Page 18 - SMEC-Newsletter-12th-Edition

MechnoVIT ALUMNI CORNER

The time I spent in VIT was filled with cherishing moments. The relationship that I managed to develop with my
friends and professors are still going strong. Even though I have moved to lots of places in my career as a
student/researcher, the bonding I had developed with them and also with VIT University itself is unique and long-
standing. Even though I tried to make use of the opportunities and the facilities offered by the University as much
as possible, I still think I could have done better by involving myself in more extra-curricular activities, assisting
professors in their projects, taking language courses and so on.
One of the most unique attributes of VIT is certainly the vastness and
architectural beauty in its infrastructure that has been developed over the
MechnoVIT is the number of connections that VIT has with international Universities.
years. I have never come-across such kind in any of the University I have
visited/studied. Personally, one among the most attractive features of VIT

These opportunities provide students a chance to visit, interact, learn and
conduct experiments at VIT’s partner Universities. This will in turn
provide students an exposure to some of the state of the art technologies
developed across the globe, build their resume and also shape them
personally. Similarly, my experience with the cultural diversity at VIT was
highly useful when I became an international student in UK in terms of Dr. Gowtham Soundarapandiyan
socializing, initiating a discussion etc. with people from different cultural Postdoctoral Researcher
backgrounds. at PSI (2009-2013)
MechnoVIT Within VIT, modules like thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, material science, etc. that were taught during
I will always be grateful to VIT for helping me figure out the field I love to work-on for the rest of my career life.
classes, are some areas I am heavily working on and software packages like Ansys, Solidworks, Matlab, which
were taught to me by the professors of Mechanical department, are being used by me almost every day. In this
sense, the mechanical department helped me build my career.
Talking about my personal challenges, coming from a small town, I felt overwhelmed with
everything that went-on around me in the beginning. But eventually, I was able to gather some friends which
made the environment more comfortable. Then there were the typical challenges that any student would face like
clearing internal exams, semester exams, grades, Lab exams, projects and of course, keeping up with my
attendance.
After I got graduated, at some point in my routine day-to-day job, I found I was getting bored. I
MechnoVIT PhD I will not be able to grow-up in this field. So, I managed to find a fully-funded PhD project with Coventry
found that I wanted to work on challenging tasks that focused on addressing the fundamentals of science. This
landed me working as a junior research fellow in a government-grant project. But soon after, I figured without a

University, UK. Even during my PhD, there were things that I could not solve, which lead me do post doctorate,
where I am currently at.
Moving to the UK was not that hard of a challenge as you might have thought; it took me around
3-weeks to adapt to the winter and the time difference between UK and India. Secondly, I had to make some effort
to understand the Scottish and Liverpool English accents- which is quite different compared to the southern part
of UK. As for my advice to the current students, I would say to have an open-mind, not to get stressed so much. In
my experience I felt life is like a marathon, if you push yourself hard so early, you might get tired easily and lose
motivation. So, its ok if you don’t get placed in campus placements, or have some arrears.
MechnoVIT try to get hand-on experience on as many techniques as possible. From design software with GUI interface like
Explore yourself, try different things and find out what you like. Be updated with the technologies, developments
and pioneers in your field of interest and learn as much skills as possible while being a student. As for the skills,

AUTOCAD, SOLIDWORKS to coding in Python, Matlab, C# etc. Try not to narrow your focus, every additional skill
is useful. For mechanical engineering students, with growing super-fast computers, it might be useful to gain
knowledge on simulations (CFD, DEM and many more) and design software packages (SOLIDWORKS, CATIA,

some experience on machine learning could be an added asset.
18 AUTOCAD, etc). Some knowledge on coding (I found MATLAB and Python to be more widely used in Europe) and
As an ending note, I would like to share the famous quote from Steve Jobs- “Stay hungry, Stay foolish”.