If you are looking for a preview of the upcoming debut Hollywood movie by YashRaj films called "The Longest Week" (would it get exciting if I said the movie stars Olivia Wilde and Jason Bateman?), this is not it!

This is actually about the longest and one of my life altering week to come. Back in Septemeber / October of 2013 I had decided to attempt the GATE examination for Post Graduation courses, the following year for various reasons. My decision was primarily driven by lot of senior experienced folks in my team quitting all of a sudden creating a vacuum at workplace which drove down the number of amazing technical talks and rapo we shared within the team. Secondly, I have always enjoyed being technically deep and self motivated explorer and contributor but work was narrowing down the avenues for exploration (I don't blame them, they do what makes business sense to them and I respect some of their decisions as well). I started preparing and picked up intense momentum towards the end before giving the exam on 1st March 2014.
Reflecting back after the exam I knew I hadn't done too well. However when the results came I ended up with a GATE score of 692 and a normalized score of 50.67 out of 100. I recieved a call for written test and interview for the Research Programme - M.Sc (Engg) - of the Computer Science and Automation CSA department of Indian Institute of Science (IISc) .

Parallely, Citrix R&D called me to appear for an interview for the profile of Senior Software Engineer for their Xen Server platform to head / Tech Lead their Bangalore development team.

As you've guessed by now, both these unexpected events happened on the same week. The week of 2nd to 6th June 2014 seemed never ending and I burnt more than a couple of midnight oils this week to see it through. I will follow up this article with one describing my Citrix R&D interview experience and the other my IISc written test and interview experience.

EDIT: Later I found out from GATE press release , the year of 2014 there had been only 16.84% people from the 10Lakh+ students that appeared were even officially qualified to get a score card. Pretty tough eh!