My Favorite Company Visit in India #HogsAbroad

One thing about India that continuously fascinates me about India is the diversity of the slums. Some slums can be full of extremely poor individuals who have little to no education and other slums like the ones in Bombay can have inhabitants that have bachelor’s or master’s degrees. This is something that I’m looking forward to seeing when we go to Mumbai.

We had the CISCO visit today. This has been my absolute favorite company that we’ve visited on this trip. I loved the diversity of experiences that we were exposed to. We got an opportunity to see CISCO’s video conference, their think-tank, and much more. We learned about the impact CISCO is having by supporting many startup companies as well as the growing number of IT startups in India. I appreciate how they broke our large group down into smaller groups and assigned us different rotations. It made all of the information much more manageable and interactive. All of the presentations we saw were very engaging and enjoyable. I once again had to change my perspective about India when I learned that India’s competitive advantages lies in IT. CISCO submits about 3 patents a week and innovation is their core capability.

While visiting CISCO, the provided lunch for us and we were paired with new hires. I was paired with a new hire named Ankitha. It was really great getting to talk to someone who was around my age and to see all of the similarities between us even though we were from complete opposite sides of the world. I particularly enjoyed her sharing her experiences and thoughts about working at CISCO. All of the new hires and interns that we talked to really enjoyed the flexibility and company culture that came with working at CISCO.

From Ankitha I was able to get a different view of the schooling system in India. We had talked numerous times about the school systems in India in our prep classes and even watched a movie about it. Ankitha had a college experience that was a little different from that of the characters in the movie Three Idiots. At her university, freshman had to declare their major (not unlike in the United States) however once you picked major, you weren’t allowed to change it. I knew about the strict schooling system, but I didn’t know that some universities didn’t allow for any flexibility.
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