My dear students: Today it is a great pleasure for me to be here among you. Thank you all and my most heartfelt thanks goes to the Management of EASA for having invited me to be with you on this day on the occasion of the inauguration of the Technical Symposium being organized by the Mechanical Engineering Department.
Personally, it is a feeling of rejuvenation and savoring nostalgic moments of yore when I am here. Both these words rejuvenation and nostalgia have a lot of connotation for me. For one, when one is past the middle age and standing at the brink of 60s, it brings a lot of refreshing thoughts and renewed energy that I now pull from you youngsters as I stand amidst you. For a person who is of the earlier generation, to interact with the present generation (people call you Gen Y, having born in the ‘80s and ‘90s) is look back at the energy and enthusiasm that I once possessed when I was your age which now looks like stone-age to me now. But I would not consider you as Gen Y but rather as Gen S. S standing for smart. A generation that is surrounded by smart phones and smart devices making you exposed to equipment that can make you faster and more agile and smarter than we were a long time ago. For nostalgia, I am reminded of my college days of the late ‘70s. I recall the ambience of the academic atmosphere and the camaraderie that I enjoyed with my batch mates – all 200 of us staying together in the Hostel. If you ask me, “Which is the best part of your life?” without hesitation my answer would be the 5 years that I spent in my college. No other phase of my life would come anywhere near to matching those 5 magic years. So my dear young friends, my advice to you is - enjoy the student days that lie ahead of you – use it to enjoy and learn to sharpen your skills, identifying your strengths and work to further augment them and locating and repairing your weakness to turn them into your assets that would stand you in good stead in the life that you are going to enter into in a few years from now. Opportunities like technical meets and symposia which are vehicles for show casing one’s technical prowess was practically absent in those days when we were studying. Now the times have changed. There are a lot of opportunities for students to present technical papers, exhibit their inventions in a competitive manner across such fora as this. So it is up to you to leverage such opportunities and hone your skills. In those days, here and there, there were a few inter-collegiate competitions like debates, quizzes, elocution, singing and such fine arts. Probably the dearth of engineering colleges, meant opportunities for technical papers presentation and exhibiting technical skills were not there much. But it is very different now. These meets are not for entertainment, they are for infotainment – a place to gather and share technical information in a way that combines the business of learning with the pleasure of competing against your peers. Like the whetstone that sharpens a knife, these are occasions when you are able to rub shoulders with and pit your knowledge and skills against your peers, where you are never the loser. It is an always a win situation, because it is the competition that teaches you here - acting as the stone to sharpen your latent skills by seeing and learning, hearing and learning and doing and learning. This is the friendliest atmosphere of competition that you can ever see in your life, far removed from the competition that you would encounter in the world outside. So all of you should participate enthusiastically and for the spectators, please pledge to yourself that the next occasion would turn you from spectators to participants. Believe me; the sheer joy of participation would far off set the passive thrill that you may earn as a spectator. So let today challenge you, to kindle the spirit of active participation for tapping such opportunities in future. This should be the jump board for you to practice - to launch you into your chosen field later in the life. The life after college would demand certain faculties from engineering students like you and such events can be your training ground. For the first and the foremost would be your soundness of the knowledge of the subjects that are taught to you in the class rooms. Many students have I come across, whom I find woefully low in having the grasp of the fundamentals. True your scores would count – for it is the passport that would allow you to gain entry into the portals of employment. But today all potential employers look for that spark beyond your academic marks - looking for the employability of the potential candidates. One aspect that would put a student on a strong footing would be his sound technical knowledge and his or her grasp of the fundamentals. So prepare yourself for that. But that alone would not suffice for most of the jobs. Your ability to articulate and communicate is an equally important skill that you need and you all should acquire. Many employers would be impatient – they do not have the time or patience to spend days, weeks and months to train you to make you fit in. For time as you all know, is money. So learn to communicate – clearly and lucidly, for how else will your employer know about the skills that you possess – unless otherwise you are able to put it across to them in a way that they understand. If you turn the pages of newspapers and popular magazines, in most of the articles you would find the author lamenting about the absence of soft skills with the present generation and their inability to be employed. Maybe the smart phones and the social networking sites are a cause of this lamentable state of affairs. Why you, even people who are in late 50s and early 60s are addicted to whatsapp and facebook. I’m a member of many groups and it never ceases to amaze me at the level of addiction I see among the group members. The groups are active 24 hours a day. For this, I would not blame technology; it is our tendency to allow technology to take over us that leads to such state of affairs. So axiom number 1 (a) is: - learn your fundamentals and 1(b) is: - enhance your communication skills. The formula for success is S = f(k,c) where S is your success rate, k is your knowledge level and c is your communication skills. As engineers I suppose that you should be able to better appreciate this mathematical equation. In any organization that you want to work for, there would be many functions, ranging from R&D, engineering, marketing, finance, quality, IT, and operations. While one or two of you who may have a flair for finance can certainly plan to take up that area of work. A long time ago I too started my career in a finance company – but I lasted there for just about 6 months and since I found myself as a fish out of water and I moved over to an engineering company. While for some of you R&D may sound exciting and you would like to immerse yourself in product development as a career there are many other opportunities in the outside world for engineers. But the bottom line is simple - all jobs call for only a simple common sense approach - to understand, tackle and solve issues and a spirit of innovation to bring about change – whether they are incremental changes spread over a large span of time or a drastic, disruptive and instantaneous change. The business world seeks for people with common sense and people who are innovators. The structured approach that an engineering course offers should enable you to acquire the element of common sense and imbibe in you the spirit of innovation. For long years, I have always believed that any activity can be reduced to a mathematical formula. Now I have veered to think it as “many activity” in place of “all activities”. But then that may be because of the ageing factor. The idea underlying this thought that I am sharing with you, is that an engineering course helps you to approach problems in a structured way. True there are always mavericks and geniuses – those who thrive on unstructured approaches. They are exceptions and we shall not consider them here. We shall look at the ordinary mortals like you and me – and let me share the secret of my success here – it is long hours of working and continuously updating myself – which only helped me to implement continuously incremental innovations in all areas that I have served. This is what I recommend to you my dear students for success in your life. When you shall combine a common sense approach and foster within you the spirit of innovation let me tell you, your success is assured, whether as an employee of an organization or if you would prefer as an entrepreneur. It is your choice to be an employee or be the employer but whatever course of life you adopt after you leave your studies try to adopt the 4 Cs and keep them close to your heart. Let them be your work-life ethic – Comprehension, Communication, Common-sense and Creativity. You may wonder why I have now introduced a new terms here Creativity and Comprehension. That is because innovation is the outcome of creativity. And is it not your creativity that is going to be exhibited in this techno-fest. And comprehension is the root of the soundness of your knowledge. The soundness of your knowledge is built upon your comprehending thoroughly the subject of your study. So use this mantra – adopt the 4 Cs and walk on the path of success from today. With that word of parting I Wish you all – participants and “future-participants-now-spectators” the very best in today’s endeavor and for all your life time in future and thanking you for patience in hearing me out, let me conclude my speech so that you can start your function.
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AuthorCyril Fernandez ArchivesCategories |