A periodic newsleffer for NITK Surathkal Alumni
Vol.1 Issue 1, Jan- Feb 2015 Message From The Dean / The role of alumni in 'Institution Building' is immense and is a well understood fact. It 1s the endeavour of the institute to keep the alumni in the know of the progress being made in all the fields. In this context, the alumni newsletter, "The Graduate" plays a crucial role in disseminating information to all stake holders. The newsletter is bound to go a long way in benefitting the institute, its students and alumni. I congratulate the student volunteers and commend their selfless work in bringing about this newsletter. This is set to be a
regular feature and I'm sure that in the future, this newsletter will become a part and parcel of the N ITK legacy. Dr. M. B. Saidutta Dean [Alumni Affairs Institutional Relations) NITK Surathkal
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The Team Founding Team Arjun Venugopal (4th Year Chern)
Nikhil 5 Thakkar (4th Year Chern)
Balagopal KV (4th Year Chern)
Gaurav Oswal (4th Year Meehl
Editorial Head
Design Head
Balagopal KV (4th Year Chern)
Prasanta Barman (4th Year Chern)
Manoj Kumar (4th Year Meehl
Editorial Team Dakshesh Thacker (3rd Year EEE)
Prasanna Muthukumar (2nd Year ECE)
Narendra Shivaraman (1st Year ECE)
Shailee Jain (2nd Year IT)
If you want to contribute to the newsletter, or be featured in a future edition, do email us at balagopalkvfagmail.com
Alumni News
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Alumni Speaks - From ECE to Public Policy / - Pranay Kotasthane s Journey / Pranay Kotasthane is a 2007 graduate from NITK who obtained his B.Tech degree in E&C. On-campus placements secured him a job as a Design Engineer at Texas Instruments, Bangalore, where he specialised in Design For Testability [OFT] for mobile processors. Realising a void, between college curriculum and the nature of his job responsibilities, led him to offer a career talk to students of the 2009-2012 NITK E&C batch on the fundamentals of OFT, research areas, advancements in technology and other relevant information. In 2008, along with Narayan Srinivasan, a fellow batchmate, Radhesh Gupta and Jagdeep Gambhir, NITKians from the Batch of 2008, Pranay started a registered trust called The Sparsh Foundation. "Education is the most powerful medium for social mobility", says this NITK Alumnus, who envisions Sparsh to be an organization that serves as a beacon of hope and ensures financial constraints don't come in the way of an individual's quest for knowledge. To begin with, Pranay chose NITK as the launch platform and with the seal of approval of the then Director Dr.Sandeep Sancheti, Sparsh started a Scholarship Program targeted at students from semesters 2-8. The Director's able guidance was a key factor in the success of the program as the Sparsh team collected donations from NITK alumni and friends, and helped finance the institutional fee of deserving students from weaker financial backgrounds. Over the period 2008-2013, Sparsh was able to aid over 40 students from NITK and MNNIT Allahabad. Over the past year, the Sparsh Team has been
looking at new initiatives, ideas and volunteers through which they can make many more positive contributions to their alma mater. In 2013, Pranay took a part time course in Public Policy [GCPPl. conducted by The Takshashila Institution-an independent, non-partisan think tank and school of public policy. This course provided him with a firm understanding of the fundamentals of public policy and governance, which one could incorporate into their professional lives and political discourse. After completing the course, Pranay quit his career in VLSI and joined The Takshashila Institution as a full-time policy analyst, with Geopolitics being his specific area of research. His research interests focus on geostrategy, geopolitics of the Indian subcontinent, public policy and urban issues. Pranay also teaches topics in public policy at Takshashila and works on the curriculum design for GCPP. As part of his research, he has contributed opinion pieces in Pragati - The Indian National Interest Review, Business Standard and Citizen Matters, The Hindu and Mumbai Mirror. He also blogs on the Indian National Interest
Platform and Pramaanik. Pranay strongly believes that his exposure to brilliant minds at NITK gave him the courage and the confidence to handle
challenges in his professional career, and through Sparsh, he intends to return that glowing favour back to his Alma Mater.
W ooplr raises US $5 Million from He/ion Ventures /
UJOO Wooplr is a fashion discovery app co-founded by Arjun Zacharia, a CSE graduate from the batch of 2004, who before Wooplr was an employee at McAfee. Wooplr enables users to discover new products from stores around them, taking the user's interest, location and social
circle into consideration. Users can share pictures of their outfits which others can view and are given details as to where they can buy them. They recently raised Series A funding round of $5 million led by Helion Ventures. The funds will primarily be used to hire top talent, expand the team and grow the Wooplr community as a whole. Following the fund infusion Rahul Chandra, Co-founder and Managing Director, Helion Ventures, will join Wooplr's Board of Directors.
Three NITKians named in the Forbes India / 30 under 30 list for 1015 / The recently published Forbes India 30 under 30 list of bright, young stars in different fields, features 3 people from NITK. The alumni who've made it to this list are Shashank NO and Abhinav Lal for their work on Practo, and Sahil Barua for his work on Delhivery. In this age of digitalization, it only seems palpable to develop a system for efficient medical processing. It was through this idea of incorporating convenience with health services, that Practo was born. Having witnessed the hassle of transferring undigitized medical records, leading to inefficient medical practices, Shanshank ND envisioned the idea of a company that worked solely for providing a communication gateway between the doctor and patient directly, devoid of all the troubles that lay in the middle. While in his final year at NITK, 1n Information
Technology, he decided to build a software that comprehensively facilitated doctors with the aid to store and create medical records, schedule appointments and so on. Consequently, PractoRay was developed by Shashank, along with his classmate Abhinav Lal. In 2009, the first version of PractoRay was released, making it available to a multitude of medical practitioners, who found it an extremely coherent tool, that led to an efficient communication system between doctors and their patients. The business grew rapidly, reaching numerous doctors and
health serv1ces and attracting umpteen investors. Practo.com is another initiative that enables patients to find doctors based on in-built listings. This facility allows patients to make appointments with ease, and find new doctors as per their requirements. Over the years, Practo has seen immense growth and popularity, expanding its business overseas and seeing a significant turn-over. Delhivery is another such start-up that has seen remarkable growth over the past few Its co-founder, Sahil Barua, years. highlights how this E-Commerce-Logistics company has transformed from delivering merely flowers and food in Delhi, to being a significant warehousing unit for successful retail chains like Flipkart. The company has
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not only seen a massive turnover, but has managed Delhi, to becoming a significant warehousing unit for successful retail chains like Flipkart. It has managed to attract a plethora of eager investors, who believe that Sahil is 'not just reacting to an issue, but solving an actual problem'. Powered with strong IT services and an outreach even in the non-commerce category, Barua believes the start-up can go the distance and emerge as an unbeatable contender, given its USP that remains unmatched by other e-commerce logistic companies. Delhivery is certainly a start-up to look out for, with its reputation of constantly outperforming itself and methodologies based on inculcating valuable feedback.
to say and when to shut up!" /
By Rakesh Godhwani, Batch of 1997 / Writing books was never a part of my plan. It just happened and NITK or KREC as I call it had a big role to play. I started writing a journal in KREC. I still remember that afternoon very well. It was raining heavily. I was looking out from my window of my room in 3rd Block, second floor. We didn't have the Mega Hostels then. There was an empty ground where we used to play cricket or football and I was just staring at it. I just took out an empty pad and started scribbling my thoughts. They trickled at first and there were times I just kept thinking. But very soon, it became a habit and I would wait for that moment. My roomie - Suresh, would usually spend his afternoons in the computer lab doing his assignments and also mine. And I used to enjoy the solitude of my room in the company of my pen and notebook. This continued till about 2007 when I took the plunge from the corporate world and
decided to follow my passion of teaching and focusing on academics as a full time job. Just a couple months after my last day at Qualcomm, I sat in my room at liM Bangalore, and updated my Linkedln Profile. I titled myself as a "nobody" and wrote somewhere in my description ..... 1 earn a fraction of what I used to and live a million times better". I think these words caught the attention of a publisher who wrote to me "you have a book in you. When you are ready, give us a call". And I seriously began to think that I should write my first book. And when you really want to do something, the whole world conspires to make it happen. As I look back at the last 7 years of my plunge, I feel complete. My 3rd book is on the topic I love persuasive communication. It also happens to be my PhD topic, the subject I teach at II M Bangalore and feel that I can contribute to.
Communication is a very misunderstood word. It has become the default word that everyone blames at when things go wrong. In the corporate world, we make scores of presentations, write millions of emails, and make countless phone calls around the world to get things done. And we all think this is communication. Well, this is just a teenie weenie crumb of the entire subject which is as big as Mount Everest. My reason of writing this book is to bring out this subject with a renewed vigour and give it the due importance it deserves. I believe that if you want to become a successful leader, you cannot not be a good communicator. And in the book, I have taken examples of great leaders like Gandhi, Obama, Malala to prove my point. The book is an outcome of my PhD literature review and I have kept it very simple. There is a simple 6 step framework called "AEIOU Xtra E" that anyone can use to draft a persuasive message and make a positive impact on the world. The book has
3 parts. The first part outlines the laws of communication in a social world, the second part breaks down the framework of AEIOU x E into individual components and gives lot of examples and exercises for the reader to grasp the concepts, and finally part 3 takes the reader into applying this framework in a variety of situations like making a presentation or an entrepreneurial pitch, handling conflicts, giving feedback etc. An important aspect is the art of "shutting up" which is sprinkled throughout the book. I want to write more on this topic and teach the subject till the last day of my life. There is a huge need of bringing a fresh perspective to this subject and I think, with the advent of social media, we need to keep learning how to communicate on twitter, Facebook and other social platforms. A time will come that people will not meet each other and use technology to communicate. And that world is already upon us. Hopefully, I will write more books and help my readers and students in navigating through those challenging times. The book has been published by Penguin Random House India and is available in all major book stores in India. It is also available on Flipkart, Amazon. The kindle version is also available on Amazon. Follow him ragodhwani. Read his other posts at http://rakeshgodhwani.wordpress.com
Professor Speaks
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Dr. M S Bhat - De t of Electronics and Communication En Recently appointed as the Head of Department of Electronics & Communication Engineering, Prof. M.S. Bhat has been involved in a very interesting project involving cross-disciplinary work
with the Mechanical Engineering Department. The project, being funded by Boeing, is on a budget of Rs.3 lakhs. The task taken up is to "design a cost effective energy harvesting seat using piezoelectric
transducers". The energy stored can be used for applications such as charging mobiles among others. However, Prof. Bhat aims to reduce the cost and thus improve the product's marketability in various transport systems as well as home applications. He is being assisted by a research scholar of the Mechanical department. At the time of writing this report, he has completed acqu1nng components for the same and is targeting completion by June-July 2015. Prof. Bhat has recently completed another major project funded by the Government of India worth INR 175 lakhs on "RF MEMS switches". He has also menta red a few
final year students on a particularly exciting project on "Multi-nerve fibre reconstruction" which is based on the concepts of illumination of fibre optics. The project was in collaboration with KMC, Mangalore and has been a boon to train budding doctors in improving their accuracy in neurosurgery. On another note, he is particularly excited about alumni involvement with the institute and envisions that one day the alumni help can be used in creating an incubation centre for technical products that students can work on such as the one he and his team are currently looking to realize.
Institute News To keep up with the increasing demand for extra space and renovation of existing buildings, a spate of construction work can be observed all around the campus. • A new academic block, comprising of 8-1 o classrooms and 3 seminar halls, is being constructed in the Western side of the campus. The buildings will be equipped with state of the art technology like audio visual aids and WiFi connectivity. The total cost of this project is approximately Rs.25 crores •A new building for the Computer Science Department is being constructed behind the NITK guest houses in the Western side of the campus. • A vertical expansion of 5 floors is being done to the Applied Mechanics Department building. A vertical extension of one floor will be done to the Civil Department building. Also, the construction of an overhead bridge between the Applied Mechanics Department building and the Civil Department building is in progress. • An addition of 2 floors will be done to the Basic Sciences block and an addition of 3 floors will be done to the Mechanical Department building. Also, a horizontal
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extension is being done to Chemical Engineering Department near the SAC. • To cater to the staff members of NITK, Residential apartment buildings are being constructed for all cadres. 28 houses will be allotted to types 3-6, 3-4 [non-faculty] and 24 houses will be allotted to type 5-6 [facu ltyl. • A new five-storey hostel block for boys is being constructed. It will comprise of 500 single rooms. A new girls' hostel block is being constructed which will comprise of 250 single rooms. •In addition to the above projects, the renovation of the SJA, the construction of a new sports complex and a new library block 1s 1n progress. The time slot for successful completion of the above projects is 12-18 months. The total estimated cost is Rs.300 crores. The projects are being executed by the CPWD and are Gal undertakings under the Ministry of Urban Development.
Student News
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Educate, Propagate, Rejuvenate / By Harsh Kumar, 4th Year Civil /
India churns out an eye-poppmg 15 lakh engineering graduates every year. However a NASSCOM survey states that almost 83% of them are deemed unfit for employment, lacking traits and skills an organization expects from its employees. With inherent flaws in the system, substandard infrastructure, ill-equipped faculty and scarce opportunities, there is little an Engineering Graduate can do about the situation. However, there is a deeper issue that we have all failed to notice. For majority of the engineers, choosing a branch of engineering was and continues to remain a gamble. Securing a rank in a national level entrance examination provided us with suitable options, whose choice was heavily influenced by others' opinion more than our thoughts about the same. Computer Science has been seen as a perpetual money-spinner, Mechanical evergreen and it didn't even occur to us that Mining could have been a branch of . . eng meenng. Lack of information to take this important decision leads a sizeable number of students to lose interest in their respective branch during the course of four gruelling
years in engineering. A result of this is a subsequent deviation of career paths a needless waste of our Engineering years. Started under ASCE NITK Student Chapter, SchoolEngg aims at eliminating this lack of clarity from the education system. Through a presentation, The SchoolEngg Show, we acquaint students in schools and PU colleges with the different engineering branches in an innovative and interactive manner exposing students to real-life examples and inducing them to think and ponder upon them. Similarly, using interesting daily life examples, we introduce all major branches of engineering to school and PU college students. This process of establishing a link between what they already know and what they want to know helps build a bridge that leads them to a branch of their interest. As a result students take up a stream adhering to their interests, which will eventually see a paradigm shift in students' approach to studies. We kick-started our initiative at Mangalore and Udupi in October 2013, which was soon followed by other places in India like Jaipur
and Kota in Rajasthan, Khagaria in Bihar and an international session at Kathmandu in Nepal. A good turn-up and a warm reception from students of all the schools have kept us going and striving to reach our goal. We have also been extensively covered in the media. In December 2014, we released our newsletter for students at the pre-university level to expose them to more information at the college and industrial level. The newsletter comprises of general information about different colleges, their entrance examinations and also presents insightful answers to frequently asked questions. We also feature a section that showcases innovative projects done by students and Gyan Space, where stories of success motivate youngsters. Post this, we deepened our reach to kids in smaller classes. The OutBoxers is an inter-school science, aptitude and logical thinking quiz for high school. This is a one-of-a-kind quiz competition aimed at testing the creativity of students rather than just testing their general knowledge. Like the name suggests, the motive is to make students think out of the box. Around 1300 students from different schools of Mangalore participated in the first edition of The OutBoxers on January 11, 2015. In due course of time, we plan to make this a pan-India event with sub-rounds in all
Tier I, II & Ill cities of the country as well as take it online.Our next project, Open Up, is essentially a summer camp for high school kids involving development of skills such as reading skills, writing skills, precision and traits such as team spirit, leadership, never-say-die attitude and the like. To bring in our traditional offbeat element, we have developed some innovative activities, each of which will be developing some of the traits in the participants. We would appreciate any support in the form of mentorship or finance to keep We plan to advancing seamlessly. revolutionize the Indian education system through many more such unprecedented ideas. What makes us unique is that we connect with students physically in addition to connecting with them electronically. Be it with our information sessions, our newsletter or more recently, our quiz, we at SchoolEngg have constantly strived to increase the practical awareness of the students of our country, and help them make more informed choices about their future. And thanks to the sparkle that we see in the eyes of the students we interact with, we vow to bring the education of our country at par with the most developed countries of the world. To know more, get in touch with us on facebook.com/schoolengg or mail us at schoolengg20130g ma i l.com.
Inter NIT Aquatics Meet / The 0-INSA All India Inter NIT Aquatics Meet was held over a period of 3 days from 30th January to 1st February, 2015 at NITK Surathkal. This year, the highly anticipated event had seven NITs from all over the country vying for the championship, competing in a total of 20 events in the women's and men's categories. The event was inaugurated by the Director of NITK Surathkal, Dr. Swapan Bhattacharya, in the presence of the Dean
of Student Welfare, Dr. Udayakumar Yaragatti, the Chief Warden of NITK Surathkal, Dr. Narendranath and the swimmers and dignitaries alike from all the visiting NITs. The first day witnessed fierce competition across four events for the men and women, with the hosts, NITK bagging highest honours in three of them. The three day swim meet culminated in the which NITK won freestyle relay, comfortably, and NIT Trichy and NIT Cali cut
touching in at the second and third spot, respectively. In the end, it was the hosts , NITK ruling the standings, bagging top honours in both the women's and men's category as well as the overall
championship for the fourth year in a row,winning a total of 16 golds out of a possible 20 with NIT Trichy finishing runners up while NIT Calicut came 1n second runners up. "Weeks of practice culminated in, what I believe, was a well-deserved victory for NITK and winning this swim meet felt bittersweet, as I knew this was the last time I would get to stand alongside my teammates up on that podium, lifting that trophy, but I'm glad to have been a part of it." - Sai Shetty, Team Captain, NITK Surathkal
Start-ups! Are you looking for Summer Interns? / The 'Start-up Internship Drive' is an initiative by E-Cell, NITK Surathkal to expose first, second and third year engineering students from NITK to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Being involved in significant projects would enable the students to apply their skills and expand their knowledge. This initiative aims to bridge the gap between start-ups looking for fresh talent and ardent students with a keen interest 1n gammg real world exposure. There are a multitude of students interested
in both business and tech profiles and E-Cell will ensure an efficient recruitment process for start-ups, by filtering out interns based on the prospective particulars specified by each company. The students will be available for internships for a period of 4-8 weeks from May 10th to July 17th 2015. If your start-up is interested in participating in the process, please contact:Aditya - +91 7829892084 , Vivek - +91 8197758531
Student Alumni Relations Cell (SARC) / The Student Alumni Relations Cell [SARC] is an initiative by the NITK Alumni Association and E-Cell, NITK Surathkal. The primary purpose of the SARC is to facilitate the relationship between our extensive alumni network, which is over 20,000 strong, and our current batch of students, who are amongst the best and brightest, for mutual benefits and gains. We are looking to start
start off with mentorships for students in their desired fields of interest, and Projects which will help students gain practical, real world exposure while giving alumni an opportunity to work with talented and motivated students. If you want to participate in these programs, have any suggestions, or want to connect with us, please contact any of these coordinators:
Manoj Chettiar- manoj3592ragmail.com, Nikhil Thakkar- nik.thakkarrahotmail.com Gaurav Oswal- gauravoswallragmail.com, Arjun Venugopal- v.arjunnagarjunragmail.com Ba lag opal K.V. -balagopalkvrag mail. com