Leverage your good qualities

Everyone has qualities and flaws. Ideally one should reduce their flaws and enhance their qualities.

But most of the effort is put in the former. To reduce flaws. But I believe leveraging your good qualities is the best way forward.

I have seen that when I am moving towards tasks that enhance and leverage my good skills, I become more confident, happy and jubilant!

Curbing a bad habit feels good but planting a new habit feels even better.

So what do you think? Which is better approach? What works for you? Killing the negatives or pruning the positives.

Let's discuss.

Job portals - how an AeSI graduate can use it optimally

As Seema Bhatia, former HR professional explains, "Job portals are quite useful when we have to recruit employees. Now, we don't have to wait for employees to send us their resumes, we can simply log on to the website, put in our criteria and get a list of the employees that we want. We often use the portals to target a mass audience."

The important bit in the above text is " put in our criteria"! Yes that's the whole thing.

The criteria are the keywords. If your resume have them, your resume will bubble up to the top. That's the secret there is in all online job portals.

Are you using this effectively?

Are you filling the job portal form with some afterthought?

Are you enriching your resume with keywords, describing your profile, experience and education?

Are you placing your target job specific words in your resume?

Hope this thoughts will trigger and help you use online job portals in a much better way.

Good luck!

One single thing

If you want to be great, practice.

Yes that's the post for today!! Don't just read it. Aim to implement and follow it.

Do this single thing and you won't have to read any other blog post, article or book to succeed!!

Start now!!

Practice !!!

Design-Analysis softwares or programming language should an AeSI graduate choose?

Recently Rohan had this question for me. He is in section B(aero mech), doing it from G.I.E.

His query

"
Sir, can u plz spare some time to tell us(i n my friends) whether we should go for learning softwares(catia proE..) or improve programming language(c, c++).
thanks sr.
"

So what should he do?

Should he learn analysis or design softwares or learn programming languages?

What's your call?

I would say do both. Design and analysis softwares are part of an engineers life. You can't bypass them. In the start they are the skills sets that can fetch you a job.

But knowing programming in any language is a life skill. It will make your life easier. As you pick programming skills, you will be able to automate stuff and tasks.

As an aesi graduate, I don't want you to push you towards software engineering if you aren't passionate about it, but learning and knowing a language will definitely give you an edge.

This all depends on your choice, and inclination.

During my AeSI days, and training period, I was more inclined towards programming but never missed an opportunity to pick up solidworks, ansys, etc.

The choice is yours!!

So it's your turn, tell us Design-Analysis softwares or programming language - which one should an AeSI graduate choose?

Measure

As Galileo said, anything not measured won't improve. Same is true for
any skills that you are developing.

Unless you put in the measurement, you will never be sure if you are
improving.

I was exposed to solidworks, Ansys and many other tools in NAL. To
track how I was doing and what I did in NAL, I kept track of the time
I have spent on each software.

This simple tracking, helped me tremendously. At the end of month, I
summaried the results and took stock. You can find some of this taking
stock posts in the archives of this blog.

So the take away from this post is measure and track your progress. It
boosts your skills.

As you might have noticed, the focus of past couple of posts on myaesi
blog is skills development, please find some other posts on this topic
via this link Http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/search?q=skills&max-results=100

How to improve your skills exponentially - Thought from AeSIAA outing

In the recent AeSIAA outing, I meet an AeSI student from chennai who
was such a good portrait artist.

He had brought his art work there and I had a look at his art. He
clearly had a passion for it and he was good at it.

After seeing this, I asked him if he has posted this some place, where
others can see it. He declined. I insisted Him to put it online for
others to see.

Why? Well there are three reasons.

1. By sharing your work, you spread it. You expose it and it might
land you some opportunity that would be impossible other wise.

2. By sharing you improve. You may draw or do things for your pleasure
but when you do things with the intenstions of sharing you tend to do
your best. It's human thing. By exposing it to other, you want the
thing to be the best.

3. By sharing, you invite critisism and praise. Both have their own
place. Positive praise motivates you while positive critisism will
help you improve. Critisism can help you see your pitfalls and improve
on.

Sharing if used can exponentially increase your skills.

So putting them for others to see is clearly to your advantege, but
where should your do it.

Internet is the best route. Don't have technical inclination to put up
a website, use orkut and facebook as your showcase.

Upload your work somewhere on free google pages and link it from your
facebook or orkut profile.

And the beauty of sharing is that this is not applicable for a drawing
artist, if you are learning catia or analysis, you can use the same
sharing technique to improve your skills !!

So what are you waiting for? The world is waiting to be amazed, show
your talent!!

More posts relating to skill building can be found via this link http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/search?q=skill+develop&max-results=100

AeSIAA Outing - some random thoughts

Yesterday at the appointed day 60+ people sacrificed there Saturday
and joined the AeSI community of friends and families for an outing.
Thank you all. You made it what it was.

It was the 3rd aesiaa outing and the unique thing about this outing
was we had more newer people joining us than the regulars. Members
outside Bangalore also came.

As someone told me "I don't know 80 % people here". That's a good
sign. Pointing that the reach of AeSIAA is going far and beyond from
where it began.

There was a resounding yes, when at the end of session, we asked
everyone if they enjoyed the whole experience.

Participation is enjoyment. That's what I saw yesterday. Those who
joined in and participated have enjoyed the most.

Well pictures of the event will soon follow. If you have some pics in
your digital camera, please do share it with us.

And for those who missed the event this time, hope you are enticed
enough to join in the next time we do something like this.

Cheers

I have been following aesiaa from it's inception, you can see it's
progress via the posts available at the following link http://my-aesi.blogspot.com/search?q=aesiaa&max-results=100

5 simple steps to have a productive day.

Be it in AeSI as a student or as a trainee in NAL or in your day job, here are 5 simple steps that can help you have a productive day.

1. Plan ahead.
Planning the day well in advance or the night before works great. This works because it untangles planning and action.

2. Make a routine.
Very similar to first point. Having a routine for all routine tasks helps in separating the action from planning. Frees you from day to day decision. Be it in what to study or what to work on next. Clearly maps your path.

3. Mix and match.
Working on one thing hours on is not going to cut it. Imagine how monotonous Sachin's batting would have been if he just used one shot all the time. Similarly, mixing different subjects or different activities in your work life goes a long way in keeping you alert and productive.

4. Not just work.
Work and no play is a bad combination. So Work and play. Don't just do serious stuff. Do the trivial stuff. Mix essential tasks with fun but non essential tasks. Life will be much more easier.

5. Process is important.
"Karam kiyae ja, fal ki chinta mat kar" says Bhagvat Gita. The process is important. The journey is the core. So make it a point to enjoy it. Destination will eventually arrive.

Most successful students and professionals use one or combinations of these steps. Why are you waiting for?

Good luck.

More tips at http://my-aesi.blogspot.com

Skill building via projects

How many times we start learning a new thing and mid way we either loose interest or stagnate. And then few months or years latter we again begin from the same place and repeat the cycle all over again.

Similar thing happened to a friend of mine, he get enthusiastic about learning a programming language. He gets all the tutorials, books and every thing ready. He does it for next few weeks but after reading/completing at some point he looses the plot and life moves on. Then a few months latter he again begins the same cycle.

So what should he do?

My advice. Don't start again. This time when you get the urge to start. Don't take the tutorial route. Jump straight into the water.

Start by doing a project. Think about a project and begin it using the skills you want to build. Place a goal that you will complete the project and once complete, you will put the finished product in public domain.

This is a much better approach. Try it if you find yourself stuck in the never ending cycle of skills inertia.

Two clear advantage of this approach are you are creating something. And working on a project related to skills you want to develop, you will pick up more insight than just by doing the usual exercises and tutorials.

So if you want to learn catia, ansys or fortran. Try the project centric approach to skill building.

If you try this, please do let me know how you fared.

Good luck!