Goodbye Kolkata, Hello Mumbai

I spent the last 3 years working in Kolkata, and now it is time to take the next step in my career. I will be joining the Master of Management program in the Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay. It is a 2 year, full time residential course.

July 1st was my last working day in IBM, and I really enjoyed my work there. I had started off as a campus recruit, with my Entry Level Training Program (ELTP) starting on 22nd July 2005. The training lasted for about a month and a half. I got into a project (Model Driven Business Transformation – MDBT) in September itself as the training was wrapping up. In fact, I continued in the same project throughout my stay in IBM – so not much variety there.

Coming to the project – MDBT started off as a research project in IBM T J Watson Research with the aim of modelling a business process and translating it to a solution and generating a platform-specific IT implementation with customizations along the way. The basic idea is to empower a business analyst with the ability to develop applications for a business process.

There were 8-10 people in the project when I started, and we reached a peak size of around 15 about a year ago. My role in the project was initially that of a developer, collaborating with colleagues from the IBM labs (Watson, IRL – Delhi, ISL – Pune) to customize the generated applications for different projects. I also travelled to the Watson Research in Yorktown Heights, NY (my first trip outside India) in February-March 2007, to interact with the clients and gather requirements. I was also involved the design and development of one of the modules of the MDBT toolkit responsible for code generation over the last year.

The project gave me the chance to explore and try out different technologies, and get to understand some of the current popular areas like SOA and MDA. Apart from the project work, I also got the opportunity to network with my colleagues around the world, and started blogging seriously (but not that regularly I suppose).

From a personal side of things, my stay in Kolkata was even better as this was the first time I got to reside in my native place. I got to spend 3 years amid my relatives, attend social functions and get to know everyone better. In fact, I had opted for my job posting on Kolkata with this aim in mind. I got to stay with my grandfather who was living alone since my grandmother passed away in December, 1999. I will be taking away a lot of precious memories from my stay in Kolkata.

All said and done, it was a very fruitful stay, and it is time to take the next step. Mumbai will make it 3 out of 4 metros in which I have resided (Chennai and Kolkata being the other 2), with Delhi the only one left.