Guest lecture

I got an opportunity to do a guest lecture in St.Joseph’s college of engineering, Chennai on 31-Mar-09. I was asked to take an hour to do the lecture on ‘Database design’. College was 27 kms from my home which I did not expect. I had a quick meeting with their guest lecture in-charge and CS department HOD. HOD was curious about where I studied and how I got to know about NIT Warangal (where I did MCA). We also talked about the campus placements and recession. She was pretty cool about downturn and said this is a cycle and it is not permanent types. Probably because I stepped into a college after a decade, some kind of happiness kicked in and the campus looked great with an air conditioned library etc. Guest lecture in-charge took me to a huge seminar hall. One of the students started with a welcome speech. (They took my profile.) I never thought they would use the content for preparing welcome speech. I was taken a back for a moment after looking at the way they introduced me.
I had very less time to prepare. I had put together few slides on db design, the products available in the market, how do we choose the database servers when it comes to live projects, usage of data store, little bit of business intelligence and in general talked about the future for the current students in terms of SaaS, open source, Cloud computing, Mobile computing etc and also talked about developing niche skills for getting better opportunities in the IT industry. I tried to make the session more interactive. It was difficult since all of them are first year MCA and MSc. Students. Very few students asked questions. Since I did this for the first time, it was thrilling. It was a good experience. I think I am quite confident of doing more lectures with better content.