Assignment: Once a semester starts, a graduate student shall be doing at least one assignment a week. Most of the assignments may not be that easy as your undergraduate assignments back in your home country. Again if one starts working on it just the day before the submission, one may not finish it in time. For most of the courses, assignment plays a big role in the overall grades.

Bike: Bike or the bicycle is most probably going to be your mode of transportation during your study days in US. It is the cheapest and the fastest vehicle available for a graduate student to go from one point to another.

Credit Card: Your best friend in times of economic stress during your graduate studies. At least once during your studies you may be forced to use the credit card. Always remember one thing – if you don’t use it wisely it would land you in trouble forever.

Dollar: The scarce commodity in the hand of a graduate student. Always try to make both ends meet with whatever you have.

Exams: An integral part of the courses you take. Professors will be testing your practical knowledge rather than your theoretical knowledge as you are used to India. Initially you may find it tough but within few weeks you will get used to the system.

Fast Food: At least once in a week you shall be eating from either Burger King or Taco Bell or McDonalds – the reasons – you are too lazy to cook or you don’t have time to go home for lunch; whatever be the reasons the result of eating from these fast foods will show up on your body in a year or so as you start gaining lots of weight.

Google: Your life as a graduate student revolves around Google. Google has answers for many of your problems J

Hourly Job: The first thing a graduate student starts looking for once he/she lands in US – some are lucky to get an hourly job that can pay for the day to day expenses.

Internship: Getting an internship is the dream of any gradate student. In addition to a good pay, an internship offers real time experience that will be very helpful in the job search after your graduation.

Jobless: When you come to do your graduate studies be prepared for the worst case – not getting any job during the extended period of your studies. The key here is not to loose hope and keep searching.

Kitchen: Never ever cooked in your life time? OK, things are about to change. You will be cooking food on your own or else you cannot survive on the money you make as a student.

Laundry: You wash your own clothes in the laundry machines in the apartment. It might be a new experience for a few.

Manage: Very important factor to succeed. You may have to do so many things (study, hourly job, cooking etc) at the same time and one has to be a good “manager” to succeed in all those.

Night Out: You may have experiences of “Night Out” during your undergraduate studies. But now be prepared for many more “Night Outs” especially during the last few days of the semester.

OPT: OPT or Optional Practical Training is the work permit with which you can work without a visa for a year for all graduates and for 29 months for some graduates (graduates of STEM). OPT process has become complex over years and you will be talking a lot about it starting few months before your graduation.

Party: Graduate study is not all about studies, it is also about parties. Friday and Saturday nights are meant for partying and you are going to have a lot of fun during these parties.

Quality: Whatever it be – studies, hourly jobs or exams or assignments it is the quality of the work that matters. Always strive to produce quality work and rest assured that you will be coming out with flying colors.

Room Mates: Don’t even think of staying in an apartment on your own when you come here for graduate studies. You may have to share a room with one or two or three others depending on the location of the school and your financial conditions.

Soda: You start drinking soda more than water. In some shops it is cheaper than buying drinking water.

Travel: Spring and summer break (total of 4 months) are for travel. You have lots of places to visit in the US and this is the right time to go. A nice way to spend time away from school and studies.

USCIS: US Citizen and Immigration Services or USCIS is the agency where you need to send all your documents for processing your visa and other immigration papers. You will be hearing a lot about this during your study days in US.

Visa: You will be force to think/talk about this almost every day you are in US. The F1 visa status places a lot of restrictions on students and you will be reminded of your visa status during your entire stay in US.

Walmart: One stop shop for all your shopping needs. You get almost all the stuff you need and more importantly at a very low price.

Yardstick: You should be keeping a yardstick for yourself all through your studies and see that you achieve those yardsticks. If you cannot, you should look back and see why you could not meet them.

Zest: The most important thing – the zest or enthusiasm to accept the challenges you face during the graduate studies and zest to overcome it. If you have that zeal everything else will fall in place.

Original Post at: Iamaceo.com

We, the LEAVES –“ Jithin V M, Samna Prasannan, Divya S Naik, Sreelima C V, Jithin Subash..”; after completing our mini project were just starting to relax when teachers told that major project was to be started from s7 onwards. This time they put a new criteria – we had to choose a topic and get approval from our project coordinator ie Miss Priya. Everyday we would search new topics and submit them to Miss Priya but she never accepted any of those telling she expected more from us. While all other groups got their topics and company ready, 5 of us were still thinking about what to do. One day someone teased us saying do “ECG ANALYSIS” as our project. The boys laughed off. At last when miss was not accepting any topics our group leader told her about this. He just added that we can view ecg on mobile. Miss got impressed and accepted it. We were in a complete state of confusion. We had no company to help us. We then started hunting for a company that would help us in this. After contacting about 10 to 20 companies at last one company agreed that they would try to help us. They did not give any guarantee about the output. Again we were starting to relax when another blow came on our head. Miss priya wanted hospital automation along with ECG viewing. Finally we created an abstract that were full of fantasies. Miss Priya gave us the following ideas; we had to create an embedded system that records ECG and temperature from an ICU patient’s body and store it in the database. We didn’t have any guarantee about output. But we named it as LIVE meaning little intensive and designed a logo also .

We had 3 entities admin, doctor and staff. Each doctor can create his account by registering and he can login only after approval from admin. Authorized doctors can login and their home page has details about his general and ICU patients, medicines and opinion about patients. He can view ECG and temperature of ICU patients; refer his patient to other doctors, accept reference from other doctors and mark his attendance also.

Staff can login and can register new patients and assign them to a doctor. They can record ECG and temperature of patient. When doctor is not available, they can send an SMS to doctor’s mobile asking him to view the ECG.

Doctor can then login from mobile using our application that is pre-installed in his mobile and he can view the ECG and temp of patients which is retrieved from the ftp server. He can prescribe medicines and send it back to the staff. Automatically an SMS will sent to the doctor’s mobile if the temperature of the patients exceeds a particular threshold.

Admin has the top privilege and does the whole management.

At Ernakulum, when others were enjoying, we, the frustrated five were spending the whole day from 10th to 5 in our company. Thus after a whole year of tedious work we successfully completed our work. By that time we had changed the name to MOBILE MEDICAL TELEMETRY. Our hard work finally got good appreciation and today we have submitted our final report also. And I am taking this opportunity to thank Miss Priya for the strength and support she had given us.

visit www.leavestechut.com for screenshots and details of our project.

An interesting management article from Dr.YLR Moorthi. 
Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?
Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sony’s and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel’s parent) are breathing easy you can’t be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the Smartphone bus. They admit that Apple’s I phone and Google’s Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The "Mahabharata" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow’s personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won’t compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today’s competitor. Today’s competitor is obvious. Tomorrow’s is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton’s law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC’s price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film’s competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don’t remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.

—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore.