Written on 10:05 PM by Tushar
On September 19th, I attended a career night organized by Alumni association of Whiting school of engineering at JHU. It was a nice opportunity to get tips from alumni having a variety of experiences ranging from building weapons of mass destruction to managing multi billion dollar finance firms. In the end of their presentation they had students to send resumes for review so that newbies will get to know weaknesses in their resume before they start flooding mailboxes of recruiters all over the place :)
I sent mine and was surprised to get a call one fine day that the alumni who reviewed mine wanted to meet me in person. He was going to do a presentation at Hopkins as a part of “Conversations with leaders” lecture series. He personally invited me to attend his talk on ‘Building and selling a software product company’. He was Neil Kleinberg, president of ‘Vertical Falls software’.
After the talk we had a chat for 20 minutes about my short time and long term goals and what my plans are to achieve them. I also asked about whether I should go for a MBA as I think that’s a good way to get VC funding whenever I decide to take the plunge and start on my own. (Believe me it is going to happen!) Though this is a very long term plan it doesn't hurt to start early. He was very nice and supportive and we exchanged good byes with his comment “In the worst case you will do exceptionally well!”
:)
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grad life
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Written on 10:58 AM by Tushar
I had written a blog before regarding my independent study in I/O virtualization so thought of adding a finale.
To give you a background, I was talking to Prof. Randal Burns regarding doing some research in I/O virtualization in the beginning of Spring semester. Randal told me that I can work on any idea that I find interesting. By then I had already accepted VMware’s offer for the summer internship so I decided to talk to them to see if they had anything research-y that I could work on. My VMware manager and mentor were very approachable and as per their suggestion I decided to work on ‘Storage I/O load balancing algorithms’ as my independent study topic. Randal was fine with this idea. Till the end of spring semester I was still in the reading phase to figure out the depth and breadth of the problem. At JHU, if you start an independent study in Spring then you can extend it till the end of Oct if your adviser is fine with that. Till I joined VMware, I had no idea whether I will be working on the same stuff. Fortunately it turned out that it is going to be my summer internship project. I won’t go into details of what we achieved due to Intellectual Property issues but to sum up my experience I will say my internship was “any systems programmer’s dream job”. My talk at VMware on the same topic was also very well received.
After coming back to Hopkins I went to Randal to give him an update about my independent study work. I thought I will have to do some more work before writing the report. But I was surprised to see the outcome of the meeting!
R: “It must be a busy summer!”
R: “So did you work on $$$$$$ worth storage arrays?”
R: “So how do you plan to use this work?
Me: (worried)What do you mean?
R: “Do you want to use this as a masters thesis or a project?”
Me: (couldn't believe my ears!)“Do you think I can use this as a thesis?”
R: “Sure…(with some improvements,suggestions)”
R: "...As far as an independent study is concerned just submit the report and you're good to go..."
R: “If I were to review this paper for FAST…”
:)
In the words of my mentor, “Good to see that your independent study bird fell with this stone! “
So officially I just need two more courses to graduate!
Posted in
grad life,
vmware
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Written on 5:37 PM by Tushar
I uploaded my website yesterday.
It took longer than expected (I spent significant amount of time for two days) and basically taught me the importance of having the right tools! With a little bit of googling I found a nice CSS on oswd.org. (Mine is created by Arcsin. Good job dude! ) Since I had already decided what stuff to put on the website the pages were already in place. So far so good… My laptop's Adobe dreamweaver trial version had expired and MS office 2003 did not have FrontPage. Those were the only two visual editors for HTML that I knew. Since I needed an alternative I tried Nvu, CoffeeCup editor and HTML Kit. Nvu is at least tolerable. In the end I had to copy my stuff to one of the lab machines in JHU to use FrontPage to fix some annoying image linking issues.
Initially I was planning to add a separate page to upload problem statements and design/performance documents for my academic course projects.Given that it will be a pain to keep the page up to date I decided to drop the idea.
Anyways I am pretty happy with its look and feel. Do let me know your comments.
Posted in
life
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Written on 12:47 PM by Tushar
I got to work today at 6am to join another 1000 VMware employees for the IPO gathering. The event was a wonderful opportunity to see VMware ring the opening bell at the NYSE, the very first trade of "VMW", a very sumptuous hot breakfast, a bevy of espresso drinks, a toast to VMware's future!
As I was guessing earlier the IPO was a no-brainer! VMware stock was launched at $51.06 which was 76% higher than the list price! According to Bloomberg ,‘The initial public offering was the largest technology sale since Google Inc.'s three years ago.’ Read a live diary describing the exciting events that took place during the first hour of trading.
People have already started talking in terms of the "next VMware" instead of the "next Google".While talking about IPO of Classmates.com IPO, the columnist says, "So can Classmates be the next Google (GOOG), or for that matter, the next VMWare (VMW), the storage software maker that surged nearly 80 percent out of the gate in its market debut Tuesday?"
Proud to be a part of VMware! Cheers!
Posted in
vmware
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Written on 4:11 PM by Tushar
I had thought that the weekend will be a little boring (definitely not exciting!) as Minu and Gud boy had decided to hone their driving skills on a rented car and I was supposed to help them. So I imagined myself sitting in the car yawning for the whole weekend when these guys will make countless rounds of some random parking lot. There was also a plan to look at used cars. We exchanged a few emails during the week discussing the “strategy” and decided that on Saturday afternoon we(our team:)) will practice driving in Oracle and VMware parking lot and in the evening we will visit various dealers for used cars. (We had heard (which turned out to be true!) that if you buy a used car from a dealer then even though you get a warranty and stuff you will end up paying something close to 10K and in our opinion it was too much to pay for an old car! So a visit to the dealer was meant to be an exercise to find out what are the options available if we buy a car from the dealer). Entire Sunday was devoted to meet various sellers (whose info was gathered from craigslist) and a little bit of driving practice.
So if you have read carefully you can see there was not even a remote intention of buying a “new” car.
Till Saturday evening everything was going as per the plan. We practiced a little in the Oracle parking lot, visited Minu’s swanky office at Oracle HQ (it's awesome!) and visited a couple of dealers of used cars. The turning point came when while passing by we noticed a sign for used cars at a Toyota showroom and rushed inside. The salesman mentioned that you can get a new Toyota Yaris in the same cost as that of a decent old car. We took a test drive and were kinda convinced that we can think about buying a new car instead of taking a risk of buying a used one.
On Sunday morning though had we gathered a huge list of sellers from craigslist, instead of calling anybody we decided to visit Ford and Honda showrooms to see if there was anything that could have fit in our budget. Ford focus was really within the budget. Good gas mileage, decent looks and a brand new car within the same price as that of an old one! But we wanted to visit Honda showroom before making the final decision.
We were interested in taking the quotes for Honda Civic as it is ‘the’ car that every desi new college grad imagines as his/her first! Since it was a high demand car Honda had added 2K more on the price of a new Civic. So now a civic was at the same cost as that of an Accord….interesting! So why not go for an Accord than a Civic? Gud boy was fine with that and rumor has it that it was Minu’s childhood fantasy to own a Honda Accord :) Once both the ‘parties’ gave the green signal and negotiations began.
You can imagine 3 novices negotiating
- whose highest purchase in US so far has been a laptop (In Gud boy’s case a ticket to India maybe)
- who had driven a car less than 10 times in US
- who could not tell what a comprehensive car insurance includes, how a burglar alarm system in the car is different than the centralized locking system
- who did not know what would be the best base price of the car that they have just decided that they would buy
- who had no idea from where they can get the car finance at the lowest APR
- who were unaware of Honda Policy that the buyer should have a permanent California license
But in the end it didn’t matter :)
As my dad always says, all you need is a common sense! For everything that we were not sure of we called numerous friends for advice and after negotiating for 7 hours emerged outside the Honda showroom with two (identical;))brand new 2007 Honda Accord at a price less than a Civic !
One weekend…three people…two new cars! That’s exciting!
Minu and Amit: Congrats :)
Posted in
grad life
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