The world as seem by my students

[fun4vnay2]

I agree cent percent by CONCHO

I have been a long time lurker in this site with little posts.

Let me tell you guys something about myself.
I hail from India and I am from one of the premier engineering colleges there. I got my BS in Electrical Engineering from a college which is ranked after IITs. I could not secure admission in IIT because I could not pass the entrance exams.
If one wants to study in premier colleges in India, there is only one way to secure admission: Work hard and Pass their exams with good marks unlike the admission criteria here in USA for top schools.
I took GRE with a score of 2200/2400. Most IITians get 2300+/2400 in GRE and 750+/800 in GMAT.
I came here for my MS in EE and had a very very easy sail with GPA of 4.0.

During my MS here in US school, I also worked as a tutor for undergrad engineering schools and I can tell you that in the second or third year of their under grad school, they are learning/studying stuffs which I did when I was in high school back home.

Aslo, I am here on Visa and wanted to add my experience about getting jobs in multibillion dollars company.
Whenever I apply for a job with any company, their first action is to fill up the particular position with any qualified american citizen and if and only if they can not find anyone qualified they hire foreign citizens. Obviously, their pay has to be competitive. Mind it , this is my and few of my friends personal experiences with big companies.

regards

DD

[anxvariety]

RE: “winning the superbowl”.. I never said I felt like I won anything, I said I felt like I was on the team that won.. so the feeling I was trying to identify was one of small participation but moreso a rewarding association experience(fellow piggys).

Does this crash present a slam dunk opportunity for anyone? Can you keep your job and stay docuemented-stable so that you’ll be able to get a loan? I personally think there is more opportunity on the back end of this cycle.. When everyone panics and things become oversold, feverish and very predictable(I’d guess in panic times, the trends closer to follow basic human psychology rather than seasonal or other patterns).

How is the tail end of a boom the good one? If someone were to go for leveraged investments say out of the money puts, and they were using something like 50-100k(around a down payment price).. I think what they can get on the back end of this boom is more than they’ll get throughout the entire next boom… If you put 50-100k into those LEND puts as many people were idnetifying as a possibly good investment – you’d have a nice chunk right now.. maybe 500k-1mil… how about letting that sit and earn interest during the inflationary period, and then cashing out 75k in 10 years to buy a house that will get you a inflation paced return.. Maybe someone can slam this if they feel so, I’m just tossing it out as something to think about..

[denis4x4]

I’m 66 years old and a high school graduate. I’ve not seen one mention in this string of creating a business or filling a niche. In 50 years of working, 48 of those years were spent working for myself and creating jobs as well as products and services. The rewards include a nice collection of cars, RV’s, an apartment building in PB with an owner’s suite, a ranch in Colorado and piece of mind as everything is paid for and has been for the last 25 years.

It’s been said that a high school graduate in the 1950’s got an education at least equal to two years of junior college. For the record, in the San Diego Unified School District, the dollar amount spent per student was $396 for the 1959-1960 school year. Today that number exceeds $7,000 and at least half of the students entering college have to take remedial math and English!

If there’s one constant theme running through this string, it’s the idea that someone else is to blame. Suck it up people and take responsibility for your life.

[Critter]

Everybody deals with the cards they are dealt. Since housing is overpriced, now is a great time to rent, invest the rest of the money, explore new neighborhoods, and NOT feel like a failure because you can’t buy!

Change is good – I think this is an exciting time to do things differently. I wouldn’t feel disadvantaged because I couldn’t buy a house or condo right out of college – there are plenty of others ways to get self-esteem. It’s not what you own, but who you are.

[Anonymous]

We see the reports on the news about a shortage of American engineers, but to see it firsthand is frightening. Tour every single wireless company inn San Diego and you will find that over half of the engineers are from India, China, Bangladesh, Europe, Africa etc. You will find plenty of female engineers – from India, while their American counterparts with business degrees are out peddling pharmaceutical drugs to doctors by wearing short skirts, catering in lunch and hoping they will land one as a husband. Go to Nokia or Qualcomm and the only black engineers you will find are from the Carribean or Africa, not Detroit or Chicago.

Furthermore, go to a shopping mall in Peoria, Illinois or anywhere USA next weekend and take in the scenery. Young, angry kids dressed like gang bangers emulating their favorite ‘I don’t give a rats ass about the world’ pop star or rap artist. No respect for their fellow citizens, an all about me mentality and not a single bone in their body concerned about their own future let alone the future of our country. They are worlds apart from their mission oriented, respectful, dutiful counterparts in India and China. Yes, these are very broad generalizations that are not always correct, but in the broad sense they are accurate.

There are 6 families in my extended family here in San Diego. All are middle class and above, and of the 20 of us aged 19-32 years old, only one has an engineering degree, 2 business degrees, 3 teaching degrees, and no less than 15 who are doing nothing with their lives, working odd jobs and drinking on weeknights and singing in bands. It’s all cool though, we all know that you can always ‘fix up a few houses’ for some cash and just chill out on the waves. Dude, you don’t need a degree to make good money, and look how hard my cousin with the engineering degree has to work man, who wants to do that? The waves are blown out today bro, I think I’ll fix up my room at my parents house in Solana Beach. I know I’m 29, but prices are so damn expensive out here I can’t afford to move out.

Our only hope as a nation lies in the heart and motivation of the part of our population that are driven to make a difference – people like the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines I see volunteering to take a bullet for this country. They come home and instinctively find ways to make themselves and this country better. They assume leadership roles in the community. Perhaps we should put a Marine Corps drill instructor in every high school in America to motivate our youth, embed them with a sense of civic virtue and wake their asses up to the reality of the global marketplace!

Suggested curriculum, day one:

“Attention on deck! Time to man-up – your all in high school now! Grab your friggin pansy ass back pack and your physics book and follow me. There’s 2 billion Chinese on your tail. Repeat after me….’This is my physics book. There are many others like it, but this one is mine. My physics book is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My book without me is useless, without my book I am useless. I must read my physics book true. I must study it harder than my Indian and Chinese counterparts who are trying to outcompete me. I must acheive an A before he does…I will…I will ever guard against the threats of global competition. I will keep my physics book clean and ready at all times. We will become part of each other. Before God I swear this creed. My physics book and I are defenders of this country. We are the masters of our competition.. We are the saviors of my life. So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no competition, just PEACE.

[surveyor]

juice

word…

[North County Native]

good idea juice!

[kewp]

“Our only hope as a nation lies in the heart and motivation of the part of our population that are driven to make a difference – people like the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines I see volunteering to take a bullet for this country. They come home and instinctively find ways to make themselves and this country better.”

Do you mean our young servicemen and women currently over in Iraq, that have been serving multiple consecutive tours of duty? I’ll suggest taking a visit to your local VA, outpatient psych ward and/or any dive bars within walking distance of the above to get a feel of how our current veterans are doing, courtesy of our foreign policy.

Or maybe you mean the current crop of new recruits, like the cat iv’s? You know, the ex-cons, mentally ill and unemployed angry kids dressed up like gang-bangers?

I work at an engineering school and interface with many highly-motivated, intelligent and creative “American” engineering students. Sure, there are not many of them, but its a tough profession and not for everyone. I have a feeling they will be rewarded for their hard work, however, as there is always demand for good engineers, recession or otherwise.

[ibjames]

I’m in info technology, anyone know how to get security clearance? I have no idea where to start.

I have mixed feelings, kind of an emotional rollercoaster sometimes. Somedays I feel that there is hope, and we’ll own something, and other days I feel that there is so far prices have to drop to be affordable that I’m fooling myself.

[Cow_tipping]

Juice … big difference between other countries India especially and the US (not sure about europe but India for sure) …
We do not study what we like, we do not study what comes easy, we do not study to be entertained and most importantly, we do not have a choice of what we study till we are very very old (in US stdent years).
We need to study everything under the freaking sun till we are done and finished with grade 10. We get the whole kit and caboodle. The 4 years of physics, 4 years of chemistry and 4 years of math before we ever get to tell OK … I wasnt to study commerce and accounting and economics or ohysics, chemistry and math. That stage in your life, nothing is easy. Its death either way. We expect to work 40 hours a week studying if we want to make it. That is other than the 40 hours a week of high school.
IIT aint no big deal, any engineer undergrad from India will completely cut american graduates to pieces on the basis of fundamentals alone. Of course we cant make it a week in the woods or pick up drunk women in bars … but hey … trade offs right … software and coding … that we know.
Cool.
Cow_tipping.

[kewp]

As an aside, guess what the common trait I’ve noticed amongst my most successful friends?

Wealthy parents.

[Anonymous]

Cow_tipping,

You raise an interesting point on the woods and women comment! Seriously, beyond intelligence and schooling there are personality traits, cultural attributes etc. that are more conducive to success in business, industry etc. EG: Germans immigrated to South America, say Brazil, and the areas where they settled have industry, strong local economies etc. compared to the rest of the country if I am not mistaken. This pattern has repeated itself over time all around the globe with other cultures. Even though Indians may be better educated, do they possess the entrepreneural spirit, the willingness to take risks and the traits, values etc. needed to organize and lead? The British are good examples of this adventourous, opportunistic spirit.

Went to a meeting once at a large cell phone company here. 30 Bangladeshi engineers attended, no Americans. They were quite, didn’t engage with us at all and were very shy. Could have been the language barrier, but I sensed that it was a bigger cultural issue. Were they British engineers, there would have likely been lively discussions, side conversations and relationship building going on. If I was looking for someone to captain a ship and guide it with initiative and confidence through rough seas, I would want an individual who was assertive and not prone to group-think.

Likewise, go to any major university and you will see that the Chinese students hang together, congregate in the libraries and generally (many exceptions of course) do not join clubs, assume leadership roles on campus or do much of anything except study. British, Australian and Nigerian, Carribean etc. engineering students will have dated Americans by graduation (the lucky ones!), developed social networks with Americans, gone to baseball games at Petco and possibly even joined a fraternity or soriety. I am making huge generaliztions here, but again, broadly applied they are very valid – just ask any college student. The Chinese student leaves with better grades, but does that necessarily mean that he will be better at global business?

[kewp]

“The Chinese student leaves with better grades, but does that necessarily mean that he will be better at global business?”

Find the Indian and/or Chinese equivalent of Microsoft, Google, Intel, Apple etc. and you will have the answer to your question.

[Anonymous]

Kewp, yes indeed. My feeling is that with over a billion people there are more than enough rugged entrepreneurs to go around! Interesting way to look at it though. A professor of mine in college once compared German and British immigrant farming families in the Medwest – Illinois, Iowa etc. He claimed that the practical and risk averse Germans tended towards stability, making a good living but staying within their box. The English on the other hand started more businesses, had more sucesses and failures, and of course some just stayed on the farm. So as a result, he claimed, some of the most wildly sucessful people and businesses in those areas tended to have English founders who were enterprising folks. A higher proportion of the failed drunks were also English:)

[surveyor]

outsourcing article:

Here is an interesting article regarding outsourcing.

MYSORE, India (AP) – At the heart of the sprawling corporate campus, in a hilltop building overlooking the immaculately shorn lawns, the sports fields and the hypermodern theater complex, young engineers crowd into a classroom. They are India’s best and brightest, with stellar grades that launched them into a high-tech industry growing at more than 25 percent annually. And their topic of the day? Basic telephone skills.

“Hello?” one young man says nervously, holding his hand to his ear like a phone. “Hello? I’d like to leave a message for Number 17. Can I do that?”

Nearly two decades into India’s phenomenal growth as an international center for high technology, the industry has a problem: It’s running out of workers.

There may be a lot of potential – Indian schools churn out 400,000 new engineers, the core of the high-tech industry, every year – but as few as 100,000 are actually ready to join the job world, experts say.

Instead, graduates are leaving universities that are mired in theory classes, and sometimes so poorly funded they don’t have computer labs. Even students from the best colleges can be dulled by cram schools and left without the most basic communication skills, according to industry leaders.

So the country’s voracious high-tech companies, desperate for ever-increasing numbers of staffers to fill their ranks, have to go hunting.

“The problem is not a shortage of people,” said Mohandas Pai, human resources chief for Infosys Technologies, the software giant that built and runs the Mysore campus for its new employees. “It’s a shortage of trained people.”

From the outside, this nation of 1.03 billion, with its immense English-speaking population, may appear to have a bottomless supply of cheap workers with enough education to claim more outsourced Western jobs.

But things look far different in India, where technology companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in a frantic attempt to ensure their profit-making machine keeps producing.

“This is really the Achilles heel of the industry,” said James Friedman, an analyst with Susquehanna Financial Group, an investment firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa., who has studied the issue.

“When we first started covering the industry, in 2000, there were maybe 50,000 jobs and 500,000 applicants,” he said. Now there are perhaps 180,000 annual openings, but only between 100,000 and 200,000 qualified candidates.

For now, industry is keeping up, but only barely. A powerful trade group, the National Association of Software Services Companies, or NASSCOM, estimates a potential shortfall of 500,000 technology professionals by 2010.

On the most basic level, it’s a problem of success. The high-tech industry is expanding so fast that the population can’t keep up with the demand for high-end workers.

Tata Consultancy Services, for instance, India’s largest software company, hires around 3,000 people a month. The consulting firm Accenture plans to hire 8,000 in the next six months and IBM says it will bring on more than 50,000 additional people in India by 2010.

A shortage means something feared here: higher wages.

Much of India’s success rests on the fact that its legions of software programmers work for far less than those in the West – often for one-fourth the salary. If industry can’t find enough workers to keep wages low, the companies that look to India for things like software development will turn to competitors, from Poland to the Philippines, and the entire industry could stumble.

The responses range from private “finishing schools” polishing the computer skills of new graduates to multimillion-dollar partnerships spanning business, government and higher education. The biggest companies have built elaborate training centers. The Mysore campus, for instance, was little more than scrub-filled fields when Infosys, India’s second-largest software firm, based in the nearby technology hub of Bangalore, began building here in earnest three years ago.

In America, the campus would be nothing unusual. But in India – with its electricity outages, poverty and mountains of garbage – the walled-in corporate fantasyland, watched over by armed guards, is anything but normal.

It has 120 faculty members, more than 80 buildings, 2,350 hostel rooms and a 500,000-square-foot education complex. There’s a movie complex built inside a geodesic dome. An army of workers sweeps the already-spotless streets and trims the already-perfect lawns.

Month by month, it’s getting bigger. Today, some 4,500 students at a time attend the 16-week course for new employees. By September, there will be space for 13,000.

Infosys spent $350 million on the campus, and will spend $140 million this year on training, said Pai, the human resources chief.

“This is the enormous cost we have to pay to ensure we have enough people,” he said.

They’re not the only ones.

IBM’s technical skills programs reached well over 100,000 Indians last year, from children to university professors. At Tata Consultancy Services, measures range from a talent search as far afield as Uruguay to having executives teach university classes – all designed simply to make people employable.

Most industry leaders believe these investments will pay off, and India will remain competitive. But most are also guarded in their optimism.

“We should be able to get through this year, but if we don’t get things like finishing schools into place we’ll see an actual shortage,” said Kiran Karnik, the NASSCOM chairman.

Much of the problem is rooted in a deeply flawed school system.

As India’s economy blossomed over 15 years, spawning a middle class desperate to push their children further up the economic ladder, the higher education system grew dramatically. The number of engineering colleges, for instance, has nearly tripled.

But the problems have simply grown worse.

India has technical institutes that seldom have electricity, and colleges with no computers. There are universities where professors seldom show up. Textbooks can be decades old.

Even at the best schools – and the government-run Indian Institutes of Technology are among the world’s most competitive, with top-level professors and elaborate facilities – there are problems.

The brutal competition to get into these universities means ambitious students can spend a year or more in private cram schools, giving up everything to study full-time for the entrance exams.

Instruction is by rote learning, and only test scores count.

“Everything else is forgotten: the capacity to think, to write, to be logical, to get along with people,” Pai said. The result is smart, well-educated people who can have trouble with such professional basics as working on a team or good phone manners.

“The focus,” he said, “is cram, cram, cram, cram.”

People can take what they will from this article. They can say, well why bother getting into a technical or working hard to get into college and get good grades if there are legions of not very well qualified Indian engineers to take my place. Or maybe they will say, look, if I work hard, get a good degree, keep in mind that there are going to be many baby boomers retiring in the next few years, and if I position myself to take over those positions, then my future is looking good because there are not many people in India who can do what I can do.

IMHO, there is no country in the whole that can match the U.S. in ingenuity, drive, and opportunity. In the U.S., you can go from dirt poor to stinking rich. There is no country that makes that easier than the U.S. Yes, there are flaws, yes, it’s not easy. But nothing beats the U.S. as long as we remember that.

And that’s what I tell every young person I encounter.

[Author]

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