Interview with Piyush Madan

I still remember my orientation day on a lovely morning at the Kashmere Gate Campus around six years ago. There were almost 100 students chatting under the huge banyan tree in front of the archeological building of my college, then known as USIT (now USICT).Many of these people turned out to be friends for life.Soon after a quick presentation by the faculty members, we took a tour of the university.I have spent most of my engineering time at the Kashmere Gate campus before moving to Dwarka campus. I have memories from every nook and corner of this campus for different reasons (many of them can’t be mentioned here :P). The time spent during engineering is very crucial for a student’s overall development and transition into the professional world.

All USS students should take full advantage of using university resources and be very active in university and department activities. I am sure that Anugoonj and department fests are one of the most memorable days of anyone who has experienced university life. I can’t pick one event I had enjoyed the most. Each participation was unique, whether it was working as editor in Anugoonj Magazine, the unofficial Dramatics group performance in Moksha (NSIT’s inter university fest), doing web development for university projects, my term as the Student Chairperson in IEEE Student Branch, LAN gaming sessions, the list is fairly long. I also had the opportunity to get support from many professors from my department like Dr. Udayan Ghose, Dr. Arvinder Kaur, Dr. Rahul Johari, Dr. Rinkaj Goyal and so many others. College memories are still as vivid as they were when I left college. We tried our best survive on chai and maggi for night long study sessions one day before exams. Semester count is inversely proportional to time spent preparing for major exams whose difficulty is directly dependent of the faculty who is teaching it. Still, all of us spent nights burning the midnight oil preparing hard for our exams. I was fortunate to get Dr. Arvinder Kaur as my mentor for major project. She was supportive in my work on gesture technology for specially abled people. This work got accepted in an international conference in Seattle. That was my first visit to US as a student. I got exposed to international researchers during this conference and getting appreciation from them was very motivating. I managed to get few other papers published in international conferences. Talking to the right faculty member who is interested in your field of research can open many doors of opportunities. Talking about the biggest dilemma of final year ­ placement , the TPO (Training & Placement Office) is the most visited place by final year students. It helped me to grab 2­3 placements, though I didn’t end up joining any of them.

While I was at university I met couple of potential employers at an Open Source Conclave held by the IEEE Branch. After a wonderful experience through the Google Summer of Code internship, I got hired by an Open source project, Raxa which gave me opportunity to contribute to the development of Electronic Medical Record systems. This gave me deep insight into what kind of problems exists in the way medical data is managed nowadays and encouraged me to research on how to try and solve the same. I also got an opportunity to travel to Googleplex in Silicon Valley, San Francisco during this project. I strongly advise students to read up and contribute to Free and Open Source Softwares as it’s a great way to become a part of a global community of motivated individuals, and apply your classroom learning to solve practical and challenging issues.

Soon after, I got exposed to issues in electronic medical record system in the Caribbean. I got hired by Caris and USAID this year to develop an endtoend information system for their national pediatric HIV Program. It connects 100+ national hospitals and thousands of other stakeholders all across Haiti. This is my first overseas managerial experience and I have got opportunity to get immigration stamps on my passport from few countries (I love the travel part of my job). I’m currently living in Caribbean to oversee this project. I have led the first national ODK program in Haiti for community health agent visits. This means health agents can digitally record their forms (internet is not necessary) on low end android phones and send information to nurses as soon as they get in a network zone. These kind of initiatives help to get rid of paper based records, improve response time and explore data analysis opportunities.

As I reminisce those days, I must say that the challenges undertaken as a part of my university life helped me learn a lot of skills, both technically and otherwise. I am indebted to my fellow students, faculty and everyone who helped me in my journey during my stay at university. Many of us may have been sometimes annoyed at the sarkari system of our university, but believe me they wish to teach you patience and the right way to do things. It helps me when I am meeting different people from the ministries of different countries. Live and Love (I hope you got the right meaning) when you are at University!! You have everything in the university, you just have to be opportunist enough. :)