Having missed the first stop of the Yathra, my first event was at Sharda University. Sharda is the goddess of enlightenment and it was a big university with a large engineering faculty. We met with the various Deans who wanted to see how being party of OTN could help students with their search for jobs in the future, and we talked about OTN being for individuals and how the AIOUG could help the university as an organisation.
They had a lamp lighting ceremony which is traditional for a special event and we were treated as very honoured guests, but it was me who was honoured, honoured to address young people who want to enter this profession and wanted to learn from us. We all had to taper our presentations to the audience who didn't have as much exposure to Oracle as our normal audiences do, but that was fine, we do this a lot, and with a lot of coaxing we did get questions from them.
The dean addressed the audience and said that the university was an oracle user as they have PeopleSoft campus solutions, although they do have a few issues and suffer from a lack of expertise in India. I talked to them about being members of HEUG and reach out to other institutions around the globe.
I spoke about BI in Fusion Apps and about Mobile Design Patterns based on the User Experience research done for Fusion Apps. I am giving these two talks at each of the events I am speaking at on this tour.
Lunch was wonderful, I love spicy food and the idea of curry three times a day is my idea of heaven.
In my first session there was a lot of talking happening but it was just before a very late lunch, I did ask if the problem was they didn't understand and they assured me they did but not much appeared to change.
At the start of my second session it seemed to me that everyone was talking the background noise was high, and I was also slightly irked that I was asked to cut short my session as although we all kept to time the event kicked off late because of traffic issues; however once it was explained that most students had a bus to catch to accommodation and the driver was only willing to delay this 15 minutes I appreciated the need. So I started with an assertive request for them to be quiet and to be fair they did, not one person talked, however the background noise did not completely disappear and within a few minutes I had to apologise, it appears we could hear the lecture theatre next door.
Anyway we ended with an open discussion and I felt everyone had a good day, I certainly got asked good questions both from the floor an afterwards which is my litmus test. The dean gave us some gifts which was very generous, but we had travel the next day so were unable to take the flowers they gave us during the opening ceremony. I gave them to girls in the audience and asked only that they enjoy the flowers.
One thing that happened to me was during my session a gentleman came on stage with a tray of tea cups and offered me one..........mid sentence. wow did that throw me for a bit.
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