Neha Kalekar, a final year information technology engineering student of Maharashtra’s showpiece College of Engineering, Pune (COEP, estb.1854), was among eight winners chosen from more than 200 contenders for the Google India Women in Engineering Awards 2010, held in Hyderabad in March this year. The awards acknowledge outstanding women computer science students with the objective of inspiring them to become active leaders in creating new techn-ology. This year, applications were invited from women students enroled in undergraduate, postgrad and doctoral programmes across 80 colleges in the country, including the IITs and BITS Pilani.
At the Google India Women’s awards, Neha recalls presenting two essays — ‘My Passion’ in which she described her zeal for solving problems, including crosswords, mathematical equations and programming conundrums. “In the second essay I was required to elab-orate on a project that I had been part of and my contribution towards its completion. I wrote about a third-year project in movie recommendations — a popular feature on social networking sites — and the comparison of different algorithms that I employed to evaluate the recommended movies,” she says.
Apart from the essays, Neha was subjected to a telephone interview related to her resume and the recomm-endations sent by her professors in COEP, following which she was shortlisted as one of 24 finalists invited to a conclave in Hyderabad last Febr-uary. “We attended panel discussions starring senior engineers and product managers and listened to distinguished speakers. The conclave also gave us an excellent opportunity to meet and network with other women engineers from schools across India,” enthuses Neha.
An alumna of St. Mary’s High School, Vashi (Mumbai) where she completed her Plus Two in 2005, Neha is thrilled by her inclusion among the top eight winners. “I was competing with brilliant minds from IITs and was therefore somewhat taken aback when I was declared a winner,” she says, attributing her success to the full encouragement she received from her father Suresh Kalekar, a city-based surgeon and mother Sanjivani, a gynaecologist.
“Yet perhaps the most critical factor was the rigorous engineering education I have been privileged to receive at COEP, surely among the best engine-ering colleges in India, if not the world,” says Neha, in a handsome tribute to this respected vintage institution.
Huned Contractor (Pune)
Aaron Dsouza
Back in Bangalore from the XIX Commonwealth Games 2010 which concluded in Delhi with a blaze of colour and pageantry on October 14, Aaron Dsouza (18) didn’t bring home a medal, but derives consolation from being a member of a 4x100 metres swimming quartet which clocked the fastest time in India’s CWG history. The quartet, of which Aaron was the youngest, finished sixth in the finals but recorded the country’s fastest ever timing (3:47 minutes) in the freestyle relay event.
Young Aaron draws considerable comfort from the Indian team’s performance which gave world class swimmers from Canada, England, Australia, South Africa, Scotland and Northern Ireland a close run. “We were beaten but far from disgraced as we recorded the fastest timing of any Indian team in the 4x100 freestyle relay,” he says.
Aaron is the eldest son of academics Agnel and Lydia Dsouza who relocated from Mumbai in 2004 so their son could train at Bangalore’s Basavanagudi Aquatic Centre (BAC), the country’s premier training pool for competitive swimmers. Of the 32-member Indian swimming squad which competed at the CWG 2010, 13 were trained at BAC under chief coach S. Pradeep Kumar, who is also India’s national swimming coach.
Since taking like a duck to water at age three, in his 13-year career in competitive swimming, Aaron has won over 94 national and 48 international medals. “My favourite events are the 200 m butterfly and 200 m freestyle in which I was national champion in 2005, 06 and 07, but missed the crown in 2008-2010 by a few points. I am three seconds off the Olympic qualifying mark and ranked ninth in Youth Olympic rankings. Quite obviously I have a lot of catching up to do for which there’s no substitute but practice and international competition,” says this second year bio-tech student of Bangalore’s S.R.N. Adarsh College.
Selected to represent the tricolour in the 4x100 metres freestyle relay and the 200 m freestyle events in particular at the XVI Asiad, scheduled to begin on November 12 at Guangzhou, China, Aaron believes that the relay quartet and he himself will improve upon CWG timings. “Whether this will help us bag medals is a difficult prediction because swimmers from China, Japan and South Korea are perhaps a tougher propo-sition than the CWG competition. But you can rest assured that we’ll better our CWG performance and go for metal,” he says.
Right on, brother!
Paromita Sengupta (Bangalore)