The below post is the blog post i wrote about Cognizant training days..,
Like all CATs, getting placed in Cognizant is a dream come true for me. The first day to the Academy in Siruseri with lot of expectations in mind, with sound of guitar and cello ringing in my ears, I was walking in search of the conference room. ‘Batch meeting with batch owner’, well it’s not as easy as it sounds. Kishore is our batch owner (now I guess you understood the gist), it was a knock out speech that he gave as an introduction about Cognizant and the academic process. His speech actually made me realize the importance of ‘me’ in a corporate like Cognizant. It also explained the importance of Cognizant in my career growth. And later when we went to the Academy room allocated for us, we all felt exactly the same thing what we felt when we first entered into a college. New faces, acquaintance, different places, different languages, and that was the first time I understood the importance of English (connecting people).
All the resources available in the academy website, the study materials that Cognizant gave me and sessions by Chandra, Satish Thiagarajan, Chan made me realize that I have mountains to climb. We, as a batch started to interact with each other not only with the regular yada yada stuff, but also spent more time on discussing different concepts and ideas related to our domain. But of course, we never ignored to have fun even when we were preparing for mock tests and presentations. Cognizant cultural event “Wings 2010” was a combo package of fun and team work, it also gave us an opportunity to interact with other batches. And as a batch we also had our fun moments, batch outings, evergreen memories of our academy life.
Oh, in midst of all these I forgot to mention about CTM sessions and weekly BO meetings. The CTM of our batch is Kartik, well his sessions on corporate philosophies; ethics and behavior didn’t exactly mold us. If I say they molded us, then it would sound very dramatic, in real all those CTM sessions gave us a clear idea and thought about ‘How I should be, in order to reach new heights’. BO meetings gave us a real time scenario of how the project meetings would be. It was all about requirement analysis, design, development, implementation, maintenance, and parallel with all phase, we would be testing. CTM sessions are more about character, behavior and attitude. BO sessions are more about process, operation, review. Both played an equally important role in shaping us as a better employee for Cognizant.
As a batch, we too had our tough times. Even though we were working hard to cope up, to thrive, to stand ahead, and to shine, things were not working out well for us in the beginning. We were desperate to prove our potential and that’s when the Dizplay (Technical – class notice board decoration event) event was announced. Previously we were more concerned about functional activities like module tests, mock tests and more of technical stuff. But understanding the importance of non-functional things like extra-curricular activities, we took Dizplay very serious in order to show out talent. We stayed in the evenings, used our spare time, in brainstorming, working on our good ideas. And all the team work paid off in the form of success in the Dizplay event. We won the first place, and it was like India winning 20-20 world cup.
Finally with all the experience, different things we went through in academy training were like ‘Butterfly effect’. The experience in the initial condition (Academy training), which would have a major difference in the future (after getting deployed in project). All of us in academy are like coins, cut from a sheet metal, rimmed, beveled and pressed into coins. That’s how we were molded in the academy, that’s what added value and respect to us to move into Business units. My Academy life, on the whole, it was water to my seed (career) that was planted in the soil (Cognizant).
