Author Archives: manish

The BITS2MSPhD Talk: 31st August, 2013

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Thinking about a higher degree?  MS or PhD might be for you. Find out for yourself. BITS2MSPhD, along with Embryo, presents this opportunity to BITSians on and off-campus. Get to know about the graduate school experience. We will help you find answers for:

Why Graduate School?

How to select a university?

How to write your resume and Statement of Purpose?

How should be your letter of recommendation?

Now you can tweet your questions to us too!
Post your questions on twitter with the hashtag “#bits2msphd”. And we shall take it from there. You may tweet your questions before or during the talk.

Off campus participants can join too, via WebEx conference.  You may find the link to live webex conference here.

The talks are held on campus:

In Goa and Hyderabad – Date: 31st August 2013 Time: 6.30 PM IST 

About the speakers:

Srivarsha Rajshekar(2007B1TS563P) is currently doing her PhD at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Cornell University in New York.  She studied M.Sc. (Hons.) Biological Sciences at BITS-Pilani and graduated in 2011.  She pursued her Thesis work at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. She has also worked in research laboratories in the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Pune prior to beginning her PhD. She is passionate about science research and education.

Adwait Gandhe(2008A3TS199G) graduated with a degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Goa campus in 2012. He interned at Cameo Digital Media Lab (PS1), where he implemented a computer vision algorithm on an embedded platform. He then developed an inventory management system and presented his work at an international IEEE conference in Fukuoka, Japan. He was selected for the StartingBloc Fellowship, and traveled to Boston, USA to attend the Institute for Social Innovation. He then pursued his Bachelor Thesis at Fraunhofer Institute for Visual Computing in Darmstadt, Germany. He also attended the International Conference on Computer Vision, Barcelona, Spain before joining the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University to pursue his Masters in Robotic Systems Development. He was the Vice-chairperson of the IEEE Student Branch and helped revive Celestia, the Astronomy club. Adwait’s focus at CMU was Robotics, Machine Learning and Data Mining. He also took coursework in Entrepreneurship and is currently a member of the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Club at the Tepper School of Business. He is currently pursuing an internship at FMC Schilling Robotics, a company that develops sub-sea robots, based in California, USA.

In Pilani – Date: 31st August, 2013 Time: 8:30 PM IST Venue: LTC 5103
About the Speaker:

Yashkumar Gandhi (2007A1PS432P) is currently pursuing M.S. in Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, West Lafayette,Indiana, USA.  He completed his B.E. (Hons) in Chemical Engineering at BITS-Pilani in 2011. Earlier this year, Yash interned at GE Global Research Centre, at John F Welch Technology Centre in Bangalore. He has also worked as  a research intern at National Aerospace Laboratories, (CSIR-NAL) Bangalore  and had  been a UGC summer fellow at Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT-Mumbai) in 2010.

KYU Series Panel 3 – University of California – Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego

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BITS2MSPhD and Embryo are excited to announce the newest Know Your University (KYU) panel discussion scheduled on 14th April, 2013 at 10:30 AM IST. The KYU series aims to give students a glimpse of life at top graduate schools across the world. The current panel, which will be third in this series, will focus on three universities in the University of California system – Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Diego. This follows an earlier panel discussion by graduate students from MIT on 16th February, 2013 and another panel by Harvard and Cornell graduate students on 17th February, 2013.

In our panel, we have:

SATISH POLISETTI (MS, UC Berkeley)
Satish Polisetti currently runs a company that builds technology to enable native advertising for the entire web/mobile world, funded by Sequoia Capital and other prominent angel investors in the Silicon Valley. He graduated with a dual degree in Mechanical & Electrical Engineering (A4A3) from the Pilani campus in 2007. Satish’s focus at UC Berkeley was entrepreneurship & product management. He was selected as Mayfield Fund (top VC firm) fellow in 2010. He won Oxford Youth Business Development Competition, UC Berkeley Startup Competition and finalist at Global Social Venture Competition. He served as Vice President to organize the first BITSAA Global Meet in 2011 and was recently recognized with ‘BITSAA 30Under30’ award. Satish interned at Indian Space Research Organization (PS-1), Qualcomm (PS-2) and Cypress USA (PS-2). Satish was selected from Asia-Pacific for Infineon Technologies International Graduate Program and worked in Singapore before joining UC Berkeley to pursue his MS in Information Systems. He won scholarships from Narotam Sekhsaria Foundation, KC Mahindra Education Trust in 2009.

GAELEN PEREIRA (MS, UCLA)
Gaelen graduated with an MS in Electrical Engineering from UCLA in 2012. His focus at UCLA was on Wireless Communication. Prior to this, he completed his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Pilani campus in 2010. Gaelen is currently working as a Systems Engineer at Silvus Technologies, a small business focusing on R&D and Product Development in the Wireless industry. He has previously interned with Qualcomm and Bharti Airtel in India.

SIDDHARTHA NATH (Ph.D., UCSD)
Siddhartha is currently pursuing his Ph.D in Computer Science from UC San Diego under supervision of Prof. Andrew B. Kahng. His specialization is in machine learning in CAD, physical reliability and their impacts on computer architecture and Network-on-Chip (NoC) router estimation. His paper on NoC router estimation got nominated for the best paper award in Design Automation Conference-2012. Siddhartha completed his Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics from the Pilani campus in 2003 with a silver medal from his batch. Thereafter, he worked at Intel Technology India Pvt. Ltd. for seven years on low-power graphics architectures and has six patents on his work on Switchable Graphics, Self Refresh Displays and Dual Display Clone. Siddhartha actively pursues Indian classical music (Hindustani vocal). He regularly performs in different cities across the US and has been training six students over the last few years at UCSD.

Know Your University: Harvard and Cornell

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As part of the opening weekend kickoff of the Know Your University series of talks, BITS2MSPhD and Embryo have invited graduate students from Harvard University and Cornell University to speak about their graduate school experiences. The talk is scheduled at 8 pm IST on 17 February, and will be conducted across the Pilani, Hyderabad and Dubai campuses. Here is an introduction to our speakers.

Prahar Mitra (2006B5A3234P) is currently a Ph.D. student at the Harvard University Physics department. His research interests include Theoretical High Energy Physics, especially String theory. Prahar’s prior research experience also includes a one-year stint for his Masters thesis at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, where he worked under Dr Shiraz Minwalla in the Department of Theoretical Physics.

Ajay K Bhat (2006B5A3414P) is a Ph.D. student in the Cornell University Physics department, where he works with Prof Sunil Bhave in the OxideMEMS Lab. Ajay’s current research is the field of interaction between MEMS and cold atoms. Prior to joining Cornell, Ajay spent a year at TIFR, Mumbai working on his Masters thesis under the guidance of Dr Mandar Deshmukh.

Know Your University: A BITS2MSPhD and Embryo Initiative

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BITS2MSPhD and Embryo are proud to announce the launch of our newest initiative – Know Your University, a cross-campus lecture series aimed at giving BITSians a glimpse of graduate school life at top research universities across the world. The series kicks off with a panel discussion by three graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 16 February at 8 PM IST.

The panel will be moderated by Yash Gandhi, Team Leader, BITS2MSPhD. Here is a brief introduction to our panelists for this talk.

Andrea Colaço (2003A3PS007P) is a Ph.D. student at the MIT Media Lab and an affiliate with the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT. Her research interests include statistical signal processing and optimization with applications to 3D sensing. Among her achievements at MIT are the award of LG Electronics Fellow (2009), winning the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition’s Pitch Contest (2012), and twice winning Qualcomm Innovation Research Fellowship (2011, 2012).

Ashok Ajoy graduated from BITS Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus with a dual degree in Physics and EEE. He joined MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics as a Ph.D. student in September 2010, and currently works on exploiting spin defects for quantum computation. His past research experience includes stints at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and University of Dortmund at Germany.

Subramanian Sundaram (2005A3A4550P) joined MIT as an ABB-MIT Energy Fellow in 2011. He currently works in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT, where he builds MEMS oscillators. Earlier, Subra worked on tunable MEMS gratings at EPFL, Switzerland, and on carbon nanotube based bio-sensors at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Germany. During his free time, Subra enjoys photography, coding, biking, running, sailing and ice skating.