CIS Undergraduates visit IFS & Virtusa

Annual industrial visit to software giants IFS and Virtusa by the fourth year batch of Computing & Information Systems (CIS) of Sabaragamuwa University was held on 15th August. Both companies are world famous software development firms which are also reputed for their human resource policies as well. The seminar and practical sessions conducted by both firms were extremely helpful for the CIS students. CIS is a new four-year special degree awarded by Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka, which celebrated the passing out of its first batch this year.

Both organizations covered a wide range of topics during the sessions they conducted for us. They included the skills a computing student should acquire, an introduction to mobile computing, cloud computing, big data, embedded system development and finally  a brief introduction about various job opportunities available in the industry. They also elaborated on the skills required to be competent professionals and organizational expectations from fresh graduates.

In the first session at Virtusa, a Senior Tech Lead explained about the organization and their operational area in the industry. After that he discussed the future opportunities for the IT undergraduates and the skills undergraduates should build up along with technological expertise.

Then Virtusa introduced their annual “LAN Challenge” gaming competition. Afterwards two project managers explained about their projects. First one relating to the aviation industry and the other “Akura”, which is an open source project. In the third session all undergraduates got the chance to visit the project development environments and discuss with the project managers, developers and testers about the projects and they demonstrated how those systems really performed. This really was an  interesting team activity done by Virtusa who encouraged students to showcase their resource planning and time management abilities too. Before moving on to the next session at IFS, Virtusa provided food and beverage including lunch for all of us.

Then we visited IFS and  they briefed us about their company and the products they are delivering. Then students participated in an interactive discussion about the emerging technologies in the industry and the industrial placement opportunities for the CIS students. Members of IFS staff also provided necessary guidance for each an every individual student and exchanged their experiences with us. At the end of the sessions IFS provided refreshments as well.

This was the second industry visit of CIS undergraduates and it was a riveting experience. Our sincere gratitude goes out Virtusa and IFS for investing time and money on behalf of the new comers to the industry and showing them the path to succeed and excel in the industry.

Digit Magazine Article  By Rohana K Amarakoon