She's had a good journey so far. This is referring to my sister Deepika's career journey so far. It actually goes back to right from her after school days. Fresh out of school, no sense of direction, and her brother that's me, seemed to have other priorities. I managed to use some influential contacts and get her admitted to B.Sc in Bio Chemistry (a relatively sophisticated sounding course for the time) at a reputed college in Chennai. From then, she was all by herself.
The 3 years flew by, she enjoyed her college life and it was time to think of what lay ahead. Having completed B.Sc (Bio-Chemistry), she had 4 choices:
CHOICE-1: Continue with Masters in Bio-Chem > look out for jobs
CHOICE-2: Continue with Masters in Bio-Chem > Do a PhD > get into Bio-chemical research / teaching
CHOICE-3: Look out for a job
CHOICE-4: Leave it all > enjoy life and learn cooking.
Fate ironically always throws up a surprising CHOICE-5, which was what happened in her case too.
Thanks to her super-cool friends at college, she came across another sophisticated sounding course - Masters in Environmental Science at the second best College in the state (considering IIT's the best). This to me sounded like "Masters in [something really cool] at a [really cool college], more of a brand building stuff. To complicate matters more, she topped the entrance, now I had no choice but to approve her choice of study. Asked about career prospects, none of us had a clue. We just had to go with the flow.
Deepika went through another 2 years of grueling fun-filled college life and graduated as a Master's in Environment Science. So what's next? She was clear, enough of studying, and time to reap some ROImsf (Return on Investments made so far). Now began the Job Hunting phase.
Thanks to the economic expansion past 2005, all kinds of jobs were opening up in this part of the world and she was getting frequent calls from Job agencies. She took up one in T-Nagar, as a Medical Transcriptionist (another cool sounding term) but the job wasn't anything great, except that she was a proud contributor to the world of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).
She worked for a year or so, work probably got mundane and no bright future as well. She eventually quit and began her job hunting phase again.
This time it was T-Nagar calling again, and she got another cool sounding job - "Junior Editor at one of the world's leading publishing firms". Those seasoned in the Indian IT field including me, would be ignorant to such cool sounding job opportunities. All we ever heard was, Trainee, Programmer Analyst, xx Lead, xxxx Lead, xx Manager, xxxx Manager, xxxxxxxxx Manager ...
The pay wasn't bad either and work environment was an awful lot better than the previous one and most importantly, Deepika was enjoying her work. To top it up, she was nominated to frequent conferences at 5 star hotels, occasional travel, regular pay hikes, and bonuses as well. Till date she's travelled to Udaipur, Mumbai, Delhi, Sri-Lanka and Malaysia.
It's been 3 years at this job, and she's moving out of what was a relatively interesting career phase of her life. She's moving out on a good note, to catchup on some personal time before her wedding two months down the line.
Looking back, it's what we make of that unplanned CHOICE-5, that make our life, interesting, mundane or sorrowful. In Deepika's case, the choice was a culmination of some sophisticated titles that made it an interesting journey till today, the Last Day!
Wishing her the best in her future journeys as well.
Bro - Karthik
