Infoquest 2010, GCT Coimbatore

A visit to Infoquest 2010, brought lots of nostalgic feelings. I felt younger amidst a group of young and energetic students. This blog post, captures my experience at Infoquest 2010.

Infoquest is a technical symposium organized by the CSITA (CS & IT association) in GCT, Coimbatore. It is a 2 days function, with lots of technical events and a few cultural events. I had been to Infoquest 2010 to attend the 2nd day of the symposium (on March 6th). Before my long US stay, I regularly attended all the previous Infoquest functions.

I reached GCT by 10 am and went straight to the auditorium. I was greeted by the General Secretary and he took me to the office of CSE HOD. I met Prof. Lakshmi Praba & Prof. Valarmathi. I had a long conversation with both of them.

There are lots of things in Infoquest that have not changed over the years or have become better. A few highlights are:

• There were 17 different events including Technical Paper presentation, Software Presentation, Quiz, Marketing, Business Planning, Software Debugging, Impromptu Programming, and Online Treasure Hunt (compare it to 5 or 6 events that we had during 1998).
• The number of delegates who participated in the symposium reached 700 (compare it to ~200 delegates that we had during 1998).
• Do you know what the budget was? It is roughly 4.5 lakhs & the unofficial numbers seem to be lot higher than that (compare it to ~30K that we spent in 1998).
• Hospitality of juniors. Students go out of the way to take care of guests. Of course, the quality of food (from Hotel Annapurna) was also awesome !
• Systems committee had lots of cool flicks. Most of the flicks carried some social message such as "Students participating in Politics", "Terrorism", "Saving Trees", and "How to cope up with love failures". Most of the flicks were like 'stories' with real characters. Syscom has come a long way from the traditional story board and 3D studio animations. The flicks are similar to 3D animation movies.
• Auditorium was well decorated and they have spent a lot on the backdrop, sound systems, projector, screens etc.,
• MCs/Comperers were great as always and there wasn't any dull moment
• Cultural events show cased extraordinary performances. There was more fun in watching the performance of students in the walkways, than watching the performance on the stage. The performers/participants in cultural events were from non-CS & non-IT departments too. The cultural events went on for nearly 2+ hours.  

It looks like there is a recent tradition that seniors talk to the current 3rd years and give them tips for campus interview preparation. So, I got a chance to interact with the current 3rd year students (120 of them from both CS & IT departments). I gave a mini interview preparation talk to them, highlighting the 4Cs of a successful software professional - Commitment, Communication, Competence, and Collabaration. Hope, I got them motivated :)

The function ended at about 8.15 pm, closing with a feedback session from all the seniors & staff members.

Overall, Infoquest 2010 was simply superb ! I'm eagerly looking forward to attend Infoquest 2011.

Also read:

Kovai Trip - Maruthamalai/GCT visit
World Classical Tamil Meet 2010

I've captured some video clips of the Infoquest 2010 cultural events. You can watch them below: