Hello friends,
On behalf of Computer Society of India – Pune Chapter I extend my greetings to all of you. I would like to thank everyone for having given me this opportunity to work as the chairman of CSI Pune chapter for the year 2008-2009.
I am glad to inform you that about 30 senior IT professionals have joined the advisory committee and have shown great interest and ownership to manage and design certain events during the year.
Let me thank my predecessors – Gireendra Kasmalkar and Monish Darda for having done a great job. It will indeed be a challenge to match the expectations that they have set and I look forward to the new managing and advisory committee to help me achieve the plans set out in the current year.
The agenda that I have for the current year is
- Increasing the visibility of CSI – We have already made some progress in this direction. Our advisory committee comprises of personalities from almost all top IT companies. Through them we hope to carry the events that are organized by CSI to the other professionals in their organizations – thus spreading awareness.
- Increasing Industry Academy collaboration – During the last couple of years, increasing number of educational institutions are becoming members of CSI. As a result, we have many requests from them to conduct lectures / seminars in specialized subjects that are not part of their curriculum. Our plan is to have a pool of IT professionals who are willing to spare some time - to visit these colleges and deliver talks on current subjects. I urge top professionals in the industry to come forward and provide their contact details and the domain areas in which they specialize, so that we could suggest their names to colleges. This would benefit the students as well as the industry that would later on absorb them.
- Another highly appreciated initiative started by our chapter (in collaboration with SEAP) is the Training program for faculty members. Various Software companies have volunteered to conduct courses on different subjects for this programme. This ‘Train the Trainer’ program is organized twice a year – in June and December - during the vacation period. As many as 30 to 40 colleges in and around Pune have taken advantage of this programme. We will continue this activity this year under the able leadership of Mr. C.G. Sahasrabuddhe – who has been instrumental in making this happen.
- Career guidance and counseling – I feel that this is very important in the present situation when many fresh graduates may not get the appointment letters, promised during the campus recruitment last year – as reported by many newspapers. There can be tremendous frustration and confusion in the minds of these students when they have nothing to do for months after they graduate. This program is aimed at guiding such fresh graduates.
- Preparing for CSI convention 2009 – CSI Pune chapter will be hosting this mega event around October 2009. More than 1000 delegates are expected to attend this 3 day event. Pune Chapter had last hosted this event in 1978. This will need a lot of planning and organization. Interested persons are welcome to participate in the preparation of this. We plan to have a curtain raiser event sometime in Feb 2009.
We will continue to publish the newsletter every quarter this year. The newsletters published last year have received great reviews. Many thanks to Swati Deodhar (editor) for her vision and ideas for having theme based newsletters.
I urge you to visit our website regularly to know about the upcoming events and also to subscribe to csipune@yahoogroups.com (in case you have not already subscribed to it).
Along with the managing committee of Rajendra Erande, Nikhil Karkare and Pradip Valame, I look forward to an exciting year ahead!
With warm regards,
Meenal
