Asei University Connect Makes Companies And Students Come Closer Together

Asei University Connect Makes Companies And Students Come Closer Together

University Connect is one of the pillars of our strategy to help students and early career engineers by forging strong relationships with Universities, student bodies and academics hailing from the Indian diaspora. As part of our focus on  youth empowerment and helping them find internships and jobs, we have been organizing events across many of our chapters over past  years. 

As Mother Teresa aptly put it once:

“I alone can not change the world, but I can cast a stone across the water to create many ripples”

So we at ASEI Silicon Valley Chapter thought of making a bigger ripple impact by coordinating a Career Fair across multiple campuses and got many of our professional chapters including Washington DC, Dallas and SoCal reach out to universities and academics in their region and beyond to come together along with inviting recruiters from several companies. The result was an engaging program with 6 speakers and multiple recruiters from our sponsors and supporters.
The students were thrilled to know about open opportunities while recruiters were able to showcase their companies and the process to go about applying to those. At this event, we were fortunate enough to get the support from Juniper Network’s CTO Dr Raj Yavatkar who shared tips from his illustrious career journey as he rose from an engineer to a technology manager to a powerful silicon valley executive across iconic companies such as Intel, VMware, Google and now as CTO at Juniper Networks. A holder of 45+ patents and 60+ publications and a book, Dr Yavatkar emphasized the importance of saying yes and developing soft skills in addition to strengthening the technical competencies.
Diliip Saraf, who is also an IIT alum has had the distinction of reinventing himself and pivoting 6 times before becoming “Linkedin’s #1 Leadership reinvention guru /coach” and now advises senior managers on their journey to executive and C level roles. He talked about the “The Magical Power of Storytelling” in communicating professionally, especially making oneself more attractive to prospective employers. The frameworks and ideas he shared are useful to not only his paying clients (a few of them were actually in the audience!) but also to students and early tenure ASEI members.
Since Linkedin is a tool that most job seekers and recruiters rely on in today’s world, we had a career coach Padma Kulkarni from Canada share her tips on optimizing resumes and profiles on Linkedin. Padma used her own profile to make a point how even students with limited experience can make their profile attractive by including volunteer and professional affiliations (such as ASEI ) in their profiles. As it is, employers today prefer a strong personal brand and encourage “bring your whole self to work” so it was quite nice to hear the reinforcing messages from recruiters from Emerson, Veridic and Juniper as well in that context.

Veridic Solutions’ CEO Vikas Aditya while giving an overview of the cloud technology innovation solutions startup that he leads made an offer to provide free platform for career building – AI driven  job search, resume building and technical assessment tools to attendees and anyone affiliated with ASEI as they opened their cutting edge  internal tools to benefit our student members. Veridic also sponsored $25 Gift cards to 10 lucky attendees while O’reilly was kind enough to sponsor  books for five of our winners.

Emerson was represented by Vice president Sam Ladva and Smita Patel who in turn talked about what their company does and how they have been able to successfully recruit ASEI members in the past and offered a glimpse into the plethora of career options they provide.   Romi , Hong Trinh and Benjamin Chong  from Juniper’s HR team shared their opportunities as well. After the formal presentations, the students had an opportunity to interface with the recruiters and company representatives in smaller groups both online and at our in person locations. Our biggest in person location gathering was at UT Dallas facilitated by Prof Gaurav Shekhar and ASEI Dallas Chapter president Pueet Dixit. The students were able to network with recruiters from Veridic Solutions as well as ASEI Board members present

 As former US President – Ronald Reagan said  “We can’t help everyone but everyone can help some.”  In that spirit we will continue to make a difference one event , one step and one student at a time and encourage you to join hands in this mission to make a positive impact.

Here is the list of winners of door prizes.

Ten Winners of $25 Amazon Gift Cards sponsored by Veridic Solutions:

  • Sachin Chodavarapu
  • Amith Inturi
  • Keerthi Reddy Jagapathi
  • Chetana Anand
  • Anjali Murthy
  • Sreedevi Rajitha Malladi
  • Suhpriya Venkateshwaran
  • Sai Tara
  • Nihar Khillar
  • Siddhi Wadgaonkar

O’REILLY Book Prize Winners need to confirm your book choice per the notification:

Our  announcement on Linkedin garnered some good community reactions and we encourage you to share your views too there. – Piyush Malik

Arjun Parth