "The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."

If one of the same Big 5 Indian companies find her at the end of two years, I am not to be blamed.