Teaching is an adventurous ride!

When I entered into corporate world, realized a lot of flaws in our education system. It is more theoretical than practical, not having any clear idea what happens in IT world, professor just focus on regular curriculum, not a known person/mentor who could potentially guide and many such thoughts popped into my mind!!

1. There are many gaps in college curriculum and actual work that you do in the industry!
2. Many things that you learn during your college term but fail to see practical implication of those thus you feel less thrilled about it and hence one end up cramming books rather than understanding them!
3. College is the time where you can learn, read, try out many things! When you start working, you get very less time! With lack of direction, knowledge, student end up in reading/mugging up books!

I always think, If I had known this in my engineering …!
Time flew and it was my turn to do something for the students in engineering/diploma.

Manisha mam happened to contact me and it was An “Aha!” moment! She wanted me to conduct some activities in the college, which will essentially help students. She is of the opinion, “Immediate seniors telling students something gives more inspiration than someone rooted in that field!, students can connect and relate better!” I started thinking, what I can share with these students with the kind of exposure I had and still make an impression and inspire them!

I was thrilled, excited, happy and nervous!

Just an Introduction! _{2014, November}

This was very first session I did in Orchid college, Solapur. It was for Final year students.

Purpose of this session was to share my journey till now. I did some homework, what I want to tell and how they can be benefited by this. I talked about my role, what I do at ThoughtWorks, what is the actual work we have to do, meetings and ended up talking about agile! I also addressed the points where it’s very necessary to take Final year project seriously and how it can benefit them! I kept it interactive! They asked me many questions and were curious to know what happens in those big IT buildings! We talked about maintaining online profile, reading technical blogs and what are other things they can do/should be doing! I was stressing on point, “College time is very valuable, where they can make most use of the time, adapt some good practices and build your profile alongside! “

They liked this session. I was happy to know that this session helped them, at least inspired them to do something!
I learnt many things from this small discussion. To have patience and empathy to understand students and make them talk! This gave me further insight of what I can plan next! I wanted to take some hands on session. Mam and I talked about this, we decided to take further sessions for third year students in Feb/March as exams would be over by that time!

Some tools, and some fundamentals! _{2015, March}

Lately in March 2015, I took session on git for third year students! They knew concept of SCM as they have learnt in Software Engineering subject, but never came across some examples, where they could relate concepts like versioning, rollback etc.

Why I decided to take session on git?

1. This will help them to relate to concepts they have learnt already!
2. They can use this to maintain their assignments and get rid of having ‘Final’ version under every assignment till very last day!
3. I remember, during college days, someone’s laptop used to crash(purposefully sometimes ), and as it was not under version control nor any backup in some external drive, they used to face problem!
4. It used to happen a lot, project works till someone makes a change in code and then it stops working, it’s difficult to find the point where it was working back in time!

Realized, learning git will help them in college and eventually in industry, be it whatever profession they choose!

I explained basics of what is git about, we saw some videos, taught basic commands and some internals of git! I Planned to take hands on session at the same time, but could not do that. The very next day, they tried the basics and did small online tutorial of git under presence of mam and I came to know that they found it helpful.
This feedback gave me more insights into what I can plan for my next visit.

When you teach, you learn; when you give, you get!

It always feels good when you help others, and I find, You learn more in that process! I am looking forward to take more similar sessions in the college once they resume from holidays!