I really wanted to write this reflective piece on my experience about the semester after the final presentations….but anyways…

A few incidences and things I learnt this semester:

1. “Welcome to the real world” – this was the first thing I noticed when I came to RMIT… the relationship between the faculty and the students seemed to be extremely formal…. It might be normal here, but back in NID we were used to sitting long hours discussing everything about life to design to politics to gossips and what not with our faculty members over two to three glasses of tea. At RMIT I could sense an aura of working under a management, finishing work on deadlines, submitting stuff at the right time no matter what…I didn’t feel much like a student. But that’s in a good way …I guess

1. “First email, wait for reply, then call for appointment…then meet” – Always fix an appointment before you go to meet anyone. This lesson was well learnt in Melbourne. In Nid when we usually start a research phase, we just go straight head on into the field trying to get as much of information about the project. We thought we could do this here too… so we just took off in search of carshare companies or offices, car share parking spots…and we landed up at the flexicar share office near by. To our surprise we were greeted by the Ceo of flexicar right at the door step. This came as a shock to us and led to us explaining all about the project…though we didn’t have to . All we wanted was some brochures and pamphlets about flexicar. We ended blurting out if we could fix an appointment with her to interview her on the company. She said she would talk with our project coordinator about it. Next thing we know…. “First email, wait for reply, then call for appointment…then meet”. Was an embarrassing issue …but good to know a little about the work culture here.

1. “I take my car at 9 am to the office…park it in a parking spot there, the car becomes a car share car for the time that the car is not being used by the owner and …at 6 pm …the car is back at the car park spot for the owner to drive back home”…..

This was one idea that went off the roof… It was only the beginning of all the confusion that was to follow in the project. It took me a long time to drop off this idea… mainly because people would start misusing it and the density of cars might actually increase with people having an intention to make a business out of it. Lesson learnt here was…. When people don’t agree, listen( not hear… listen!) on “why they dont”.

1. “the dollar to rupee coversion”- 1 $ = Rs 39 … and that’s all it takes for an entire day’s meal in India. So when we went to an Indian restaurant here in Melbourne, we freaked out on seeing the prices on the menu. A simple “ daal – roti” meal…in India is usually less that 25 Rs…. But over here, on calculating the conversion amount…it was about Rs 240…. About 10 times the price of that in India. But later on as the months passed by the conversion mentality just died out.

1. Tuesday’s domino effect…and then drowning in a standard cappuccino at Hudson…. – Every Tuesday at 1.30pm to 3.30 pm, we had discussion classes on the car share project. And every single time after the classes, I’d be one confused freak. It always felt like the work done the previous week was just a waste or just another thing that wouldn’t work. This usually ends up with me brooding over a standard cappuccino at the Hudson downstairs. After about an hour and a half…I’d end up changing the entire game plan, all pumped up to try something new. But later on trying out too many game plan changes was not working …led to another whole range of time management problems.

1. “What’s with the grades and submissions”- This is something that I found really difficult to keep up with… I have worked on dead lines and submissions before…but at NID the final output of the work required had to be the best, time and grades were not a factor, hence the freedom was more. But at RMIT the sheer pressure of need to submit a weekly report, somehow I think leads to work that have to be submitted in order to meet the deadline, be it well learnt or not. Still all of this did have a huge lesson in store for me….” Time Management”. A concept that I am very poor at, probably due to the amount of freedom I had at NID.