Contribution Idea – CommunicationTraining

Dear friends,

I am happy that the idea of celebrating our Silver Jubilee in our college premises has gained momentum with more and more our friends are joining us and many have opted to be the volunteers.

I don’t have any hesitation to volunteer from Karaikudi. Prof.Tamilselvam (Secretary of ACCETOSA), myself, Sebastian, Samuthurakani and Raju will coordinate from Karaikudi.

In order to invite many of our friends to participate actively in this Silver Jubilee, let me give an idea of what previous batches have done.

  • In 2002, ACCETOSA constructed a “ACCETOBA GOLDEN JUBILEE HALL” worth of Rs.50 Lakhs in memory of the Golden Jubilee of our college, and donated the same to our college. Fortunately, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979 and 1980 batches participated actively in that actively.
  • In 2006, 1981 batch constructed a Toilet block in the above said Hall and they donated the same to the college.
  • In 2007, 1982 batch constructed an ornamental arch at the entrance of our college and donated to our college.
  • In 2008, 1983 batch constructed and donated a Class room to the Deaf and Dump school at Karaikudi.
  • In 2009, 1984 batch constructed a MKV memorial PG Hostel and donated to the college.
  • In 2009, 1984 Accelerated batch donated an RO Plant to our college to meet out the drinking water need of students.
  • In 2010, 1985 batch constructed a TIFAC-CORE building and donated it to our college.
  • In 2011, 1986 batch constructed “Alagappa Computer Centre” and donated the same to the college.
  • In 2012, 1987 batch ……….. ?

We should fill up the gap memorably.

At our meeting held at Trichy we unanimously decided not to go in for any construction. One of the main reasons for not getting into this is that it involves various procedural hassles and also that the college is not particularly lacking availability of funds. The college can access funds from the Government for the needy project.

After consulting our batchmates, two suggestions were given to Rajeshwar (President of ACCETOSA during 2011-12).

1. Our students mostly hail from rural side. Though they are good in subject, they miserably lack soft skills (mainly communication). Hence, 1987 batch may offer extensive training to the students, so that they can be prepared to compete with anybody.

2. There are students in the college, who need financial assistance even to remit their Tuition fees and special fees. (Remember… It is hardly Rs.8000/ per annum). So, 1987 batch may offer financial support to those students who are identified by the college as well as the team of 1987 batch mates.

From my side I think both the ideas are great and the first idea is welcomed by everyone in the college including the students. The feedback from companies that are coming for placement is the same every year.  They say that the students are very good in core skills but are very poor in communication. We expect a minimum standard for communication and so we are not able to make offers to the students even though they are technically. The college must also focus on this area.

Unfortunately, the college is not able to do anything substantial in this area. The placement coordinator Mr. Ravikumar (alumni of our college 1981 batch) does conduct some training which the students find very useful but they require a lot more. Rajeshwar discussed the issues with Mr. Ravikumar also. He was very excited by our idea and he also said that the students desperately need help in this area.

So I think soft skills training particularly communication skills is a very good idea which we should implement. If we can establish a good program and fund it for 5 years (as proposed by our core team of Rajeshwar, VP, Boby, Vilva, Krishnamurthy, Sudarshan, Baskar and others) it will make a BIG impact on the students and others will carry forward the good work.

I sincerely believe that Rajeswar along with our friends is seriously taking steps in this regard. I will do whatever I can to help in this regard. I expect a strong “OOOOOOOOOOOO” support from all of our 1987 batch mates.

Sivanantha Raja

Contribution to Silver Jubilee celebrations and beyond

Since the Chennai get together on 23rd Dec, working on the ideas provided by our batchmates in the Trichy & Chennai get togethers and the US East Coast conference call and various one on one phone calls that we have had with each other a core group comrpising Rajeshwar, Saravanan, Sudharsan, Baskar, Boby, Vilva, and me have had several meetings and discussions over the past 4/5 weeks.

Rajeshwar, Vilva, Saravanan, Sudharsan, Bobby & myself met at Rajeshwar’s office on 26th evening to kick start the activities. There were several decisions taken in the meeting. I will summarize major ones:
1. Giving back to the institution: There were several ideas floated in the previous meetings. The team felt there is no point in contributing to infrastructure as the college is well funded. The team felt there is a strong need for improving the students’ employ-ability in terms of communication skills, personality development etc., Some scouting for trainers has been done by Vilva and Rajesh. Some more work needs to be done where short-listed trainers will pitch before us and we may select one. Preliminary budget has been worked out. We are planning to conduct training for 5 years and the cost works out between 8 to 10 lacs per year. Vilva is anchoring this activity and he post a detailed note here the coming week.
2. Channeling the funds: Lot of work has been done by Rajesh and Bobby in this aspect. The team has zeroed in on forming a TRUST viz-a-viz SOCIETY. We have identified a broad based team of TRUSTEES. We have included people from all branches, representation for women & people from different regions. Further paper work and legal aspects are being worked out by Rajesh & Bobby. Rajeshwar will make a detailed post on this this weekend.
3. Regional coordinators: We have identified regional coordinators. Saravanan is the anchor and will communicate with the concerned people. Saravanan will share the details in a post soon.
4. Silver Jubilee celebration: From last year’s expense sheet we find that we need between 8-10 lacs for the function alone. Bulk of the expense is Food (about 3 lacs). The fund for this cannot be channeled through the TRUST that we form to conduct Training of students. We will communicate on this once we are thru with the decision on this. We find that each one of should donate between 8 to 10 thousand for the function. This is only for the celebration part. Apart from this there is a donation that needs to be done to the TRUST for conducting the training programme. There are some high value commitments made by some of our class mates. The estimated budget for Celebration and Trust activities is about 50-60 lacs. Since we are celebrating the 60th year of the institution we are targeting a fancy number of 60 lacs. I sincerely hope and appeal to all mates to voluntarily contribute as much as you can to this noble cause.

I will give more updates in the coming days. Time is running out and we need to gear up. We are humbled by the previous and subsequent batch mates’ energy, enthusiasm and the amount they are targeting. We will all galvanize and show them that we are no inferior in setting standards.

Database Update Status – January 01, 2012

First, let me wish you all a Very Happy New Year! We all have one happy occasion to look forward to this year. The congregation in Karaikudi on the 11th of August 2012 for the Silver Jubilee celebrations of our batch.

We have made significant progress in tracing our batch mates and we have only 50 left to trace.

Dept. Sl.No. RollNo Name of the student
ECE 17 83209 Sumathy,S
CIVIL 1 83001 Alagarsamy,B
CIVIL 2 83221 Ameer Batcha, A
CIVIL 5 83004 Archunan,K
CIVIL 13 83029 Gunasekaran,R
CIVIL 22 83070 MohamedKaleelRahman,MRM
CIVIL 26 83199 Naganandhini,A
CIVIL 30 83085 Pawan Kumar Sharma
CIVIL 32 83203 Premalatha,K
CIVIL 33 83098 Raja,S
CIVIL 34 83109 Ramanan,N
CIVIL 35 83229 Ravichandran,V
CIVIL 38 83247 Saravanan,S
CIVIL 40 83126 Sekar,R
CIVIL 41 83127 Selvaraj,K
CIVIL 48 83176 Vanchinathan,L
CIVIL 49 83179 Veerakumar,V
MECH 1 83007 Balaji,M
MECH 8 83032 Jagadeeswaran,R
MECH 9 83037 Jayasankar
MECH 17 83050 Kannappan,M
MECH 20 83053 Kathiravan,M
MECH 24 83069 Lakshmanan,A
MECH 29 83077 Muruganantham,T
MECH 37 83091 Porko U
MECH 42 83099 Rajakumar,P
MECH 43 83103 Rajakumar,T.R.
MECH 44 83227 Rajasekaran,D
MECH 47 83102 Rajeswaran K
MECH 50 83108 Ramamoorthy,S.K
MECH 59 83133 Sivakumar,D
MECH 63 83138 Sridhar,K
MECH 65 83223 Srinivas,M.R.
MECH 70 83164 Thamaraiselvan,M
MECH 74 83234 Thiruvalluvan,S
MECH 75 83175 Vallinayagam,A
MECH 77 83180 Vengusamy,S
MECH 78 83181 Venkatachalam,O
MECH 80 83208 Vijayalakshmi,E
EEE 1 83006 Azhaguvel
EEE 12 83066 Manimaran,R
EEE 13 83197 Manimekalai,M
EEE 16 83090 Paul Stephenson,G
EEE 19 83106 Ramachandran,S
EEE 20 Reginald Thileepan,S
EEE 22 83124 Saravanan,M.G.
EEE 25 83222 Sivakumar,T
EEE 29 83143 Sridharan,V
EEE 40 83178 Veerabhadran,M
EEE 42 83184 Vetrivel,N

If any of you have the postal addresses (whatever you have), we can try sending them a letter. We did manage to establish contact with some of our batchmates by sending letters to the postal address available in the college. However, we could not get the postal address from the college for Electrical & Mechanical as the records are not available in the college. So, please see what you can dig out.

We are setting up an option to allow all registered users to create albums and add pictures. We hope to have this ready by next week. Please post your ideas and comments here.

Group Call – US East Coast – Dec 17 – Audio recording

On December 17th, 2011, Vadivazhagu had organized a group conference call of people living in the US East Coast mainly to discuss and agree on a convenient date to meet for a family get together.

The following joined the call:

  • Geetha
  • Jayalakshmi
  • Murali (ECE)
  • Nagarajan (ECE)
  • Sailesh
  • Soundararajan
  • Srinivasan
  • Suresh (EEE)
  • Vadivazhagu

Saravanan and Rajeshwar joined the call from India.

The audio recording is available below:

[mejsaudio src=”https://accet87.in/audio/conference-call-dec-17.mp3″]

 

The call was just over an hour. Here is a summary of the key points as summarised by Vadivazhagu:

Apart from being able to briefly introduce ourselves,  we were able to come up with couple of key outcomes.

1.     We have decided the date for family get-together in the East Coast area to be  April 7th & 8th  and the location is Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Got acknowledgement that most of us could make it for that day and location.  As a next step,  I will coordinate further with Srini and others to come up with detailed plan and discuss with all of you to finalize.

2.     Had good discussion on what and how each of us can contribute to give back to our college – the Alma matter –  as part of our Silver Jubilee Celebrations in August 2012.  Got voluntary initial commitments from many of the participants. As a next step, Rajeshwar and VP Saravanan to follow up and keep the team updated of the plans and suggestions.

3.     Got commitments from most of the participants to be able to plan for the trip to Karaikudi during the Aug 11th and 12th  Silver Jubilee reunion.

Website Moved to new platform

I am happy to announce that we have moved this website to a new platform. This one runs on WordPress with BuddyPress powering the social network. It is hosted on our own hosting account.

Please register yourself here and allow us a day or two to authorise your access. We don’t want to allow outsiders access our private information, Once you have access, you can log in and update your profile, add your picture, contacts and more. You can message others registered here directly; we will also be implementing chat feature here. You can also add photo albums that can be shared with the group. Go ahead and give it a try.

Right now, posts done here will automatically be posted to our Facebook wall. So also will be comments made here. More features are in the works.

As we now have full control of the website and the server, we can add a lot more features.   Feel free to send add feature requests in the comments and we will try to implement whatever is possible.

 

Trichy Get together

We had a nice meeting at Trichy. Most of us met there after 24 years. The person who has 28 years of bonding with our college Sivananda Raja came from Karaikudi. Noordheen of Mech. who is doing business in Pudukotai made the meet lively.

 
All the photos are available in
https://picasaweb.google.com/115838997675492136575/December162011

We have many academicians in that group.
Dr.Maheshwaran – Principal of Sivanthi Adithanar College
Dr.Kannan – Principal
Mr. Lakshmanababu – Prof.
Mr. TamilSelvan – Prof.
Prof. Viswanathan – Prof. & HOD
Dr. Nagaraj Mepco – Prof. & HOD
Many are doing their own business.
Bobby Thomas
Venkatesan
Krishnamoorthy
Rafikhan
Pandian
Manikavasagar
Devasenapathy
Few Govt. employees
Sridhar EEE – AD EB
Sudharson – AD EB
Ragavan C K
Others
M.Anbu Manager in a Chemical company
ULA. Ilancheral – GM
Murugan – PM Velammal Educations
Saravanan – PM Zoho
It was really enjoying moment, recollecting our old memories (in hostel  SCH, ETH and Ezhil).
Everyone introduced our self and Sivanandaraja explained about how the Silver Jubilee is organized by various batches. Next year is not only silver jubilee for our batch, it is a diamond jubilee year for our college.
Krishnasami, Mahesh, Raju, uday and Badmanabhan are not able to make due to last minute engagements. We missed them.
If you have any college photos, please scan and send it to me.
Saravanan