Work Experience

Time and again work experience seems to pop up in the most unrelated of contexts, and sometimes relevant as it may seem there does not seem to be enough time to go ahead and layout everything that I have actually worked on and experienced. So I thought I'd just take a trip down memory lane and put things down in black and white. Just for personal reference of course.

1. Church - Altar Boy: Probably the first thing that any Catholic boy does in his life. I still remember the first time I did that. I was with a friend Kenneth in Irla and goofed up quite a bit. I especially remember how many times I actually stood up aside the altar when I wasn't supposed to. But well managed to get through that.
Unforgettable Moment: Goofing up

2. Boarding School - Choir, Altar boy, Cleaning up, Sweeping, Mopping floors etc: While at the boarding school at Boscos we did it all. Cleaned up the whole place, cleaned up the playing fields, washing our clothes and god knows what else. We did it all and we showed up in style at the school. Boarders kicked ass when we came along at Boscos man.
Unforgettable Moment: When one of the boarders went berserk! Also remember making those giant cutouts for our late night chill outs.
Cant forget all the great s.d.b. priests and brothers that we met. You guys simply rocked.

3. School - Hockey Team player: I was in the hockey team during my school days at Don Bosco. Played the defense quite a bit and people said I was pretty good.
Unforgettable Moment: When I missed the penalty shot against St. Stanislaus Bandra, while all my friends in the boarding looked on. We also lost the match so that was the pits. Also remeber bro. chris whacking me in the shins with my own hockey stick during my first match. Damn that hurt.

4. Internship at ABB: This was the final year project during my BE and we managed to squeeze into ABB for this. Thanks to some of the wonderful people out there that helped me realized that the journey had just begun.
Unforgettable Moment: When the department head told me that my project was the only real world project she had seen all year. And also when I realised my work may not be used by the company in production :(

5. Engineering College - Placements: Helped out with going out to a couple of companies in Mumbai to come out to the first ever placements that our college had.
Unforgettable Moment: When one of them accepted.

6. Engineering College - Debating: We kicked some ass while debating at Agenls's in our final year. I think it was pav and anna on the team with yours truly. Of course I was just the stand-in :)
Unforgettable Moment - Winning. Yippieeeeee!

7. PA, US - Serving, Cleaning, Mopping up etc: This was at University Park, PA. The first on campus job that I had was at the central eatery. We did everything. We had some early morning shifts at around 6.00 am where we went in and sliced frozen bagels etc for the morning rush. I did fries, burgers, burritos, salads, club sandwiches, sodas etc. Man I cant even remember all the places I served. We also had the late night shift on Sat night where we cleaned and closed up right up til 1.30am in the morning. Phew.
Unforgettable Moment: Cleaning up puke. Yuck!!!

8. PA, US - Serving tapes to Cray: Yeah for one day me and a friend served up tape drives to a Cray supercomputer, that was on campus, so that data could be transferred onto cds. Yeah baby.
Unforgettable Moment: Seeing a supercomputer in person :)

9. PA, US - Working with the big guys: Got a job on campus for a cool 16$ an hour, which was a record, that was to code for this handheld computing project for the department of health in PA. This was under the supervision of a defense building on campus.
Unforgettable Moment: The look on the sys-admin's face when he realized I wasn't a citizen of the US of A :)

10. PA, US - Biochemistry?: My first assistantship was with the Biology/Biochemistry department. The lady out there wanted someone to do work comparable to re-writing LAPACK in 2 months :) That didn't work out.
Unforgettable Moment: Realizing that I was given an impossible task and that I needed to find another assistantship asap. Peed in my pants.

11. PA, US - Civil Engineering: My primary source of income during my education was through a graduate assitantship with the Civil engineering department. I wrote Visual Basic programs for a professor there. I interacted with the hardware equipment manufactures for a month or so to understand how to integrate their stuff into our program. It was super to see that thing up and running.
Unforgettable Moment: Interacting with Dr. H. - super guy.

12. PA, US - Volunteering: During my free time I volunteered with an organization at the local church. The basic work there was simply interacting with differently-gifted children.
Unforgettable Moment: A kid that I was interacting with for nearly a year underwent a brain surgery, it was really big risk that the parents just had to take. After he was released from care and came back to the sessions he pulled me to the nearest ABC chart and started telling me A for apple, B for Ball. That moment I can never forget.

13. PA, US - Thesis: Phew man. The toughest professor in Wireless Networks at the university was my guide and he sure as hell knew what he wanted. He made sure I worked my ass off and well I managed to satisfy his requirements.
Unforgettable Moment: My first thesis proposal going in the dustbin. Then my thesis experiments running on multiple computers and me collecting and understanding the data. And then of course Graduating, Yipee!!!

14. PA, US - Start up1: Yeah baby. Quantum Bio Inc was launched sometime late in the winter of 2002. I interviewed with Lance and the crew out in the Chem labs at Penn and was bought on board. We got our rented office and moved into it sometime in the middle of Jan 2003. And boy was it fun. We actually took the comps and printer from the chem building out to the incubation centre, yeah we did the loading and unloading, and also pinched some CAT5 cables and stubs in there too :). Then we headed out to Office Depot and purchased the cheapest tables we could find and hauled them back to the office. We then assembled them ourselves, yeah! Then we layed out the Ethernet cables to main switch board and also punched in the pins ourselves. We then setup the network with a MacOSX PC serving up as the server. Each one of the 5 guys installed a different flavor of Linux just to test the code on different versions while we coded :) Damn we even had our code for the common copier, that was billed against us. Of course we managed to get the admin account for our consumption :)
Unforgettable Moment: Damn everything was unforgettable man. I still remember the guys next door who were into precision instrumentation and measuring. That dude bought us beers a couple of times just to break the ice. Cheers buddy.

15. Back in Bangalore: Working at Sun was awesome. Was part of a really great team. The people gelled well and things were great. The lead was super.
Unforgettable Moment: Seeing a real world angel :)

16. Start up2: Working in a start up is always the tops for me. So I quit my job at Sun and moved out to Gurgaon on a whim.
Unforgettable Moment: First two weeks at Gurgaon, man the dust is still coming off me till now. The other thing that was rocking was the ability to do whatever I wanted to do and push it forward, and of course the ability to talk to the founder directly and frankly was priceless, well at least for me :)

17. The giant: For reasons best known to me I needed to get out of Gurgaon. Microsoft offered me a job, along with 2 other biggies, that seemed to be a really great opportunity and I am currently here pursuing it to the fullest
Unforgettable Moment: Making those right now :)

Other experiences
a. been a class prefect in school :)
b. fund raiser
c. Master of ceromonies @ family parties and couple of corporate events
d. Horse riding
e. ...

So that in short is the experiences that I have had the pleasure of having, ofcourse not everything is covered here. Sound interesting? Now that I have this written down I wonder what I should tell the next person that asks me this question, any suggestions?