Career Bloom

Your source for authentic and practical career advice

Category: Students

  • My recent talk with a 3rd yr student in a Greater Noida engineering college left me very disturbed about lack of quality and responsibility of such private colleges. My thoughts on what needs fixing, and what we can do about it.

  • By making the kids start preparing for IIT-JEE so early in their life (Class VI in some cases!), we are robbing them of their childhood, and setting them on a path to cramming, rather than developing joy of learning. It’s time we change this!

  • In my previous post ‘Foreign students in US – China, India, South Korea’, I made the point that India is seeing a downward trend in terms of graduate students over last 3-4 years (while undergraduate has grown slightly), while China has been accelerating at a rapid pace in both graduate and undergraduate. Here is a…

  • Someone forwarded this article from New York Times: Getting Ahead in India Means Getting Out of Town. Here are some excerpts from the article: “… is among a rising number of students in India’s rapidly expanding younger population who want, and can pay for, a better education. Yet they know that in a country where…

  • Over last few months, I watched 2 Hindi movies, both by Amir Khan, which reminded me of some of the career lessons I have found useful to follow and to pass-around via my blogs and discussions. The 2 movies are Taare Zameen Par (movie review here) and 3 Idiots (movie review here). While Taare Zameen…

  • In the previous post, I described the scenario of two smart people in conflict in an organization and why they need to engage in a deep conversation. Here are some of the aspects of such a conversation that A and B need to keep in mind: Create shared goals: Without such a goal, no conversation…

  • As I mentioned in my previous post, I have been reviewing some of the career sites that seem to be popular in India. The goal was to understand how good (or bad) these sites are and then hopefully recommend some sites that are useful. However, while going through these sites, I realized that I promised…

  • As I mentioned in my previous post, I plan to review some of the web sites/companies that offer services in the general area of career counseling/guidance/management. Here is the list that I have come up with. Here is how I picked these sites: Listed some of the web sites that I heard about via TV…

  • As I may have mentioned in my previous post, I spent a month in India recently (August, 2008) before coming to Shanghai to join Microsoft here. In this post, I will comment on the education system and related aspects that I observed. In the next post, I will talk about my observations on working professionals…

  • This is the last article in the series on Measuring Career Growth, which started off by talking about measures of success and implication of having multiple measures vis-à-vis time, and was followed by posts on financial and learning goals, followed by a post on job complexity and satisfaction. As I promised in the last post,…