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After publishing several papers in a peer reviewed journal, it was back to the familiar
area of hunting for jobs.Unfortunately, North America was in a recession and I was racing
against time as my University funding deadline was fast approaching. All my bags were
packed and I was getting ready to head back to India, my motherland. Adding to my list
of last-minute surprise(s), a communication arrived from a Professor in Australia, whom
I had contacted regarding Post-Doctoral fellowship opportunities. A hone interview with
the interviewing committee was scheduled, and to my pleasant surprise, an offer came
through in a flash. My travel destination changed from Bangalore to Canberra, Australia.
Such is life.

At the Australian Defense Force Academy (ADFA), University of New South Wales,
located in Canberra, my Civil Laboratory architecture contribution continued. Here the
challenge was to design Hollow Cylinder Torsion (HCT) testing equipment for studying
sand behavior during earthquakes. There were only a handful of such apparatus in
the world; a couple of them in North America and half a dozen in Japan. Along with
equipment design, software design proceeded in parallel to control the experiment and
capture data in real time. After three years of my efforts in designing and building, the
ADFA was equipped with the HCT testing capability and joined the elite list of countries

to have such apparatus- “Made in Australia”, a feather in my cap!
A professor from the University of Sydney became interested in my test automation
and control ability and I was invited to continue my Post Doc fellowship in Sydney, the
commercial capital of Australia. My sincere advice is: while working on a task it is always
advisable to acquire skills which are “out of the box”. This has helped me immensely to
project myself out of the civil engineering world to the Software Engineering world.

My career changing event occurred duringthe final stages of my post-doctoral
fellowship, when I narrowly missed opportunities to securelecturer positions at three
different Australian universities. It was the final straw which broke my civil engineering

dream in academia. I immediately enrolled in Oracle and C++ courses at the University
of Canberra. It was time to move out of the University environment and venture into
the industry. Due to limited civil engineering opportunities in Australia, I was once again
back in familiar territory- job hunting.
I managed to get interviews for a civil laboratory tech position and also with an IT/
Software placement agency on the same day. While talking casually with the IT placement
agency, I mentioned that I was coming from another interview at the Civil Lab, which

were poles apart in those days. I wondered if it was a big mistake to have mentioned
that fact. Immediately, the placement agent (named David) told me, “Clients don’t like a
resume from a different industry.” He informed me that he could not forward my resume.
I pleaded with him to give me an opportunity to prove myself because I was confident
that my own initiative in software programming would produce results. He flatly refused
to continue the conversation. Some instinct came over me, and I challenged him. ‘David,
you are not willing to send my resume for a 35K job, I will challenge you that you will

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