PSU or Private Corporate Job ?

 I have worked in private as well as government organisation (PSU to be precise) so I think I am eligible to answer this question.

There is a famous saying that “Grass is always greener on the other side” and it holds very true when it comes to dilemmas like this.

I worked as a Graduate Engineer Trainee in Hero Motocorp Ltd, the worlds largest 2 wheeler manufacturer by volume and a major MNC in India. I was placed through campus and my CTC was 6.5 lpa.

Let me tell you the story of private job first.

These people are professionals in the true meaning of the term. They know the details, their job. We were a bunch of novice who had just graduated and knew nothing about this corporate world. They treat you like kings during the GET period. They try by every means to retain you and make an asset to the organisation. Believe me, 4 star and 5 star hotels were a common thing for us. During training period we used to stay in the priciest of the hotels for weeks long. The company will not let you down even for one second. As I told you, they are professionals, they wanted to win over us. It was a brilliantly organised training programme where we learnt a lot and made wonderful memories. The module was a beautiful amalgamation of technical as well as behavioural aspects.

Here are some photos of our training period:

Here we stayed for 3 months in Gurgaon

The next one is during our training in Kolkata. It is a 5 star hotel with the best facilities and amazing food. I used to fill my plate like crazy😂

We stayed there for 11 days and my laundry bill alone was near about 5k!!!! which ofcourse company paid.

I have bunch of photos but I wouldn't bother you with those. It is just meant to give you a feel of what it was like. Company took us to Corbett National park for behavioural training, various plant visits, always provided good modes of transportation. So it was definitely a honeymoon period.

Ok so GET period is fun. Made amazing friends who are still in touch. But all good things come to an end. After this training we were allocated different departments and I was posted as a Territory Service Manager in Assam Northeast region.

Now the actual game begins.

It was no easy job. We had to travel a lot. I used to travel from Kolkata to Guwahati back and forth every week. From Guwahati to other northeastern states back and forth. I used company provided flights so much that I had become a platinum customer in Jet airways. This gave me a lot of privileges like free tickets, business class upgrades, free airport lounge and what not. Again, notice that company is not shy about spending in you. They never asked us to travel by train. They saved those valuable hours which we would have otherwise wasted in travelling by train. I thoroughly enjoyed this life and thought wow!

Me and mom in business class

Accommodation was first class. I used to stay in a 4 star hotel in Guwahati for weeks.

This WOW thing didn't last long.

Having said that, they provide you with all sorts of pleasures but it does come with a price. We used to have targets. It was a stressful job. Visiting dealerships and talking with experienced businessmen was no child's play. They are always one step ahead of you. Each day used to be a minimum of 10 hours with all the hectic travelling from one place to another. Health does take a toll because your lunch timings get altered and you are eating out everyday. Home cooked food is special, no 5 star restaurant can give you that. You become bored of these eventually. I still remember that after a few months I asked the waiter of a 5 star restaurant to provide me with khichdi (you ought to have seen the look on his face as it was not in the menu). That explains a lot I guess.

There is fierce competition among the colleagues. You grow a lot, learn new things very fast. It is extremely professional.

In short, if you want a taste of actual corporate life, this is the place. Growth is exponential and knows no bounds. You'll always get increment percentage in double figures.

After 10 months of job, I quit. It was a tough decision and there were a lot of factors for that decision, family being one as my work involved too much travelling.

Then I started preparing for Engineering Services and luckily cracked in the first attempt. Meanwhile as I await joining, I am working in Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd., a Maharatna PSU with a package of 12 lpa during the training period and 17 lpa after a year.

Salary is really good and they provide the best medical facilities.

But it all ends there.

I saw a major shift in everything. The training period was not as good as my earlier organisation. Some PSUs like IOCL provide good accommodations in the beginning, but not all!

The professionalism was missing to some extent. People are too good! There is no rat race amongst us. The hierarchy was flat. Be happy and enjoy life is the motto of BHEL and it cannot be truer!

Don't expect the PSU to spend tons of money on your training like private entities. No more flights! Only 2AC trains.😂

Accommodation is average as we are allotted hostels in the first year. The township is beautiful with a lot of greenery and good sports facilities which you will never find in a Private company. Posting can become a pain in the arse as sometimes you will be thrown in some remote location like in my case. I belong to Assam and I have been posted in a small town in Tamil Nadu.

PSUs are going through difficult times so yearly bonus has become a thing of the past. Many facilities which were provided earlier have been discontinued. PSUs served the nation since independence, build the state of the art infrastructure for the country but the present government feels that their task is over and needs to be dumped.

The growth will be substantially less here. Someone working in private sector will catch you up in 5–7 years if he works diligently. You will seldom work in metro cities so you have to be prepared to sacrifice a lot.

In contrast to that, you will get time to pursue your hobbies in PSUs. You will remain physically fit as there are lot of parks and sport facilities here unlike cities, where we are crammed in a small apartment for our whole lives.

But inspite of all these, being a part of nation building does give a sense of pride and joy, as if our lives have some purpose. And nothing can match this profound feeling of satisfaction.

Few photos of BHEL township:

Doggo posing like a pro 😅

Meeting with CMD sir

My favourite place! Library inside office! 😀

Before Pongal:

I wasn't kidding when I said one can stay fit 😅

And Yeah we slept through the training period!😂

Edit: The earlier pic had to be removed due to privacy concerns🤣

Now it is upto you to decide what you want!

Thanks for reading

Wasim Yuhana,B.Tech Mechanical Engineering at NIT Durgapur

I Would Say That “Sacrificing”.......

I would say that “sacrificing” your early 20s for your career is worth it.

My father always says we have two choices - Enjoy early life at your parents’ expense and suffer the rest of it, or, work like a horse all day throughout your early life and live like a king for the rest.

Every individual has dreams in life that she/he wants to achieve. And, nobody likes waiting. We all want things to happen fast. Sadly, that never does.

Nothing good ever comes easy.

When I was in final year, most of my friends who were in engineering had passed out and taken up jobs in IT sector. When I was doing my internship, a few got married. My friends who were in medical/dental from school joined PG in private colleges right after UG got over - it was an smooth transition.

For me (and majority of my batchmates from college), it has been a roller coster journey, emotionally and physically.

Days of tears, worries and anxiety! Endless cravings to just drop out and put an end to the whole rat race.

But we held on. Through fire and ice. Each of us wanted to get into a central government institution for PG.

Each of us have achieved that, finally.

There's still a long way to go, but the whole thing so far has been worth it. I'm (almost) financially independent now (salary comes after work starts), have a gorgeous room all to myself and am close to home.

Financial independence is something to die for in today's world. It gives you security and the power to design your life the way you want it (irrespective of what others around you feel!).

  

  -Aheli Bal,MD AIIMS,MBBS JIPMER

College Maths vs Arithmetic

 Proof-based mathematics is normal mathematics, and has been since the ancient Greeks. Unfortunately, many school curricula focus almost entirely on being able to perform computations, with nary a thought about why any of this works, or what it means. As a simple example, I am quite certain that virtually no one who has not taken some intermediate level math courses in college would be able to provide a definition of the real numbers that I would not be able to tear to shreds. Considering that I have taught college students who were able to show exactly how you multiplied fractions, but were not able to properly explain why that was the right thing to write down, my confidence in this assertion is extremely high.

However, if you only have mechanical understanding of procedures, then you cannot write proofs, because that requires conceptual understanding. If you have no experience in explaining your reasoning (and most people are quite terrible at this), then you cannot write proofs. If you don’t have a good feeling for how logic works, then you cannot write proofs. Most people don’t really have a good understanding of logic—to wit, I accidentally tripped up a lot of my students on an exam by giving them the following question: they had to decide whether the statement:

Suppose that f′(x)=x3−2x+1$f^{\prime }(x)=x^3-2x+1$. Then f(x)=14x4−x2+x$f(x)=\frac{1}{4}{x}^4-x^2+x$.

was true or false. Virtually all of them answered that this statement was true, because they checked that the given function f(x)$f(x)$ really does have the desired derivative… and so you must be done, right? Well, no, because there are all sorts of different choices for f(x)$f(x)$ that would also give that same derivative, hence the statement is actually false. I am fairly certain that this was a problem of logic rather than a misunderstanding about anti-derivatives, because I did a good job of drilling into them that if you want to find an anti-derivative, you find a particular anti-derivative plus a constant. In other words, if I had asked them to write down the general anti-derivative of x3−2x+1$x^3-2x+1$, I wager that most of them would give a correct answer of 14x4−x2+x+C$\frac{1}{4}{x}^4-x^2+x+C$.

Writing proofs is not hard once you have developed the skills required to do so. The trouble is that most students are dumped into this all at once, without training any of the myriad skills that you need to be successful in this endeavor.

   

    -Senia Sheydvasser,PhD in Mathematics,BA-Physics