Podcast transcript: PS: Welcome back to another episode of Sabre Souvenirs. This is your host, Preeti Sahu and I have with me today one of our newest employee – Aayusi Biswas. Hello Aayusi. Introduce yourself to the audience. AB: Hello everyone, I am Aayusi Biswas. I joined Sabre as an intern from SRM university from AP in the month of February. This August, I converted into  a full-time employee. So far, it has been an amazing experience.  PS: Congratulations on joining Sabre as a full-time employee. You must be excited!  We already chatted with Amitesh from your batch on the Intern Boot camp journey. Why don’t you tell us about your graduation experience and your other learning at Sabre that keeps you excited? AB: Thank you! Interning at sabre was an amazing experience and the Intern Bootcamp had given us a great start. The Graduation Day was a fitting end to our journey as interns. It was an evening full of fun where we got to come together, show our talents and toss our graduation caps ‘virtually’. The highlight of the evening was the tips and pointers shared by the leaders at Sabre emphasizing on a culture of innovation and focus on diversity. Especially for us who started our corporate careers post pandemic and haven’t yet set foot in our offices, this was great. We expected to be working an ungodly amount of time everyday and talking to the screens but that is not the case here. Several employee resource groups, programs and events keep us engaged and allow us to grow personally as well as professionally. I’ll even say that these groups and events have kept me sane during the monotonous lockdown period – it provided for a platform to engage and socialize while making meaningful connections. PS: So, you mean you love the employee resource groups at Sabre that provides you ample opportunities to develop your other skills at work? Can you talk about few that you particularly like (that you saw  or participated in since you joined)? AB: The Intern bootcamp which was a 3 week long power packed event was one of my favorites. It helped me connect to my peers and thanks to the fun games and other activities we had everyday I made some great friends at Sabre. It also had a lot of technical sessions where we learnt about the current frameworks and technologies being used at Sabre. It ended with a hackathon which was super fun. Along the same lines, I witnessed the #SuperBlitzCode2020 – a 72 hour coding hackathon where numerous teams compete to devise unique solutions for our current customer challenges. The best part is that the winning teams get a chance to get their codes go into production. Solve!T – a forum where technologists share case studies and best practices of the tech world – is an event I look forward to every month. There’s always something new and exciting up for discussion ranging from Cloud, AI, NLP, DataOps, Micro Services to Scrum, Digital Commerce, Automation, Travel Technology. Women in Technology is perhaps the best forum that I’ve joined here at Sabre. While all the other forums I just mentioned are Sabre India initiatives, W!T is a global forum. It creates an environment of success for women technologists to flourish. Engaging and growing with women in science and technology has driven me from a very young age, in fact I was the first chairperson of the IEEE Women In Technology chapter in my University. I was very happy to learn that Sabre has its own W!T community where something great is always happening. I joined it hoping to connect to women leaders at Sabre, learn from them and find ways to give back to the society. I got all that plus a community of very supportive women to talk to and grow with both professionally and personally. PS: How are you coping with the virtual only interaction as you’ve probably never got a chance to visit office and meet your colleagues. Also, share one of the biggest takeaways from your career journey so far. AB: Interaction is definitely one of the biggest challenges when it comes to starting our career virtually. Fortunately, there’s always something fun happening at Sabre that gives us an opportunity to connect with our colleagues. The Solve!t sessions, the W!T Knowledge sharing sessions and other open hours, the travelators sessions – there’s always something to look forward to, something that sparks conversation and makes it easy to interact even when we’re all sitting miles apart. One of my biggest takeaways has been to always communicate – be it small doubts, major questions or feedback. Sabre has a rich pool of mentors always out there ready to help. All we need to do is ask. It is a huge step towards personal and professional development. PS: What are you working on currently that makes you feel inspired? AB: I am part of Sabre hospitality Solution’s Synxis Property Hub. Currently, Sabre is transitioning to google cloud and that in itself is very exciting. It is amazing to be able to get up every morning knowing that I’ll be contributing in a product that makes the hospitality marketspace way more personalized.  PS: Anything else that you would like to share with the external audience based on your learnings so far? As a fresh graduate, I’ve realized learning is a process that never stops. Learning and updating ourselves with new technical advancements, learning about interpersonal relationships, learning to collaborate are all skills we need to keep harnessing. With the current Work from Home situation it is very easy to isolate and cut off ourselves. But it is important that we grab hold of little windows of opportunities to interact and stay in touch with the outside world, it is important to attend that one 45 minute Solve!T session on a technology we’ve never heard of, to volunteer for that one W!T event, to participate in that one competition – it makes a difference. Awesome! Thanks for your time Aayusi. I hope our listeners enjoyed our discussion today got a peek into the awesome culture at Sabre while at it. We will keep coming back with more stories in our upcoming podcast. The link to our podcast will be updated on our website as and when they happen. So listeners! Don’t forget to keep visiting our YouTube channel and other social media channels for more such interesting stories  from our team member’s experiences! Until then, stay safe and happy!