Importance of Diwali and how is it celebrated

One of the most significant festivals in Indian culture visible from space, Diwali, is the festival of lights, with millions of firework displays and celebrations across the world. The festive mood in the air during Diwali makes everyone happy. Diwali, in some Indian languages, translates literally as “row of lamps” and is a celebration of the victory of good over evil, light over dark and knowledge over ignorance.

Diwali at UConn School of Business

Diwali was celebrated with great joy and enthusiasm on November 13th, 2015 by UConn School of Business family. The banquet hall was  illuminated with lamps and candle-sticks. A great assortments of Indian cuisines and desserts were served for dinner.

Performances

Diwali event was hosted by our amazing talented students Alekhya Garlapati, Mahesh Pai and Piyush Rohella. The celebration started with amazing flute performance by Chinmay Joshi, followed by a guitar performance by Alok Singh. Students were extremely enthusiastic and couldn’t stop cheering up the performances. A graceful and festive dance performance by UConn girls namely Abhinaya Raju, Gargi Chugh, Paridhi Valecha, Sowmya Subramanian and Swati Chelawat was followed by an amazing dance performance by UConn Boys Dinesh Takkallapelly, Kirubhakaran Gnanabalan, Nirmal Chandrasingh and Sunny Dalsania on fun and festive songs. Maithili Pandey sang a beautiful melodious song, and then was the time to move to a hilarious stand-up comedy performance by Sainath Palla, which was followed by a fun-filled group dance performance by Abhinaya Raju, Dinesh Takkallapelly, Gargi Chugh, Harsh Bansal, Mrigank Tayal, Nikita Bonavate, Paridhi Valecha, Piyush Rohella, Sowmya Subramanian and Vipin Yadav

Glimpses of Diwali Celebration 2015

Everyone was dressed in beautiful traditional attires and festivity was all over in the air. Students and faculties played a hilarious networking game called “Star of the night”, where one star was distributed to everyone. People ask questions and if you say no, you give up your star and the person with maximum stars at the end of the event wins the game. Here are some beautiful glimpses of the festival and UConn School of Business family.

Workshop on R was conducted by Sasank Daggubati on 4^th and 11^th of November. The first session of the workshop was an introductory session on R as a platform for statistical computing, its popularity and wide industry use. Sasank had the students install the R interface and demonstrated some simple codes and statistics. He demonstrated the use of packages, vectors, matrices, arrays and data frames.

The second session of the workshop on R was designed to demonstrate use cases for advanced analytics in R. It provided hands-on on more complex codes to perform data manipulation, sampling, create models and predict values. Sasank then demonstrated the use of R sentiment package for scoring of Twitter feeds into positive, negative or neutral polarities, for user defined searches. It was interesting to see the wide usage of R in analytics and how versatile it is. Sasank gave a number of tips and tricks for working with R, and a few examples of interview questions.

A bustling crowd, nervous laughter and a room full of enthusiastic students, dressed in neat formal attire, waited outside the closed doors of the career fair, held at Marriott in Downtown Hartford at 2:00 pm on the 23rd October 2015. The doors opened and the students rushed in, ready to encounter what they had been anxiously awaiting. The students we equipped with their portfolios and resumes to impress the companies’ HRs and representatives.

The UConn Graduate Career Fair was primarily held for part- time and full-time MBA, MSBAPM and FRM students in their first and second years. Some looking for summer internships and some for full time jobs, the hall was a scurry of students all eagerly anticipating the outcome at each of the stalls.

The fair offered a wide range of companies (25 in number), some of which were – Priceline, Boeing, Aetna, Eversource, ConnectiCare, Target, CVS Health, Cigna and many more. We had the opportunity to talk to a variety of companies, make decisions on what profiles we would like to work as and distribute resumes to the companies we were interested in. It helped us realize the number of opportunities that were present before us. It created a platform for networking, to improvise our conversational skills, collect information regarding an array of companies depending on our area of interest and a chance to meet people who worked in important functions in the company of our interest.

The representatives were patient with their advice and distribution of critical information regarding their companies. Many of whom were surprised at the quality and number of the students who had attended the fair. The Graduate Career Fair was a well-rounded exposure for each student who was present there.