Working as a Graduate Senator:
- In my first term as a Graduate Senator, I make efforts to reach out to students on campus and understand to get feedback and areas of improvement for the university.
- One such issue that most students were concerened about was the duration of the hours of operation of Cris library on campus, especially during exams and finals. Many students expressed interest in having the library open 24X7 in order to prepare for papers.
- I reached out to the Dean of the library and other officials to discuss the possibility of having the library open for extended hours, along with analyzing the concerns of library staff if the change was made. After a series of discussions and planning sessions, for the first time in Fall 2016 Criss library remained open all night for students. Data gathered revealed more than 100 students took advantage of the extended hours every day.
- I have been inspired by Saint Mother Theresa who dedicated her entire life to serve the poorest of the poor, the sick, the crippled, the lonely and the unwanted in the slums of Calcutta, India. She welcomed everyone with open arms and touched the lives of millions and became a symbol of kindness, love and care and there is so much to learn from her.
- The qualities that I would like to emulate from Mother Theresa is being humble, kind and caring to all those around us. Working with my college, my parish and local non profit organizations in India, we used to reach out to the poor, the sick, kids who were orphaned and the elderly who were abandoned, providing them food, clothes and basic supplies.
- Today working with WhyArts in Omaha, Nebraska, I try my best to continue helping those in need and reaching out to at-risk youth, teen and adults with severe physical, mental and learning disabilities. I also work in a very diverse environment through by job at the Collaborative, and at the same time with campus organizations such as Student Government and Global Diplomats, and feel these skills of being humble, kind and caring are essential to fostering an inclusive and welcoming work environment.
- Mother Theresa was also very courageous, hardworking, energetic, bold and an effective communicator. Being a foreigner in India is never easy, and yet she made a change so profound that it touched millions all over the world. I understand very well that there is no substitute for hard work and look to Mother Theresa for courage. For me coming to a new country like the United States of America in search and hope for a better life has not been easy, as you have to start from the very bottom. But I have learnt never to give up and no matter what I challenge is, despite my imperfections, I strive to do the best in everything.
- From the slums of Calcutta, she founded the order of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950 and today has expanded with over 4,000 members in 697 foundations in 131 countries of the world all serving the sick and unwanted. Her story in truly amazing and inspiring and will always be close to my heart.
Working for Tata Consultancy Services:
In order to tacle this problem and make year end activities easier for my team, I began working on a project to improve the existing process in place:
Due to my effort, I was able to save significant man hours during every year end activities that would instead go in analyzing calendars, thereby saving close to $3000 for GE- Capital. I was awarded a customer appreciation certificate and an internal Six Sigma Green belt certification for my work.
- As a Systems Engineer, I helped manage the production environment for GE - Capital. The production enviroment had a large number of processes running on a daily basis and were scheduled using a batch scheduling tool called Appworx.
- As part of year end activities, our task was to schedule every process for the next year based on client requirements. In order to do this in production, developers would define a calendar for it, specifying the dates it was supposed to run. As a production team member our job was to identify the calendar that would be appropriate for each process based on its frequency and then extend it.
- GE - Capital's production environment had hundreds of processes running on a daily basis and had new ones being introduced during each release. Over time, this lead to the following problem:
- Duplicate calendars ( Same frequency, saved with a different name)
- Redundant Calendars ( Production job retired, leaving being the calendar)
- Randomly named Calendars (No proper naming convention followed by development team for a calendar making it difficult for production team to identify the calendar frequency).
In order to tacle this problem and make year end activities easier for my team, I began working on a project to improve the existing process in place:
- I analyzed every single existing calendar in production based on their frequency of operation and clubbed similar ones together. For example: The calendar FIRST_EVERY_MONTH, as the name suggests indicates that the process would run on the first day of every month.
- From each group of similar calendars, I choose one calendar that had a name that best described it's frequency. If no calendars had a proper naming convention, I introduced a new one and added the dates.
- Rescheduled all the production jobs to the new calendars and extended them for the next 3 years. Deleted all the redundant calendars.
- Documented all the changes in production and conducted a session to educate developers of the new naming convention to be followed for introducing a new calendar and to resuse existing ones first.
Due to my effort, I was able to save significant man hours during every year end activities that would instead go in analyzing calendars, thereby saving close to $3000 for GE- Capital. I was awarded a customer appreciation certificate and an internal Six Sigma Green belt certification for my work.
Through my work at the Collaborative and WhyArts, as well as being part of Student Government and Global Diplomat student organizations, I interact with people from all over.
- Within the Collaborative and WhyArts, through my work as a Program Manager and now as the Service Supervisor for Educational Support, I make sure I always try to foster an enviroment of trust and mutual respect so that everyone's opinions are heard. For example, during our Signature Sevice day event '7 Days of Service', as the Service Supervisor for Educational Support, I helped corordinate and engage a diverse group of volunteers and encouraged them to give back to our community.
- At Student Government, we identify issues on campus and try to come up with ways to improve services that make an impact and help students. I believe that to be a leader you don't need a title and that you can bring about change from anywhere in the organization. Therefore, to create an inclusive environment, I make sure to hear ideas and suggestions from everyone not restricting myself just to other senators. This includes other students and faculty on campus, administrative staff, Collaborative and Baxter Arena staff, managers, visitors etc to get a broad range on ideas that can be worked upon. A resolution in the Senate goes through a tough review process and it is during this time, I take advise from other senators, as we leverage common ground and work through our differences.
- Working as a Global Diplomat, my primary audience are international students who come from diverse backgrounds and have had so many rich experiences living in other parts of the world. I make sure to interact with them, understanding what their experience is studing on campus, things they appreciate as well as things they miss and wish they had here. For many Engish may not be the first language, so I make sure to learn some basic phrases in their native language first to make them feel comfortable and then encourage them to speak freely.
- During the senior year of college, I was working along with my team to implement a project to put all that we learnt in our degree to good use. We had to choose a topic in a promising field of technology and we chose to work on creating and implementing an inventory management system what would run in a virtualized operating system.
- As per one of the initial project requirements, we had prepared a list of tasks that needed to be done along with a timeline that needs to be followed for completing then, along with what was assigned to whom. We tried our best to follow it but considering that not everyone in the team was on the same page with regards to technical proficiency, we were getting things done much slower than what we had initially planned for. Also, half way through the project, as everyone in the team were busy with a lot of other activities on campus, we had a lot of scheduling conflicts, which lead to further delays.
- Due to all this, we got side tracked from our objective for a few weeks and it put us in a very bad situation that ultimately led to us missing deadlines. We also faced multiple code failures as we did not test it properly in an attempt to speed things up which inturn affected the quality of our deliverables.
- In order to tacle this, we initiated a discussion to plan and analyze the situation from a new perpective. Everyone in the team realized the gravity of the situation and agreed that we had made a mistake. Not giving up hope, we decided to put the past behind us and give it our best shot going further. We supported each other, asking help from each other in the areas that we lacked in and providing advise and guidance in the tasks we were most confident in. Together as a team, we worked all day and night totalling more than 13 hours each day and in the end were able to create the end deliverable by the end of the semester.
- Our project was appreciated by our professors and fellow students. The lesson we learnt is that together as a team we can accomplish anything no matter how difficult the task is. While working with Tata Consultancy Services and now with the Collaborative and WhyArts, I remember these life lessons as I work to help every one in my team and never shy away from asking feed back and guidance from others.
- I also learnt to never wait for the last minute and always be prepared to face failures and struggles, and how important it is to make plans well in advance. This is what I follow to this day and try my best to work in a systematic and organized manner which would display professionalism and be a source of inspiration to those around me.