Life is still dragging on as usual with all the usual s**t of office work, phone calls and all the usual stuff....Life has become some sort of monotony which I expect to break soon hopefully........Was filling up the SPJIMR profile sheet that actually sent me to an introspective mode.....The answers required quite a bit of soul-searching........Let me post the thing here....
Adversity faced in life.
I suffered from a long illness after my Class 10th. A lot of medical tests and medication followed since the root cause of the illness could not be determined and I took around a month to recover. I missed many of the initial classes in my college due to this.
Distinct contributions to the society by you or your family members.
I was a part of the Rotaract Club at NIT Rourkela under the Rotary Club actively involved in blood donation camps, clothes collection camps for orphans, drugs and HIV awareness camps for college students etc. My grand mother had also started an English medium school at our native village.
My formative years..
Effective planning and sacrifices by my parents ensured that I was taken care of well during my formative years. I have imbibed a lot of values, ethics, culture and morals from them. My school and hostel life also taught me teamwork skills, basic leadership skills, sharing, accommodating different viewpoints etc.
Explain a situation when you were a part of a team where the group process and/or intended outcome failed. What was your role, how did you contribute to the process or outcome, and what did you learn?
Every year during our college tech fest, there used to be a computer gaming tournament at an inter-college level and me and my friends used to participate as a team enthusiastically every year. In the tech fest in 2007, during our final year, we had one last chance to win the first place in the tournament. The game we used to participate in was Counter Strike which is a real time army team strategy game. In the early stages of the tournament, we were comprehensively beaten by a relatively weaker underdog team of our college although we were clearly the favorites. The key factors that led to our defeat were ineffective planning and strategy, overconfidence that ultimately led us to misjudge the opponent’s strengths and neglect our own weaknesses, lack of out-of-the-box ideas for attack and defense and ineffective communication between team-members that led us to work incoherently. As far as my role is considered, I should have been a little more prudent and thought about the strengths and weaknesses of the opponents and my team-mates. I should also have tried harder to pull my team together. We failed because we lacked a proper strategy and a foolproof game plan.
Describe an instance in which you took the strongest stand of your value system. What specific values were violated and what was at stake for you?
I believe a lot in fair play and a clean competition where only merit and ethics matter. I don’t believe in malpractices to achieve victory and short term gains. I believe in having a guilt-free conscience. The year was 1998. It was a national level Geo-map quiz being conducted by the Indian National Cartographic Association. I was representing my school in the same. My father had accompanied me to the venue. We were waiting for the competition to begin when my father suddenly met one of his friends at the venue. He had seen him after a long time after having lost contact with him for many years. After exchanging pleasantries, we came to know that my father’s friend was in fact a member of the organizing committee. Once he came to know that I was going to take part in the competition, he immediately offered to help me out with all the answers assuring me a win. The offer was politely turned down by me. I finally entered the competition without any help. Although I didn’t win the competition, I came out of the competition satisfied that I had not cheated and had held on to my values.
Explain a situation where you have brought about any improvement either in your self, work or society.
Improvement has been a continuous process in my life. Small events like practicing in front of the mirror before debate competitions to remove my fear of public speaking, writing non-stop for hours to increase my writing speed during the exams etc. have all brought about small improvements in me. As a part of the Rotaract Club, I have tried to bring about improvements in the society and in peoples’ lives be it whether by donating blood or by donating clothes to orphanages, visiting the children there personally and spreading joy etc. When I joined my work place, I found that the processes for initial training and orientation of new team members required improvements. I tried my best in providing initial training about the project to new members, prepared well documented step by step procedures for crucial tasks to be completed for them to start getting productive soon, trained them in the usages of various tools used in the project, helped them with their queries, spent time with them explaining them about the business of the client over and above my daily responsibilities. This indirectly has also brought further improvement in my self, helping me in my team-building and communication skills.
Give a detailed description of the roles, responsibilities and achievements at your current /last place of employment.(in not more than 300 words)I have been working with IBM India Pvt. Ltd. since 8th June 2007 till date. My role in my work place is that of an Application Programmer. I have been working in the Financial Services sector since 2007 and my client is a major credit card organization. The software we are developing and supporting is an online dispute resolution software for credit card transactions for the use of credit card issuer and acquirer banks. My job involves a lot of interaction with people onsite and offshore, understanding and working with client banks and providing them solutions as a team, imparting trainings etc. My responsibilities include coding in JAVA, smoke testing the application, daily reporting activities, maintaining the application, diagnosing issues reported by clients and users and resolving them. I have also taken up the responsibility of a Software Configuration Administrator in Rational ClearCase. This role involves responsibilities like code merges and delivery, training people about the usage of the tool, resolving issues pertaining to the tool, preparing documents of reference etc. I have also completed IBM internal online courses for understanding the business and functioning of the banking sector in general and the dispute cycles of credit cards in particular which have helped me gain a good domain specific knowledge. I have also completed online certifications at IBM pertaining to data security and privacy, working and communicating effectively in a global environment, personality development etc. that have honed my soft skills apart from my technical knowledge. The most important achievement at my work, apart from the appreciation mails from my clients and my team mates, is the appreciation award “BRAVO-The Best Of IBM” that I won in April 2008 for my contribution to the project. I have also been rated a “Solid Contributor” continuously for two appraisal cycles in IBM.
