Students travel to business driven India

By Jen Abraczinskas and Carrie Caine
Collegian Reporter and Collegian Staff
April 18, 2007

Only a 13-hour plane ride stands between Philadelphia and New Delhi, but the United States and India are worlds apart, or at least they used to be. Now, whether you call Dell or American Express, you can be linked to the network by Indian call center operators who diligently try to fix your burning computer. The Leadership and Global Understaning 229 class visited this land of mystery known for its spicy food, rich cultural heritage and soaring population to see for themselves the chaos of cow-filled roadways and the ambition of our newest global competitors: India’s business and technology students.

Across India, students are upgrading their technological skills to be ready to take their places in the global market. India boasts seven Institutes of Technology (IIT), which churn out highly skilled grads eager for new opportunities. According to Mickey Dominick, former IBM Global Systems Analyst, the job competition in India is fierce.

“One job posting may yield 1,000 responses from qualified people,” Dominick said, “and the competition only makes Indian youth more ambitious.”

That ambition fuels the venture of new Indian companies like Infosys and its luxurious, state-of-the-art campus. They are competing with U.S. dinosaurs like IBM, which have also moved to India to take advantage of the growing knowledge base in their economy. The LGU 229 class visited both IBM and Infosys happy to eat Pizza Hut and drink Aquafina, witnessing firsthand the collaboration among nations.

Competition is still the name of the game, however. If you’re not concerned with having your job outsourced in the next 10-15 years, you should be, and if you are, it is time to pay attention to the Collegian. In his Feb 14 article(“What’s more important: Global warming or your friend’s Facebook account?”p.7,) senior staff writer Jesse D. Hamilton asks readers to check out the newsfeed on CNN.com more frequently than Facebook.com. His argument is sound, and for more details on how to compete across the globe, pick up Thomas Friedman’s bestseller The World is Flat. For example, the 70,000 employees-strong Infosys began 20 years ago with two people and $40,000 revenue on a platform that had never existed before. Friedman tells today’s students to have the same motivation and innovation. Upon touring Bangalore, the students saw firsthand the need to beef up their versatility across subjects, collaboration skills and entrepreneurial nature.

Don’t think that it’s time to move to India to save your job. Although three million of India’s 1.2 billion people are prospering in the new, technologically savvy industries, the roads and restrooms have yet to show improvement. Poverty is still strong in India and, even as social activists attempt to tackle the centuries-old problems such as human trafficking and malnutrition, there are some problems that need more than the Internet to solve them. And, to the many La Salle students graduating in a few short weeks, these problems, the world’s problems, need you to solve them.

abraczinskasj1@lasalle.edu and ainec1@lasalle.edu