Personals

10 Best Uses of Orkut or Facebook for Students

I started with my social networking life with Hi5 in 2005 but did not find it much useful. Few days later I got several invitations from my friends for Orkut, I deleted few but the high frequency made me to look into it. The concept single account for gmail and orkut was the reason to have an orkut account back in 2005.


Initially it was really exciting and checked the orkut account as email, and also had scrap and friend requests alerts set. Whenever someone used to scrap, send a friend request or approves it I used to get an alert. It was really fun meeting all old friends in one place after a long time. And also made friends from different parts of the world, specially having more girl friends was an honor.

One fine weekend I decided to go for trekking and got off my research lab little early to take rest for next day trekking. I was getting busier with research paper’s deadlines too and this was last chance for me to go out for hiking. After dinner I went room I checked my mail and saw few friends’ requests and scrap alerts. Just opened orkut to accept and read the scraps and go to bed. Unfortunately or fortunately met many old friends and started scraping them and reading them unknowingly it went very late in the night.

Next day early in the morning when friends called me, I was not in a position to go with them, too tired and sleepy, just took excuse from them and slept long. In my history I missed my only first breakfast at IIT the next day. After waking up late, I took shower and ate some fruits and went to lab. As soon as open my mail saw a friend request form my B.Tech junior with a scrap. I jumped with happiness and opened orkut again and replied her scrap. It went on again and I missed my lunch. When I came out it was dinner time. I orkuted whole weekend, and missed my social life because of social networking.

Next Monday when I looked back at my progress, I felt really bad and sick of orkut. I thought of deleting the account at first, but speared it for my old friends here. On the way to lab I decided to make best use of orkut or any other social networking site to support my research as I used Internet.

First suggestion, to make best use of any social networking sites like orkut, facebook, my space, Hi5…etc. is to disable all the default setting, do not receive any alerts from them. You go the site whenever you feel like going there. Don’t give them a chance to pull you there. I went to settings and cancelled all the alerts and concentrated on my research work. With the changing the settings the golden time started.

Afterwards I used orkut the most efficient way to help my research, develop hobbies and finding friends at new job location. Instead of searching for orkut themes, best orkut birthday scraps or some best scrap shairee to send it to girls you can use it as most effective product to shape your career. Here are few tips.

1. For Education
Make best uses of communities join some of the best and active communities of current semester subjects specially the one you found difficult. Post your questions and be interactive in the community. There are lots of experts there who will be happy to help you.

2. Subject book reviews
In engineering we are usually confused about buying books for semester, most of the time students find it difficult to understand the concepts. Most of us end up buying a difficult book that we never study and finally end up with weak subject knowledge and just pass it and never dare to touch that again. With the help of seniors and other people who used these books we can find some very good book reviews and can decide which book will help us to grow in strong knowledge. The eventually help us in scoring good marks in final exams. Other books we can definitely borrow from college library.

3. The best buyer guide
Asking parents to buy a laptop for you and confused about the range available, go thought the community discussion related to the product and get an idea of product you were planning to buy. You can go through the reviews of your own community of people on certain electronic products. Most of the bloggers just copy paste info from the information brochures and really don’t have any idea about what they are talking about, therefore it is always better to use trusted communities.

4. Seminars
Seminars are must in almost every course these days. For selection of good seminar topics, materials and white papers join communities and learn from others experience. It will also help you to find out the trends while searching for a good topic that may be useful for your mini project and final projects.

5. Projects
Selecting a good project topic and working on that is usually one of the most difficult part the curriculum. Most of us think that our job mostly depends on the kind of project we do or at least our scores depends on it. You can search some good project names in some related communities. Ones you are done with collecting information and start implementing it and struck somewhere you can always approach the right person to help you in the communities. As expecting help from guides back at school will usually not much fruitful.

6. Competitive Exam preparation
When we are at the verge of finishing the course we usually look around for jobs, you can find lots communities with people similar to us, hunting jobs everyday. They will usually post some information about test and interview questions. Having a look at them will definitely help.
If you are preparing for some competitive exams like GRE, GMAT, GATE, TOFEL, JAM or MBA or MCA CETs, for further studies you will find huge recourse on these sites. You can see how people are using audio lectures and links to prepare for them. Preparation plans, ebooks and materials are often shared in these communities.

7. Promoting hobbies
Don’t get puzzled when some ask you for your hobby. What you would like to do in free time is your hobby. I love to read and write about personality development, using my time efficiently, therefore I joined a group till I found useful. I gave suggestions too but latter decided to write them on my own blog.

8. Outings
Vacations and semester breaks, don’t spend them at home just playing video games and thinking about reading something that you never read. Plan properly and look around what are the nearby tourist attractions that are affordable by you and your parents. Checkout the experience of other travelers and find out their recommendations to help your travel. This will make you fresh and also give a feeling of break from routine and gives strength to concentrate on studies again.

9. Contacts with old friends and Alumni
Everyone loves their close friends and loosing them make us cry. The best way to know how abouts of them is to add them as in your friend list and checking their profile updates and scrap them sometimes. Another set of important people to you can be your college Almuni who share a common interest with you or in places where you want to go in future. Don’t disturb them but on the same time don’t hesitate to ask a good question. Be good to them you may face them in some interviews. Also check their activities and have a note on their attitude this may help you to reach there.

10. News around the campuses or companies
Join the communities of companies and campuses you are targeting or going to join. This will make you understand the culture there make it easy for you to adopt. You can make friends before you go there. A new joining community can help each other with the admission or joining process. This can also be the best uses to keep your momentum going for your target jobs or campuses.

Hope this helps. Keep reading for new stuff..

16 Comments

  1. Shuvanshu

    Nice post Zahid.. There are a lot of things that can be made use of on social networks other than just making random friends.
    I’ll continue reading your other post too in future.

  2. PAVAN

    it is an very usefull information………………….

  3. rahul agrawal

    really it is useful information which you shared with us sir thank you for giving 10 reason to look it positively and engineeringly …………

  4. manisha

    sir i want to know whethr students of mechanical engg cud appaear for m.tech in aerospace engg or not???

    plkease mail me to [email protected]

  5. manisha

    sir,
    i m am student of mechanical engg 3rd yr i want to know else i will b able to appear gate in aerospace engg or not???

    [lz mail me to [email protected]

  6. zeeshan

    hello zahid i have took mtech seat need help…..

  7. shiv

    sir thanx for guide n u changed my view about fb or orkut .its really vry easy to get knowldge abt our carrier

  8. dilip

    Sir, this is the best and most useful post for me i ever seen ….
    thank you so much for guiding us… today i realized what i have to do and what i was not doing…
    Various topics on GATE are very very useful and cleared the fog which was in from of my eyes…
    thanks..

  9. Ashwini

    Nice Post

  10. Rohit Batra

    Excellent post….It might help others to understand that you can gain knowledge from Social Networking also…some think that its just waste of time….i say that it depends on you how do you use it…

    I have also earned and developed lots of skills and knowledge as i am also an engineering student..

  11. anirudh

    it was anice one

  12. Saheli Mazumder

    Really helpful one.. i have already disabled the alerts and it proved to be useful.. will try to follow d rest.Thanx 🙂

  13. dileep

    thanks for ur keen support zahid sir. it’s really nice

  14. niranjan

    good post

  15. Zahid

    Satbir Lamba: Thanks a lot for encouragement. Ebooks is a great resource you get from Orkut. I agree with you.

  16. Satbir Lamba

    nIce post …..:)..
    .
    its really sad tht people waste so much of time on these sites searching 4 new frnds n competing on their no. of scraps…….but thr is a lot of stuff these sites offer as said above…..
    .
    .
    i use orkut for latest softwares,keygens,ebooks(u almost get all ebooks )n learning small hacking tricks…:)

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