Women engineering students score big at career fair

Still in her final year of engineering, Keerthana Krishnan from the Government Model Engineering College, Ernakulam, is already the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a startup, Teezonic Studios, that builds websites.

Keerthana is one of the 400 students from various colleges in the country, who participated in the Student Career Fair organised exclusively for women from computing, IT and engineering backgrounds.

The fair was conducted as part of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing India (GHCI), 2015, conference, that began on Tuesday.

A student of Computer Science, Keerthana believes now is the best time to be in technology.

“There is rapid development in technology and there are also a number of open source platforms,” she said.

Her mother is also an engineer and she grew up around computers and technical talk and discussions. “I do not think women are any less than men in the technical field. On the contrary they might even be better,” said Keerthana who is also an avid tech blogger.

Another student, Rajeshwari Srinivasan, a student of theoretical computer science at the PSG College of technology, Coimbatore, wants to chalk out a career in machine learning, a field within computer science that deals with algorithm construction that can predict data.

“Over the years the field of machine learning has evolved quite a bit and there are a number of companies that are investing a great deal in the area,” said Rajeshwari.

Of the 300 odd participants, as many as 175 students were given scholarships worth Rs 7000 to attend the conference. Companies like Google, Accenture, HP, Facebook and others participated in the fair. Besides recruitment, the fair is also a platform to enrol for internships.