Dhruv Apte

Dhruv Apte

Ph.D. Student at Virginia Tech

The one with internships

4 minute read

Published:

Hello down there! Long time, eh? Well this is not a weekly newsletter you were expecting about a grad student in AOE ranting about his research and life in particular. You can see the news channels for that stuff. But I must agree, I need to work out ways to encounter my temporary writer’s block and work more on the posts- maybe once in 2 weeks or something.

I am currently bck in the great Commonwealth of Virginia from Florida and currently enduring final days of my 2 week quarantine. It was one hell of a time (as always!) in Florida with close reports of how coronavirus is ripping lives apart. Anyways, we need not talk about that more.

I recently read a tweet from someone on Twitter stating that unpaid internships should be made illegal. And then there were company owners who stated that interns learn stuff from their companies and the moment they are ‘productive’ they dump the company for greener pastures. In fact, there was one genius at a high executive position in a big company who said istead of receiving stipend, interns should pay gurudakshina( Sanskrit for tuition fees). Well, I’ill be damned!

I worked through internships in the summer and one spring through 3 years of my undergrad- all unpaid. My summer research this year for three months was paid as a 20hr internship with a decent stipend. I have been on both sides of the grass and to show this I bragged about myself in the previous statement. I do not care if it’s an undergrad or grad student- if he\she is doing an internship, it DESERVES to be paid.

Because, while company owners devote their “precious time” which could have been spent on finding out the hidden features of MS Excel, students spend a jolly good worth of their time too learning all this, spending time in airless corporate offices instead of going on a trip with friends somewhere in the world. And not to offend MS Excel (that is a brilliant invention btw) but students do devote their precious time to work- and the Asian logic of “paid in knowledge” is stupid. Company owners get ideas these young Turks think about (I think they call it innovation in the entreprenuership industry). Plus if a great intern goes to greener pastures, the “ex” would have made a good mark on his/her next company as they would have realized the amount of knowledge this person possesses. Not to forget, the intern has a choice- the corporate world is a free one, god damn it!

The whole thread about how company owners think about interns as just some stupid people who are being raised to the level of excellence by Indian company owners is nauseous. It reflects the toxic and not to forget, needlessly stupid corporate culture we have. there should be an equal bargain on both the sides. Let’s think of the other sid eof the story.

Today, a lof of us feel we are so important that we deserve to do the best job. If you are working as a software dev, your first task should be testing and checking out how code works rather than inventing your own code. At a manufacturing plant? how the chain works, how the production floor functions before you lay out your own dopey operational plan. And some of us don’t get it. I spend around 5 mins a day on LinkedIn’s forum and I see posts of junior or even barely graudated students giving life advices and how to work and how to run companies. Well, life is not about how to run companies! I remember the story of Dr. Feynman working out at Thinking Machines Inc with his first job being buying office supplies. You start from a small task and end up working something beautiful- you just can’t start with it. And it bedazzles me how people think like that as such a young age, how they are able to figure out the next 30-40 years of their life(I for the moment, can barely figure out what I am going to do in the next 2-3 years). And if the next 40 years of their life is about posting this “career advice” daily for “daily motivation” so they can have good audience, it’s all baloney. Explore the world. Study anything that piques your interest. As Dr. Feynman used to day, “Nobody ever figures what life is all about and it doesn’t really matter”. Do something you may like and who knows, you may fall in love doing the thing!

That’s it for today!! Thank you very much.

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La conte des colombes foncees

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Rebonjour ! Ça fait environ quatre mois que j’écris quelque nouveau. Mais, j’était occupé avec beaucoup de choses à faire et j’ai pas l’inspiration à écrire quelque chose intéressant. En plus, cette fois, j’ai trouvé écrire quelque truc très difficile (vous connaîtrez bientôt !) L’été pour moi, c’était époustouflant. Je suis allé en France pour la première fois et j’étais complètement surpris que je parle français sans difficulté. J’ai souvent fait des conversations banales à l’arrêt du bus ou des restos ou des gares et beaucoup de gens m’ont apprécié. Ça me fait très encourageant et motivant. Quand j’aurais dit que je viens des États-Unis, on m’a souvent demandé si j’ai grandi en France car mon français était génial. Mais moi, vous connaissez si vous coupez ma main, à place de sang, vous allez voir le merlot qui vient de Bordeaux :P


Aujourd’hui j’apporte un poème qui je n’ai pas écrit. Le poème était originalement en espagnol par M. Federico García Lorca au nom de « Casida de las palomas oscuras ». C’était un très beau poème avec beaucoup de sens caché surtout sa sexualité. Pour moi, il représente l’idée du secret et comment on cache notre identité à s’intégrer dans un groupe ou car on ne semble pas comme faible ou sensible. Puisque le poème est écrit en espagnol, j’ai dû comprendre sa traduction, son sens et essaie à traduire en français mais pas perdre sa signification. Donc, pour les mecs qui comprennent tous les deux ou seulement espagnol, voici le poème original :

Casidade las palomas oscuras

Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
«Vecinita», les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola», dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta», dijo la luna.
Y yo que estaba caminando
con la tierra por la cintura
vi dos águilas de nieve
y una muchacha desnuda.
La una era la otra
y la muchacha era ninguna.
«Aguilitas», les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola», dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta», dijo la luna.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas desnudas.
La una era la otra
y las dos eran ninguna.

Les Amoureux

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Bonjour encore ! Ça fait longtemps que je viens ici mais vous me connaissiez : j’ai souvent l’air d’humeur changeante ou, comment est qu’on dit, peut-être lunatique ? Comme je m’ennuie et j’essaye de trouver quelques bons passe-temps, j’ai commencé à lire et, bien-sûr, à écrire de nouveau des poèmes. L’anglais, c’est une langue pour les insipides et j’ai trouvé la poésie de langues romans sont très belle- de quoi m’inspirer ! Ce n’est pas facile mais on trouve de faire quelque chose qui représente un défi, n’est-ce pas ? Et ce n’est pas mon premier poème en français (je vous dirai plus tard). J’espère que vous le trouvez satirique, comme je l’ai fait. Le rythme est inspiré par un poème du M. Georges Brassens, au nom de *Les Copains d’abord *. Il a pu l’air de sophistication mais si vous ne comprenez pas, ne vous inquiétez pas !

Les Amoureux de l’année

Supposedly six months later

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Hello there, how are you doing? Well as the title suggests, I was planning to wite a post six months later but what the hell, you were not expecting me to fulfill that ‘commitment’ on the 4th of july, right? Well, we can just assume it is six months in the pandemic time; that’s a pretty good scale. But yeah,a lot of things have happened since we visited this rusty old blog which somehow still comes up on like the 5th site when you google my name (Goddamnit, Google): 1) I completed my spring semester with retaining almost perfect sanity 2) Decided to become more social- can’t stay in the shell anymore. 3) Went on two trips- one to this country place called Duffield on the Virginia-Tennesse border in April and later to Cape Canaveral,FL for two days. Now, I have laos later visited DC and my family in the Tri-State area but the Cape Canaveral visit is somehow one of the best trips of my life. The reason itself was so interesting- to see a launch at 3 am on a lakeside and it was magical. Of course, it’s Florida, so we hit the beach too. And the company was great. Imagine just some crazy people driving down south just to see a launch we could have seen on television: but it was fun and worth it: we could not have seen it that cool on the damn TV and could n’t have been that interesting.

New Year

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Published:

Hello, down there! Happy new year 2021! Well January 1 is just a date to start a new Gregorian calender but looking from the events of last year, it seemed 31st Dec 2020 11:59:59 would turn into 31st Dec 2020 11:60:00. That would have been insanely scary. But 2020 has vanished and off we are to a new year with new things on the bucket list piled upon the old things we have had and new ‘resolutions’ This resolution thingy seems not dopey for an undisciplined person like me- I don’t remember the last time I had made any resolution. Maybe it was because I decided to start on a resolution immediately when I thought of it and not wait for it on the 1st of January. And all over you see people being glad as if this Covid-19 virus will leave on 1st Jan 2021. We have had some variants of the virus now but thankfully science and the hard work of thouands of researchers and healthcare workers has won with some vaccines in the market and vaccination programs beginnning to happen and we might see some sort of the normalcy later.