#companies that hire opt students

[optresumess]

The F1 visa category is a non-immigrant visa, under which international students find ways to arrive in the USA. International students come here to study at colleges and universities. They must be enrolled in full-time courses, in the English language. Also, the candidates must be fluent in the English language and must have relevant documents to support their stay. Such as their financial background must be strong enough to sponsor their academics in the USA. There is a privileged permit given to international students, to work while they are pursuing their academics.

[planckstorytime]

Dragon Age: The Veilguard: Strangled by Gentle Hands

*The following contains spoilers*

“You would risk everything you have in the hope that the future is better? What if it isn’t? What if you wake up to find the future you shaped is worse than what was?”

– Solas, Dragon Age: Inquisition (2014)

I. Whatever It Takes

My premium tickets for a local film festival crumpled and dissolved in my pants pocket, unredeemed as they swirled in the washing machine. Throughout that October weekend in 2015, I neglected my celebratory privileges, my social visits to friends, and even my brutal honors literary theory class. All because a golden opportunity stretched before me: a job opening for a writing position at the once-legendary BioWare, with an impending deadline.

The application process wasn’t like anything I’d seen before. Rather than copy+paste a cover letter and quickly swap out a couple of nouns here and there, this opening required me to demonstrate my proficiency in both words and characters – namely, BioWare’s characters. Fanfiction wasn’t normally in my wheelhouse – at the time, I had taken mainly to spinning love sonnets (with a miserable success rate). But I wouldn’t balk at this chance to work on one of my dream franchises – especially since the job prospects for fresh English BAs weren’t exactly promising. So, I got to work crafting a branching narrative based on the company’s most recent title: Dragon Age: Inquisition. Barely two months prior, I saw the conclusion of that cast’s story when the Inquisitor stabbed a knife into a map and swore to hunt her former ally, Solas, to the ends of the earth. Now it was my turn to puppeteer them, to replicate the distinct voice of each party member and account for how they’d react to the scenario I crafted. And if it went well, then maybe I’d be at the tip of the spear on that hunt for Solas. Finishing the writing sprint left me exhausted, but also proud of my work.

The folks at BioWare obviously felt differently, because I received a rejection letter less than a week later. Maybe they found my story trite and my characterization inaccurate, or maybe they just didn’t want to hire a student with no professional experience to his name. Regardless, I was devastated. It wouldn’t be until years later that I learned that, had my application been accepted, I likely would’ve been drafted into working on the studio’s ill-fated looter shooter, Anthem (2019), noteworthy for its crunch and mismanagement. My serendipitous rejection revealed that sometimes the future you strive to build was never meant to match your dreams. What seemed like an opportunity to strike oil actually turned out to be a catastrophic spill.

Still, my passion for the Dragon Age series (as well as Mass Effect) persisted in the face of BioWare’s apparent decline. I maintain that Inquisition is actually one of the studio’s best games, and my favorite in the series, to the point where I even dressed up as Cole for a convention one time. The game came to me at a very sensitive time in my life, and its themes of faith vs falsehood, the co-opting of movements in history, and the instability of power all spoke to me. But I will elaborate more on that at a later date. My point is, I held on to that hope that, in spite of everything, BioWare could eventually deliver a satisfactory resolution to the cliffhanger from their last title. Or perhaps it was less hope and more of a sunk cost fallacy, as an entire decade passed with nary a peep from Dragon Age.

As years wore on, news gradually surfaced about the troubled development of the fourth game. Beginning under the codename “Joplin” in 2015 with much of the same creative staff as its predecessors, this promising version of the game would be scrapped two years later for not being in line with Electronic Arts’s business model (i.e. not being a live-service scam). Thus, it was restarted as “Morrison”. The project cantered along in this borderline unrecognizable state for a few years until they decided to reorient it back into a single-player RPG, piling even more years of development time onto its shaky Jenga tower of production. Indeed, critical pieces were constantly being pulled out from the foundations during this ten year development cycle. Series regulars like producer Mark Darrah and director Mike Laidlaw made their departures, and the project would go on to have several more directors and producers come and go: Matthew Goldman, Christian Dailey, and Mac Walters, to name a few key figures. They eventually landed on John Epler as creative director, Corinne Busche as game director, and Benoit Houle as director of product development. Then came the massive layoffs of dozens of employees, including series-long writer Mary Kirby, whose work still made it into the final version of DA4. Finally, the game received a rebranding just four months before release, going from Dreadwolf (which it had been known as since 2022) to The Veilguard (2024) – a strange title with an even stranger article.

Needless to say, these production snags did not inspire confidence, especially considering BioWare’s been low on goodwill between a string of flops like Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda (2017) and, before that, controversial releases like Dragon Age II (2011) and Mass Effect 3 (2012). The tumult impacted The Veilguard’s shape, which scarcely resembles an RPG anymore, let alone a Dragon Age game. The party size is reduced from four to three, companions can no longer be directly controlled, the game has shifted to a focus on action over tactics a la God of War (2018), the number of available abilities has shrunk, and there’s been a noticeable aesthetic shift towards a more cartoonish style. While I was open to the idea of changing up the combat (the series was never incredible on that front), I can’t get over the sensation that these weren’t changes conceived out of genuine inspiration, but rather vestigial traces from the live-service multiplayer iteration. The digital fossil record implies a lot. Aspects like the tier-based gear system, the instanced and segmented missions, the vapid party approval system, the deficit of World State import options, and the fact that rarely does more than the single mandatory companion have anything unique to say on a quest – it all points to an initial design with a very different structure from your typical single-player RPG. The Veilguard resembles a Sonic Drive-In with a mysterious interior dining area – you can tell it was originally conceived as something else.1

That said, the product itself is functional. It contains fewer bugs than any previous game in the franchise, and maybe BioWare’s entire catalog for that matter. I wouldn’t say the combat soars, but it does glide. There’s a momentum and responsiveness to the battle system that makes it satisfying to pull off combos and takedowns against enemies, especially if you’re juggling multiple foes at once. Monotony sets in after about thirty or forty hours, largely due to the fact that you’re restricted to a single class’s moveset on account of the uncontrollable companions. Still, this design choice can encourage replay value, as it does in Mass Effect, and free respec options and generous skill point allocations offset the tedium somewhat.

While the character and creature designs elicit controversy – both for the exaggerated art direction and, in the case of demons and darkspawn, total redesign – the environmental art is nothing short of breathtaking. I worried that this title would look dated because of how long it had been in development and the age of the technology it was built upon. Those fears were swiftly banished when I saw the cityscapes of Minrathous, the cyclopean architecture of the Nevarran Grand Necropolis, or the overgrown ruins of Arlathan. But like everything in The Veilguard, it’s a double-edged sword. The neon-illuminated streets of Docktown, the floating citadel of the Archon’s Palace, and the whirring mechanisms of the elven ruins evoke a more fantastically futuristic setting that feels at odds with all three previous titles (even though all three exhibited a stylistic shift to some extent). It aggravates the feeling of discordance between this rendition of Thedas and the one returning players know.

All of these elements make The Veilguard a fine fantasy action-adventure game – even a good one, I’d say. But as both the culmination of fifteen years of storytelling and as a narrative-based roleplaying game – the two most important facets of its identity – it consistently falls short. Dragon Age began as a series with outdated visuals and often obtuse gameplay, but was borne aloft by its worldbuilding, characterization, and dialogue. Now, that paradigm is completely inverted. The more you compare it to the older entries, the more alien it appears. After all these years of anticipation, how did it end up this way? Was this the only path forward?

Throughout The Veilguard’s final act, characters utter the phrase “Whatever it takes,” multiple times. Some might say too many. I feel like this mantra applied to the development cycle. As more struggles mounted, the team made compromise after compromise to allow the game to exist at all, to give the overarching story some conclusion in the face of pressure from corporate shareholders, AAA market expectations, and impatient fans. Whatever it takes to get this product out the door and into people’s homes.

This resulted in a game that was frankensteined together, assembled out of spare parts and broken dreams. It doesn’t live up to either the comedic heights or dramatic gravity of Inquisition’s “Trespasser” DLC from 2015, despite boasting the same lead writer in Trick Weekes. Amid the disappointment, we’re left with an unfortunate ultimatum: It’s either this or nothing.

I don’t mean that as a way to shield The Veilguard from criticism, or to dismiss legitimate complaints as ungrateful gripes. Rather, I’m weighing the value of a disappointing reality vs an idealized fantasy. The “nothing”, in this sense, was the dream I had for the past decade of what a perfect Dragon Age 4 looked like. With the game finally released, every longtime fan has lost their individualized, imaginary perfection in the face of an authentic, imperfect text. Was the destruction of those fantasies a worthy trade? It doesn’t help that the official artbook showcases a separate reality that could’ve been, with a significant portion dedicated to the original concepts for Joplin that are, personally, a lot closer to my ideal vision. I think it would’ve done wonders to ground the game as more Dragon Age-y had they stuck with bringing back legacy characters, such as Cole, Calpernia, Imshael, and the qunari-formerly-known as Sten.

I don’t necessarily hate The Veilguard (I might actually prefer it to Dragon Age II), but I can’t help but notice a pattern in its many problems – a pattern that stems from a lack of faith in the audience and a smothering commitment to safety over boldness. As I examine its narrative and roleplaying nuances, I wish to avoid comparing it to groundbreaking RPGs such as Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023) or even Dragon Age: Origins (2009), as the series has long been diverging from that type of old-school CRPG. Rather, except when absolutely necessary, I will only qualitatively compare it to Inquisition, its closest relative.

And nowhere does it come up shorter to Inquisition than in the agency (or lack thereof) bestowed to the player to influence their character and World State.

II. Damnatio Memoriae

No, that’s not the name of an Antivan Crow (though I wouldn’t blame you for thinking so, since we have a character named “Lucanis Dellamorte”). It’s a Latin phrase meaning “condemnation of memory”, applied to a reviled person by destroying records of their existence and defacing objects of their legacy. In this case, it refers to the player. When it comes to their influence over the world and their in-game avatar, The Veilguard deigns to limit or outright eliminate it.

Save transfers that allow for the transmission of World States (the carrying over of choices from the previous games) have been a staple of the Dragon Age and Mass Effect franchises. Even when their consequences are slight, the psychological effect that this personalization has on players is profound, and one of many reasons why fans grow so attached to the characters and world. At its core, it’s an illusion, but one that’s of similar importance to the illusion that an arbitrary collection of 1s and 0s can create an entire digital world. Player co-authorship guarantees a level of emotional investment that eclipses pre-built backgrounds.

However, The Veilguard limits the scope to just three choices, a dramatic decrease from the former standard. All import options come from Inquisition, with two just from the “Trespasser” expansion. One variable potentially impacts the ending, while the other two, in most cases, add one or two lines of dialogue and a single codex entry. Inquisition, by contrast, imported a bevy of choices from both previous games. Some of them had major consequences to quests such as “Here Lies the Abyss” and “The Final Piece”, both of which incorporated data from two games prior. The Veilguard is decidedly less ambitious. Conspicuously absent options include: whether Morrigan has a child or not, the fate of Hawke, the status of the Hero of Fereldan, the current monarchs of Fereldan and Orlais, the current Divine of the southern Chantry, and the individual outcomes of more than two dozen beloved party members across the series. Consequently, the fourth installment awkwardly writes around these subjects – Varric avoids mentioning his best friend, Hawke, as does Isabela ignore her potential lover. Fereldan, Orlais, and the Chantry are headed by Nobody in Particular. Morrigan, a prominent figure in the latest game, makes no mention of her potential son or even her former traveling companions. And the absence of many previous heroes, even ones with personal stakes in the story, feels palpably unnatural. I suspect this flattening of World States into a uniform mold served, in addition to cutting costs, to create parity between multiple cooperative players during the initial live-service version of Morrison. Again, the compromises of the troubled production become apparent, except this time, they’re taking a bite out of the core narrative.

Moreover, the game’s unwillingness to acknowledge quantum character states means that it’s obliged to omit several important cast members. At this point, I would’ve rather had them establish an official canon for the series rather than leaving everything as nebulous and undefined as possible. That way at least the world would’ve felt more alive, and we could’ve gotten more action out of relevant figures like Cassandra, Alistair, Fenris, Merrill, Cole, and Iron Bull. Not to mention that The Veilguard’s half-measure of respectful non-intereference in past World States ultimately fails. Certain conversations unintentionally canonize specific events, including references to Thom Rainier and Sera, both of whom could go unrecruited in Inquisition, as well as Morrigan’s transformation into a dragon in the battle with Corypheus in that game’s finale. But whatever personal history the player had with them doesn’t matter. The entire Dragon Age setting now drifts in a sea of ambiguity, its history obfuscated. It feels as gray and purgatorial as Solas’s prison for the gods.

Beyond obscuring the past, The Veilguard restrains the player’s agency over the present. When publications first announced that the game would allow audiences to roleplay transgender identities and have that acknowledged by the party, I grew very excited – both at the encouraging representation, and at the depth of roleplaying mechanics that such an inclusion suggested. Unfortunately, The Veilguard offers little in roleplaying beyond this. The player character, Rook, always manifests as an altruistic, determined, friendly hero, no matter what the player chooses (if they’re offered choices at all). The selections of gender identity and romantic partner constitute the totality of how Rook defines themselves, post-character creation – exceptions that prove the rule of vacancy. Everything else is set in stone. The options presented are good, and should remain as standard, but in the absence of other substantive roleplaying experiences, their inclusion starts to feel frustratingly disingenuous and hollow, as if they were the only aspects the developers were willing to implement, and only out of obligation to meet the bare minimum for player agency. In my opinion, it sours the feature and exudes a miasma of cynicism.

Actual decisions that impact the plot are few and far between, but at least we have plenty of dialogue trees. In this type of game, dialogue options might usually lead to diverging paths that eventually converge to progress the plot. You might be choosing between three different flavors of saying “yes”, but as with the World States, that illusion of agency is imperative for the roleplaying experience. The Veilguard doesn’t even give you the three flavors – the encouraging, humorous, and stern dialogue options are frequently interchangeable, and rarely does it ever feel like the player is allowed to influence Rook’s reactions. Relationships with companions feel predetermined, as the approval system has no bearing on your interactions anymore. There are so few moments for you to ask your companions questions and dig in deep compared to Inquisition. Combined together, these issues make me question why we even have dialogue with our party at all. Rook adopts the same parental affect with each grown adult under their command, and it feels like every conversation ends the same way irrespective of the player’s input. With the exception of the flirting opportunities, they might as well be non-interactive cutscenes.

Rook’s weak characterization drags the game down significantly. With such limited authorship afforded to the player, it’s difficult to regard them as anything more than their eponymous chess piece – a straightfoward tool, locked on a grid, and moving flatly along the surface as directed.

III. Dull in Docktown

On paper, a plot summary of The Veilguard sounds somewhere between serviceable and phenomenal: Rook and Varric track down Solas to stop him from tearing down the Veil and destroying the world. In the process, they accidentally unleash Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, two of the wicked Evanuris who once ruled over the elven people millenia ago. With Solas advising them from an astral prison, Rook gathers a party together to defeat the risen gods, along with their servants and sycophants. Over the course of the adventure, they uncover dark truths about the origins of the elves, the mysterious Titans, and the malevolent Blight that’s served as an overarching antagonistic force. Eventually, Rook and friends join forces with Morrigan and the Inquisitor, rally armies to face off with their foes, and slay both the gods and their Archdemon thralls before they can conjure the full terror of the Blight. As Solas once again betrays the group, Rook and company have to put a decisive stop to his plans, which could potentially involve finally showing him the error of his ways.

The bones of The Veilguard’s story are sturdier than a calcium golem. Problems arise when you look at the actual writing, dialogue, and characterization – the flesh, blood, and organs of the work.

I’ve seen others chide the writing as overly quippy, but that better describes previous titles. Rather, I think The Veilguard’s dialogue is excessively utilitarian and preliminary, like a first draft awaiting refinement. Characters describe precisely what’s happening on screen as it’s happening, dryly exposit upon present circumstances, and repeat the same information ad nauseum. This infuriating repetition does little to reveal hidden components of their personalities, or their unique responses to situations. You won’t hear anything like Cole’s cerebral magnetic poetry or Vivienne’s dismissive arrogance. Many exchanges could’ve been uttered by Nobody in Particular, as it’s just dry recitation after recitation. It almost feels like watching an English second language instructional video, or a demonstration on workplace safety precautions. Clarity and coherence come at the cost of characterization and charisma.

Words alone fail to make them interesting. Most companions lack the subtlety and depth I had come to expect from the franchise, with many conversations amounting to them just plainly stating how they’re feeling. Most rap sessions sound like they’re happening in a therapist’s office with how gentle, open, and uncomplicated they feel. Compare this to Inquisition, where every character has a distinct voice (I should know, I had to try to copy them for that stupid application), as well as their own personal demons that it betrays: Sera’s internalized racism, hints of Blackwall’s stolen valor, Iron Bull’s espionage masked by bluster, or Solas’s lingering guilt and yearning for a bygone age. These aspects of their characters aren’t front and center, but things the audience can delve into that gives every moment with them more texture. The Veilguard’s companions lay out all their baggage carefullly and respectfully upfront, whether it’s Taash’s multiculturalism and gender identity issues or Neve’s brooding cynicism towards Tevinter’s underbelly. You’ve plumbed the depths of their personas within the first few minutes of meeting most of them.

Small exceptions exist. Professor Emmerich Volkarin stands out from the rest of the cast as a particularly inspired character: a charming, Vincent Price-like necromancer. His attachment to tombs and necromancy as a way to cope with his crippling fear of death makes for curiously compelling melodrama. The way in which he ultimately has to face his fear – either by foregoing his opportunity for immortality to save his beloved skeletal ward, Manfred, or by allowing his friend to pass on so that he can transcend into a new type existence – rises above the other binary choices in the game by being both narratively interesting and legitimately difficult to judge. Still, I feel Emmerich’s whole “lawful good gentleman necromancer” conceit, while a unique and clever subversion of tropes, would’ve worked better if it actually contrasted with anyone else in the party. Instead, the whole crew is full of unproblematic do-gooders who are forbidden by the game to nurture any meaningful interpersonal conflict. While I’d appreciate this lack of toxicity in my real-life relationships, fictional chemistry demands more reactive ingredients.

The Veilguard’s developers frequently positioned the game as “cozy” and about a “found family”, but I can guarantee you that there’s more tension at my Thanksgiving dinners than there is anywhere in this title. This family would get along swimmingly even during a presidential election. The thing about the “found family” trope is that it’s more satisfying when it’s earned. Here, it represents the default state, the starting point, and the status quo that they will always return to. Any minor squabbles (Harding wanting to sleep in the dirt, Emmerich taking too many books on a camping trip, Taash not liking necromancy) are introduced and squashed within the same scene. They all feel so extraneous. There’s so little friction among the companions here that you’d think it disproves Newton’s Third Law. The previous games never struggled in this regard, which makes the choices here all the more baffling.

Beyond the intra-party dynamics, characters lack grit or darkness to them – even when the narrative absolutely calls for it. Remember how I described the necromancer as lawful good (to use traditional Dungeons and Dragons alignments)? Yeah, that’s every character. Even the demonic assassin. Lucanis is a notorious hitman possessed by a demon of Spite, and possibly the weakest character of the game. This may or may not be due to the fact that his writer, Mary Kirby, was laid off mid-development. Regardless, he has noticeably less content than the other party members and generally feels unfinished. The demonic possession storyline goes nowhere; he doesn’t exorcise Spite, nor does he learn more about it or how to live with it. Instead, Spite is just an excuse to give Lucanis cool spectral wings (which he will use to fail several assassination attempts). The demon itself mostly just comes across as rude rather than threatening. The biggest issue, however, stems from the absence of any edge to Lucanis. When confronting his traitorous cousin, Ilario – the man who sold out Lucanis’s family to an enemy faction, kidnapped his grandmother, and made multiple attempts on his life – our grizzled, hardened assassin, pushed to the brink, demands… due process. Seriously, if your choices have led Lucanis to have a hardened heart, his method for dealing with the grievous traitor is sending him to jail. That’s The Veilguard’s idea of vindictive brutality among a clan of unforgiving murderers-for-hire. By contrast, Inquisition features Sera insubordinately murdering a stuck-up nobleman for talking too much. I believe that if modern BioWare had written The Godfather (1972), it would’ve ended with Michael Corleone recommending his brother-in-law to attend confession and seek a marriage counselor.

The writers seem intent on making the cast wholly unproblematic, with no way that the audience could ever question their morality or taste the delicious nuance of seeing someone you like do something bad. Measures were taken to child-proof every aspect of the good guys so that they couldn’t possibly be construed as anything else – even if it constricts them to the point of numbness and eventual atrophy.

To make things as palatable and accessible as possible, the language itself was dumbed down. Characters make frequent use of neologisms and bark phrases like “Suit up,” or “These guys go hard.” It emulates popular blockbuster superhero stuff rather than staying true to the diction the series traditionally employed. It’s all about the team, and the entire Dragon Age world has been stripped down into simplistic conflicts and recognizable stock characters.

This is why The Veilguard’s story largely fails. Despite being ostensibly being about the characters, they come off as an afterthought. Most of the time, only the sole requisite follower has anything to say on a given mission. Even in combat, their wholeness as fully-implemented party members falls short of expectations. Their damage output pales in comparison to the Rook’s, they have no health and cannot be downed in battle, and they mainly exist to give the player three extra ability slots. That’s the game’s true ethos for the companions, whether in combat or dialogue – utility, tools to make things happen rather than elegantly crafted identities. We end up with the largest amount of content per companion among any game in the franchise, only to have the weakest roster.

I know these writers can do better, because I’ve seen them do better. Trick Weekes wrote Iron Bull, Cole, and Solas in Inquisition, as well as Mordin Solus and Tali’Zorah in Mass Effect 2 (2010) and Mass Effect 3. Mary Kirby wrote Varric throughout the series, as well as Sten and Loghain in Origins. Plenty of other experienced writers, such as Sylvia Feketekuty and John Dombrow also contributed, so I can’t put any of the blame on a lack of skill. I don’t know if the mistake was trying to appeal to a wider audience, or if the constant reorientations of the DA4 project drained the crew’s passion and left them lacking in time to polish things.

I personally suspect that the writers had to rush out a script for all of the voiced dialogue. A video from August of 2020 showed off the voice actors for Davrin and Bellara, more than four years before the final game’s release. I think the codex entries, letters, and missives that you find throughout the game, which consist of only text, are much better written than the dialogue. My theory is that the writers had more time to revise and spruce up these tidbits, where edits were minimally invasive, as far as production is concerned. But my knowledge is limited; after all, BioWare rejected my application almost a decade ago.

Still, there are aspects of The Veilguard’s plot that I enjoy. The lore reveals were particularly satisfying2, and many felt rewarding after a decade of speculation. I called that elves were originally spirits, as well as the connection between the Archdemons and the Evanuris, but I wouldn’t have guessed that the Blight formed out of the smoldering rage of the Titans’ severed dreams. I’d concisely describe The Veilguard’s story as the opposite of Mass Effect 3: Whereas ME3 did excellent character work, the characterization in The Veilguard leaves much to be desired. Whereas ME3’s tone was overwhelmingly grim, The Veilguard feels inappropriately positive. Whereas ME3’s lore reveals ruined much about the series’s mystique, The Veilguard’s helped tie the setting’s history together. And whereas ME3 fumbled the ending about as much as it possibly could, The Veilguard actually coalesces into a spectacular third act.

While I think the twist with Varric’s death is weak (outright pitiful compared to the Dread Wolf twist of Inquisition), the actual events that make up the finale carry a momentum and urgency that the rest of the game severely lacked. Everything from the sacrifice and kidnapping of Rook’s companions to the slaying of Ghilan’nain to the awe-inspiring battle between the Dread Wolf and Archdemon Lusacan – the whole affair takes the best parts of Mass Effect 2’s Suicide Mission and elevates it to the scale of an apocalyptic series finale. Ultimately, Solas takes center stage as the final antagonist, and the drama crescendos to a height the rest of the game desperately needed. He remains the most interesting character in the game and perhaps the franchise, and thankfully, the resolution to his story did not disappoint me (though I would’ve preferred the option for a boss battle against his Dread Wolf form if the player’s negotiations broke down). So in that sense, I think the worst possible scenario was avoided.

But is that really worth celebrating? Averting complete disaster? Exceeding the lowest standards? In many regards, The Veilguard still could have been – should have been – more.

IV. A World of Tranquil

In my essay on Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (2024), I briefly discussed a trend in media to sand off the edges so as not to upset the audience in any way. The encroachment of this media sanitization seems to be an over-correction to the brimming grimness of late 2000s and early 2010s fiction (to which the first two Dragon Age titles belong), which earned comparable levels of criticism. Like Solas, I occasionally feel trapped in a cycle of regret, where it feels like our previous yearning for less aggressive, mean-spirited content led to a media landscape that prioritized patronizingly positive art. Now it’s clear to me that, in order to have a point, you need to have an edge.

Dragon Age historically drew a very progressive audience, and many of them congregated around Tumblr in that website’s heyday. Tumblr has garnered something of a reputation for overzealous discourse and sensitivity among its userbase, and I think that the developers of The Veilguard, in an attempt to cater to one of their core audiences, may have misunderstood both that passion and the fundamental appeal of their products. They became so concerned about optics, about avoiding politically charged criticism, that they kneecapped their world-building, rendering it as inoffensive and sterile as possible. It’s not so much “PC culture” as it is “PG culture.”

To that end, the various governments, factions, and societies of Thedas lost their edge. Dragon Age previously presented itself as anti-authoritarian by showcasing the rampant abuses of power across all cultures. Whether it was the incarceration of mages under the Chantry, the slavery practiced by the Tevinter Imperium, the expansionist anti-individualism of the Qun, the restrictive dwarven caste system, or the rampant racism against elves, social strife abounded in this world. I think that’s one thing that drew so many marginalized fans to the series. But the correlation of fictional atrocities with those of real life frequently prompted volatile discourse, with many concerned about how allegedly allegorized groups were being represented. You began to see countless essays pop up by folks who use the phrase “blood quantum” more than any healthy person should for a setting about wizards. BioWare responded to this by making Thedosian society wholly pleasant and the people in power responsible and cool and the disparate cultures tolerant and cooperative. If nothing’s portrayed negatively (outside of the cartoonishly evil gods), nobody can take offense, right?

For starters, the Antivan Crows have gone from an amoral group of assassins to basically Batman. These figures, which previously purchased children off slave markets to train them into killers, are now the “true rulers” of Antiva, by which the official government derives its authority. The Crows in The Veilguard stand against the insurgent qunari army as heroes of the common folk. They’re not an unscrupulous faction that Rook is reluctantly forced to ally with for the greater good; no, the Crows are simply good guys now. When the pompous governor of Treviso rails against them, with such audacious claims as “assassins and thugs should not represent the citizenry,” we’re meant to laugh at the governor’s foolishness. The unintentional implication this sends is that lethal vigilantism and unchecked power are cool because the people who use it are cool and stylish. The slave trade goes unacknoweldged; Antivan children want to grow up to be assassins now. The Crows never do anything wrong in The Veilguard – the governor is later revealed to be cooperating with the invaders for their own power. BioWare avoids the unpleasantness inherent in the Crows’ concept by pretending it never existed.

Perhaps more ridiculous is the Lords of Fortune, a new faction of pirates and treasure hunters based out of Rivain. Except they don’t really do piracy or treasure hunting. The game goes to lengths to ensure that the audience knows that the Lords don’t steal important cultural artifacts from any of the tombs and ruins they raid. What do they steal, then? There is no such thing as an ethical treasure hunter – plundering indigenous sites for souvenirs is inherently problematic – but the writers wanted to reap the appeal of adventurous swashbucklers without any of the baggage, regardless of whether it makes sense or not3. It comes across as a child’s idea of a pirate: they’re not thinking about the murder and looting, just the funny men with eye-patches who say “ARRR!” The developers want us to like the Lords of Fortune, and to that end, they can’t do anything culturally insensitive – even fictional disrespect toward a made-up culture. This is doubly amusing because the Lords are represented by Isabela from Dragon Age II. The same Isabela that kicked off a war with the qunari by stealing their holy book, the Tome of Koslun. This irony goes unacknowledged by the game.4

When these rogue buccaneers aren’t busy giving land acknowledgments to displaced Dalish elves or whatever, they’re enjoying their nonviolent coliseum. Pirates revel in bloodsport, but only so long as no actual blood is spilled. The Lords refuse to fight prisoners or animals in their arena, as they find such acts too cruel. I guess they’re all big Peter Singer readers. Instead, they summon spirits to adopt the visages of common enemies so that the player can kill them with a clean conscience. It’s another example of wanting to have your cake and eat it too – they wanted to create a glory hunter/gladiator faction, but couldn’t stand the underlying implications of such. So they twisted and bent them to fit into their unproblematic paradigm, leaving the Lords flavorless and lame. They barely even contribute to the main story, and they’re practically the only look we get into Rivaini society (which remains criminally underdeveloped).

More tragic is the handling of the qunari, once one of the most unique and nuanced civilizations in the Dragon Age setting. The Qun, as portrayed in the first three installments, is a society that demands all of its composite parts work in harmony. Thus, they have predetermined vocations for their children, rigid gender roles, strict codes of conduct, and an ambition to “enlighten” the rest of the world. While the Qun has often been presented as antagonistic toward the heroes, the series has commonly balanced its portrayal by showing how seductive its absolutism can be for people without hope. In some cases, life under the Qun is preferable, as is the case with former Tevinter slaves. Conformity becomes comfort when the world is regularly threatening to split apart.

The Veilguard opts for a different approach. See, Rook’s not fighting members of the Qun in this game – they’re fighting the Antaam, the former qunari military. The Veilguard constantly reiterates that the Antaam, which makes up one of the three branches of the Qun, has broken off and decided to invade, pillage, and stoke chaos. BioWare didn’t want the questionable morality and complexity of fighting an invading people from a humanized, multi-faceted culture, so they removed their culture. Their efforts to turn the non-Western-coded qunari into something digestible for their mistaken conception of a modern audience instead results in two caricatures: one being a fetishized, perfect society where there are no perceivable social ills; and the other a bunch of rampaging brutes.

Contending with a realized conception of Plato’s Republic mixed with the Ottoman Empire makes for more compelling drama than a horde of murderous giants. Again, BioWare wanted to have it both ways, and they still needed nameless, faceless orcs to kill. So every bit about the qunari’s militancy, imperialism, and repression coexisting alongside some of their more progressive ideas and communal unity is stripped of its context and meaning. Blame is placed solely on the Antaam, who no longer represent (and retroactively, never represented) the Qun’s ideology. It’s a cowardly compromise, attempting to pin the blame of all the Qun’s failings on a renegade military and seeking to exonerate the political and social apparatuses of their culpability.

At one point, a minor character named Seer Rowan lectures to an ignorant human (a proxy for the audience absorbing these retcons) that qunari society has always been egalitarian in practice, with mages enjoying freedom there. Previous games showed that the qunari shackle their “saarebas” mages, stitch their mouths, cut out their tongues, and teach them to commit suicide if they ever stray from their masters. However, we’re now assured that this is only practiced under the Antaam, and No True Qunari would ever do such a thing. Ignore the fact that, in Inquisition, we witness the enslaved saarebas under the supervision of the Ben-Hasserath, a subdivision of the Ariqun (i.e. not part of the Antaam). In fact, the Antaam that Rook fights in The Veilguard never command saarebas at all. They’re completely absent from the game (likely because the image of the bound, mutilated minority was too much for The Veilguard’s sensibilities). Seer Rowan’s weak, conciliatory retcon can’t even justify itself in its own game. The scolding diatribe communicates an intrinsic misunderstanding of the Qun by the writers – namely, it continues the pattern established with the Antivan Crows that the mechanics of power in society are fundamentally good as long as aberrant forces aren’t in charge. While I understand the desire to be conscientious about the portrayal of fictional cultures that draw upon non-Western traditions and iconography (which have historically been demonized in media), glamorizing the Qun and stripping it of its realistic nuance does little to alleviate any problems with representation. If anything, it creates new ones.

But hey, now we have our faceless orcs to guiltlessly slaughter. That’s what the Antaam’s been reduced to, bereft of the ideology that made them people. We kill them because they’re strange and scary and foreign and seeking to destroy our cities for fun. They remain the most prominent representation of the qunari in-game, barring our party member Taash. BioWare’s attempts to reverse what they viewed as problematic components to the qunari instead devolved into the very tropes they wished to avoid.

Which leads us to the elves. Much of the series’s discourse has surrounded the portrayal of the long-suffering elven people, who endure slavery under Tevinter, expulsion from their homeland in the Dales, confinement in ghettos, and the general disdain from other races. The games’ stories use symbolic shorthand of real-life oppressed peoples to communicate these tragedies, and this has led to a variety of intense, emotional interpretations over the years. The unending misery of the systematically marginalized elves hasn’t gone unnoticed by the fanbase – and their criticisms haven’t gone unnoticed by the developers. To quote The Veilguard’s creative director, John Epler, in an interview with Polygon:

“Dragon Age has not always been the kindest to the Dalish [elves]. Somebody once made a joke to me, and it’s not untrue, that it’s possible to wipe out a Dalish clan in all three of the games in some way.”

He and others on the development team must’ve thought elves needed a break, because the omnipresent racism against them vanishes completely in The Veilguard. Tevinter, an empire built on the back of chattel slavery, doesn’t show any of that. Consequently, it feels like players in the know still haven’t seen the true face of Tevinter, despite spending half a game there. The notion that the capital of Minrathous gives now is one of a prosperous city that’s centuries ahead of the countries down south, rather than a cruel regime cracking the whip at every opportunity. Perhaps the writers weren’t comfortable portraying this, or felt that their audience might not be amenable to it after years of incendiary argumentation. Nevertheless, it castrates their established world-building and robs us of the opportunity to witness true elven liberation in the climax. With both the fall of Minrathous and the toppling of the tyrannical elven gods, we could have delivered a much needed catharsis after four games of oppression, but The Veilguard forgoes this storytelling opportunity to play it safe.

I worry that this hesitancy originated from anxieties about the sensitivity of depicting marginalized peoples in brutal, dehumanizing conditions, and how that might look to more fragile viewers. But I think it’s important for all players, watchers, and readers to know that, though there might be aspects shared between them, fictional minorities are distinct from real ones.

Dragon Age’s elves are aesthetically Celtic. Their residency in alienages evokes images of Disapora Jews in Europe. Their Long Walk after being driven from the Dales calls back to the Trail of Tears, sharing an experience with Native Americans. Their subsequent migratory nature is reminiscent of the Romani people. And their ancient empire of Arlathan, with its large columns and temples of worship, headed by ascended humanoid (for lack of a better term) deities that cast down an enemy called the Titans, and which has since had its religion and culture co-opted and renamed by Roman-inspired Tevinter invites comparisons to classical Greece.

My point is, the elves of Dragon Age don’t represent one group of people, because fictional cultures are constructs drawing from countless inspirations. If they represent anything beyond themselves, it’s the idea of a proud people that’s fallen under the yoke of conquering powers – a supervictim to embody all. The idea that one must be limited in their storytelling options based on how the portrayal might reflect upon or disrespect an existing culture is flawed, in my opinion. In the overwhelming majority of cases, coding cannot be read as a 1:1 allegory, especially in speculative fiction like science-fiction and fantasy. I believe the most mature way to evaluate a story isn’t to try to pigeonhole what it’s trying to say say about who, as if there’s some insidious encrypted message in the text. Rather, it’s to see the forest through the trees and interpret the work as a complete whole in itself.

On that basis, I ask: would it have been so bad to see some of those enslaved elves, praying for salvation, side with their manipulative, nefarious gods? To add some nuance to the conflict with Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain, would the story of elven liberation not have been better if the game actually engaged with it? Could we actually have a moral quandary with those whom Rook ends up fighting, even if the content might be seemingly problematic?

Epler might respond in the negative, per the Polygon interview, claiming that the gods “simply don’t care” about the elves.

“Those blighted, decrepit gods, they’re not bothering with the soft pitch. Their pitch is, We’re going to make a horrible world. We’re going to give you a lot of power, and maybe you’ll be OK.”

Like a chess board, the core conflict of The Veilguard is black and white. BioWare abandoned the chance to make Elgar’nan and Ghilan’nain more interesting villains because it was too risky.

Similarly risky was Solas’s role as an antagonist, since his motivations, as explained in “Trespasser”, are deeply sympathetic. Perhaps too much so for the developers’ comfort. Unlike the Evanuris and their disinterest in the elves, Solas wants to restore the elven people to their former glory. At least, that seemed to be his pitch in the last game. Frustratingly absent from The Veilguard are the Agents of Fen’Harel – elves who swore fealty to Solas’s cause. They infiltrated and compromised the Inquisition, effectively precipitating the final decision to end the organization in its current form. The idea that Solas had amassed an army of common folk who found the idea of a renewed elven empire appealing made him appear formidable and intimidating. “Trespasser” implies that a mass uprising of elves under Solas’s leadership was imminent, and anyone could be in on it.

None of this happens in The Veilguard. Not only does Solas lack an army, but their absence isn’t explained or even acknowledged. As a result, Solas remains a passive antagonist until near the end, since the player has no disciples of his to contend with (either physically or ideologically) along the way. It wastes a side of his character that had been foreshadowed in a decade-long cliffhanger – that of a charismatic leader, capable of coordinating a rebellion that could spell disaster for its own followers.

In a Reddit AMA after the latest game’s release, Epler answered where the Agents of Fen’Harel disappeared to:

“Solas’ experience leading the rebellion against the Evanuris turned him against the idea of being a leader. You see it in the memories – the entire experience of being in charge ate at him and, ultimately, convinced him he needed to do this on his own. And his own motivations were very different from the motivations of those who wanted to follow him – he had no real regard for their lives or their goals. So at some point between Trespasser and DATV, he severed that connection with his ‘followers’ and went back to being a lone wolf. There are Dalish clans who are sympathetic to his goals, but even there, there’s an understanding that he’s too dangerous to have a more formal connection with, and that he will, ultimately, sacrifice them to his own ends if necessary.”

I find this explanation unsatisfying, not the least bit because the narrative offers next to nothing to imply this. The disappearance of Solas’s agents represents my biggest bugbear with the game, depriving it of the full potential of its highly anticipated antagonist in favor of the more generically villainous Evanuris. Moreover, this omission fits into the aggravating blueprint for The Veilguard’s inoffensive direction. The motivations, emotions, and backgrounds of the Agents of Fen’Harel would be sympathetic, and therefore might problematize the otherwise cut-and-dry conflicts. Epler seemed concerned that audiences might think Solas was “a little too sympathetic in his goals,” according to an interview with GamesRadar+.

But that’s the thing: sympathy isn’t endorsement, and portrayal of sympathetic characters isn’t endorsement either. But neither does that invalidate the emotions and experiences that generate that sympathy, even if the character’s actions ultimately turn toward evil. I’ve noticed a trend (especially in symptomatic criticism, which I generally dislike5) to view art as propaganda, and to evaluate it from a moralizing, top-down perspective. Antagonists with complex or understandable motivations (in this case, revolutionary villains) are often judged by this framework as tools for stories wishing to champion the status quo. Common arguments that I’ve seen imply that the relatability that we often find in villains is not a strength of the writing, but a devilish trick of ideology by which writers can reinforce conservative doctrine, to scold us away from certain beliefs. Any decent writer knows this isn’t the case, and that people don’t write morally or emotionally complex antagonists for didactic purposes. Instead, characters such as these embody the anxieties of their creators – the fear of losing yourself to your passions, the fear of going about things the wrong way, the fear of sacrificing too much to achieve your desired ends. The concepts and feelings that compel these characters remain authentic to the writer’s heart and the connection they established with the audience.

Art isn’t propaganda. To read it as such reduces it and promotes intellectual dishonesty and foolhardy myopia. Stories are irreducible (otherwise, we would not waste our time with them), and so I believe interpretations should be formed from the bottom-up, rooted in the text as much as possible. The “message” cannot be imposed from the top-down, but symptomatic readings, in their focus on tropes and cultural context, frequently condemn without a trial. Hindering your story in order to future-proof it for the sake of optics is a safeguard against this, and one that leads to bad stories. Artists should have confidence that their text will hold its ground on its own. To quote Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “A Message about Messages”:

“The complex meanings of a serious story or novel can be understood only by participation in the language of the story itself. To translate them into a message or reduce them to a sermon distorts, betrays, and destroys them… Any reduction of that language into intellectual messages is radically, destructively incomplete.” (67-68)

BioWare’s doctrine of passive writing violates this wisdom by surrendering to their fear of (bad) criticism. The Veilguard lacks punch, stakes, and empathy and becomes incongruous with its established lore because it’s not willing to take risks that might alienate or upset players. They’re more concerned with making sure their work is inoffensive than they are with conveying a moving story.

I believe all of this was inherited from an incestuous feedback loop between a vocal minority of critics, of which I might’ve once counted myself among the blameworthy, and the apprehensiveness of out-of-touch corporate board room decision-making. Dragon Age’s genome mutated, and it slowly lost its teeth.

Over the course of a decade, we bred the Dread Wolf into a Dread Pug.

V. What It Took

The Veilguard’s lack of confidence in itself and lack of faith in its audience contribute to its capitulatory nature. In many respects, it feels like the developers lost their passion for it over the course of the ten year hellish production and just wanted to be done with it. This resulted in a decent game that nonetheless feels divorced from what came before it. It tries to juggle being a soft reboot while also trying to close out the series’s biggest and longest running story arcs, but inevitably fumbles.

Nearly everything done by The Veilguard was handled better by Inquisition. And Inquisition was certainly the more ambitious title. Perhaps more returning characters would have established a sense of continuity between the two, or at least made it less awkward by having them present for the story’s grand finale. For as strong as the endgame is, it could’ve benefited from the presence of slave liberator Fenris, elven history aficionado Merrill, possible Evanuris soul vessel Sera, or Divine Victoria (any of them). The core pillar of Dragon Age is the characters, and The Veilguard’s under-performance (and in some cases, outright dismissal) in that regard sabotages its integrity. Without this to anchor it, the changes to gameplay, visuals, and roleplaying depth become more alienating.

Personally, what do I take away from this? The Veilguard is far from the game I dreamed about for ten years, and not the one that loyal fans deserved either. I’m no stranger to disappointment at this point in my life, and yet this still leaves me with a hollow feeling. Will I still be able to return to Inquisition, a game I truly adore, and see it the same way as before, knowing now where all this is leading? The true cost of The Veilguard, for me, has nothing to do with the price tag: it’s the loss of that perfectly tailored dream, now that the possibilities of the future have shut their gates.

Where do those dreams go? Are they doomed to fester in their lonely, incommunicable agony? Will they be twisted by their enmity, like the blighted dreams of the Titans, and spread their corruption into those important happy memories?

In 2014, I was depressed as fuck, and Dragon Age: Inquisition helped me to see the light and come out of it. In 2024, I was depressed as fuck, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard made me feel nothing. There’s no less favorable comparison in my eyes. It’s disheartening to behold something that once meant so much to me and be greeted with numbness. I have to wonder if that affection will ever return, or if I’ve just grown out of it.

But as I wandered the streets of Minrathous as Rook, I heard a familiar song. It was one of the tavern songs from Inquisition, its nostalgic chords filling me with wistful sentiment. I know, deep down, there’s still something there. Maybe I just need to dig it up. Maybe it’s time to look back…

To be continued…

– Hunter Galbraith

Further Reading

Le Guin, Ursula K. “A Message about Messages.” Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction, Abrams Image, 2018, pp. 67–68.

Incidentally, this was an anomaly my friends and I pondered over and eventually solved. It turned out to be a former Wienerschnitzel. ↩︎

You could argue that this credit goes more to Inquisition and the previous games for laying the groundwork for said reveals, which were obviously planned out ahead of time, as confirmed by the aforementioned official artbook. Regardless, the payoff satisfied me and gave me proper closure. ↩︎

I’ve been informed that there is a hidden conversation that explains that the Lords of Fortune do, in fact, sell cultural artifacts at times, but only to the rightful owners. This just makes me wonder what they do with the artifacts if the prospective clients can’t pay. Do they shove them back in the ruins and re-arm all the booby traps? ↩︎

I would argue that this does not represent character progression on Isabela’s part, as her (possible, depending on the player’s choices) return of the Tome of Koslun in Dragon Age II was a pragmatic sacrifice she made to save her friends and the city, rather than an acknowledgment of the qunari’s inviolable ownership. In fact, in many continuities, she never returns the Tome at all. ↩︎

I prefer more formalist criticism because it allows the text to lead the dance, not the critique. I think it’s only fair, given that the creators likely spent more effort crafting the piece than I spent consuming it. Symptomatic criticism mandates that the reader consider everything around the text, typically at the text’s expense. In the worst cases, symptomatic critics make their arguments about seemingly everything besides the text in question. ↩︎ Link to article: https://planckstorytime.wordpress.com/2025/01/01/dragon-age-the-veilguard-strangled-by-gentle-hands/

[chaaistained]

☕︎ my better cr; intro •°

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🗝️ you’ve now unlocked the recipe to my better cr ≈

name : ℳ

age (when i shift) : 17/18 — i’m planning to either shift to dec 2021 or aug 2022 , wtv my subconscious chooses

occupation : university student — double degree in law and arts, majoring in media law and craft of writing & literature, respectively

+ part time tutor for english and maths, at the same private tutoring company i went to in high school

+ (eventually) part time stock acquisition and youth advertiser at a telecommunications company near my campus which is technically a nepo hire bcs my aunt works there

+ (eventually) paid internship at the australian taxation office for the study of torts and contracts and even tho i got in genuinely bcs of my marks and my interview it also feels a little nepo bcs another aunt (a family friend) also works here.. anyway

side hobbies/hustles : blogger (tumblrina in every reality if i can help it) , tiktok + youtube cover channel with two of my high school friends , fic author (ao3 curse does NOT exist here come at me) , occasional columnist for my uni’s student newsletter

my s/o : childhood family friend — lost contact and reunited ten years later — not revealing his name apart from the first letter bcs . he’s real .. anyway it’s 𝒜

౨ৎ meet ℳ

a sun kissed cinnamon bun personified — she is the smile that blossoms between warm cheeks during the burn of a sunrise ≈

in this dr i don’t change my name, and for that reason i’ll stick to the first letter (just like my pinned post) which is ℳ.

i’m nothing more than a normal girl, waking up each day already tired but willing myself to either go to uni or work, staying up late to catch up on the hours i spend doing other things, i have a closet full of clothes and yet i have nothing to wear, i have three of the same shades of lip gloss but they’re all from different brands so ofcs they’re not the same, i just bought a new journal but i’m yet to finish the one i got four years ago, i have ink stains on the tips of my fingers and chai stains on the pages edge of the novel i’m currently reading.

i just take every day like a new pot of tea leaves, waiting to be steeped to perfection.

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇬⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

౨ৎ the metamorphosis

with frayed edges and tear stained cheeks, she undid the binds of a life once lived, a life once loved, finding the holes to be too much to bear in the everlasting winter of the cold reality that was thrust upon her, opting to take the needle and thread between her own fingers and stitch up the seams, to reinforce the realm of her existence into one that can hold her hand rather than hold her down

quite often i approach the concept of reinvention with a quivering hand, unable to part ways from the comfort — or perhaps the codependency — of that familiarity.

but eventually i took a step back and realised, there is no shame in finding freedom in what already feels right . after all, our souls are not dependant on this realm or this body, our consciousness is an ever expanding universe on its own, and our power to wield it is something that we have grown to understand and control in a way that allows us to live the lives we truly desire.. that’s all that this dr represents for me.

a life that i truly desire.

i’m not that different here, i have the same name, the same birthday, the same family. but it would be a lie to say everything stays the same.

i do admit to changing my appearance a bit, i’m nothing if not a perfectionist and whilst i do think my features have potential, i actually reach said potential in this reality. my upbringing has been revitalised to be something that enriched me rather than keeping me sheltered. my parental unit is less overbearing and more understanding, my brother is less of a jerk and more of a friend, my family relationships are less immature and more genuine.

i revise my failures in education, i revise my anxieties around success and the fear of that success being unreachable, i revise my health, my athleticism, my willpower and the general energy i have throughout the day to achieve everything that i wish to accomplish, everything that i could not bring myself to take a step towards in my previous reality.

my passions aren’t shamed here, they are encouraged. not just with the wary caution of a simple hobby but rather as an actual proper lifestyle, a feasible choice to make for a career, a skill that is supported as something from which i can make a name for myself.

and in this growth, in this metamorphosis, i find stability and comfort in not just my family but also my friends — people that i lost contact with, people that i drifted away from, people that i couldn’t bring myself to keep close because of the shame in my own progression or lack thereof — i’m not an aspect of shame, i never was, i know what i deserve and what i’m capable of and in this reality, i am all those things.

that’s why this is home, even after i break out of the cocoon and open my eyes in a world that’s familiar, it will also be different, because i’ll be different — no longer experiencing the slow sluggish state of what once was, for i now have a marvellous symmetry of splendour that holds me high, the equilibrium of my reality, where the scales finally tipped in my favour, levelling out to be amiably sound, with every flap of a butterfly’s wing.

𓈒⠀𓂃⠀⠀˖⠀𓇬⠀˖⠀⠀𓂃⠀𓈒

౨ৎ sugar heart cookies

it’s an inexplicable pull, an intangible tug on the heartstrings, a firm grip, a gentle ache, a deep longing. you can’t help but feel that there is something more out there for you, that there is someone more. someone that feels less like a piece and more like a whole person. someone who won’t complete you, but will help you complete yourself. two halves of a heart leaves you vulnerable when you’re apart, but when it’s two hearts beating alongside each other, the only thing left is to hold onto you

he sat beside me in his mother’s car. we were six (me) and eight (him). he sat in the drivers seat while his mother went inside the house to pick up a few things before taking the three of us (his little sister sat in the back) to a gathering of family friends.

his mother had bought us britannia little hearts. i can still remember the minuscule sugar crystals stuck to the tips of my small fingers while i dove inside the aluminium cover every few seconds to reach for the next tiny biscuit.

he asked me where i was that day — i’d stayed home from school because i felt unwell — when i told him, his first reaction was to nag me : “you know, if you’re sick, you shouldn’t be eating these. this is pure sugar.”

“yeah but i don’t want to listen to you!” — i was .. never really good at listening to people, especially not cute boys who were a little older than me.

he always seemed a bit uptight, but i guess i forgot how much he cared. because i can’t remember what happened two years later, during my last day in my old school. i remember crying, and i remember being comforted by people. but i guess i forgot that one of those people was him. i guess i forgot that he told me “it’ll be alright. i’m sure we’ll see each other again someday.”

it took us ten years but we got there.

this time, he was upstairs, in the house that was hosting a dinner among friends. i was distracted by my brother’s antics, one foot inside the threshold past the door and one foot on the pavement outside. with a flick of my head, my gaze turned up, up past the stairs in front of the door, up to the railing on the second level, a lookout point for the entrance.

he was leaning against the railing, blue button up shirt tucked into his black jeans, scrolling aimlessly on his phone, taking a quick glance to his side before doing a double take.

the silence felt like the calm before a pattering evening of rainfall, where you can feel the change in your future from the way the air seems electrified, from the way the clouds seems to churn around each other, like they’re brewing together, ready to erupt and explode into thunder, like the way you can hear your heartbeat in your ears.

he seemed familiar, he seemed important, he seemed to be everything i could ever ask for and i didn’t know why the sirens were singing in my skull but i knew in my gut he was meant to be important to me. i knew he was meant to be somebody.

it took me a second to look away, but that entire night, and every night that followed, and every day that came along with it, i can’t ever forget the sugar crystal glimmers of light in his eyes. and for every moment to come, i’ll hold the little heart biscuits of our love in the palm of my hands, because i’m not someone who listens to people very well, i don’t care if i’m not allowed, i want them . i want him.

don’t swallow the tea leaves ! for they leave you a message 🍂

this dr is very near and dear to my heart and i can’t even begin to put everything i wanna say about it into one post so .. there will be more abt this dr

it’s literally home. it’s my life.

i’m so grateful for it xx

chaai brews; tea assortments — dr archive

2025 © chaaistained

[byenycfm]

Via Villas || 36 || Loft #606 || Ana De Armas || Closed

Personality:

Calculating and observant, Via adapts to whatever demeanor fits her situation best to her outcome. For now it's the timid amnesia patient, returned home after harrowing months out in the city.

Biography:

Via knew from childhood her life wasn't normal. Her father headed Spain's leading underworld crime group, particularly the branch in New York City. He wanted a normal life for his daughter, or close to normal: private school, her chosen life of ballet and private tutors. Unlike other students at her elite school, her parents were present in her life. She was lucky. International trips, fancy dinners and (all related to her father's job) made being a single child less than lonely. She loved seeing operas and ballet best, not knowing the cover they served for organized crime. The truth surfaced when her parents were murdered by a rival organization in their home, but Vida was spared. The leaders of Portolés Theater, a secret assassins academy for a subgroup of the organization her father previously led, took her in.

Driven by revenge, Via trained in martial arts, marksmanship, melee combat, tactical and defensive driving, stealth, infiltration, and escapology. She continued dance to keep her sanity, but also a cover identity. Under the guise of an international ballerina she could easily slip from place to place, hunting down her family's killers.

The neutral territories and safe zones for hired killers or criminals couldn't always be trusted. Sometimes infiltrated, other times a trap, she preferred longer stays in a place of her choosing. She wanted to be central, but not flashy, and the run down Wexley was as good a fit as any. Vida bopped around different abodes in the city over the years, but this place fulfilled its purposes. Lowkey, passed over, but with accommodations newer buildings no longer had (without buttoned security and quick to squeal). Well sized apartments, a bar and diner, pool, and pleasing architecture? Modern tenant spaces were minimalist were cheaply structured, barren in design, and had far too many cameras for her lifestyle. If her safe house was one online search away how could it be safe? The Wexley was on the map just enough to be central, but off the track from curious tourists. If she's buckling down from time to time outside of the neutral territories in the city, why not have it be someplace bearable?

Renting full time for five years, but stopping in only every few months, Via didn't make cozy connections. She needed to be faceless and forgettable in case the wrong sort of people came around. Opting out of staying at one of the organization's nests upon returning home from a Russian operation, Via was only home for a week before the virus broke out. Although this scenario wasn't in the handbook, she knew when she needed to team up. With her to go bag and a plethora of weapons, Via was out the window and in good company at Portoles within an hour.

With the stocked bunker, locked down building and well trained associates, they held their own through February. Her companions' downfall was business, which didn't slow regardless of a zombie-like disease and closure of the city. There were still crime units spread out to connect with and people to kill, if they hadn't died or evacuated already. Slowly, her team was picked off one by one by infected, rebels, rivals or simply missing the landing while jumping rooftops. The usual casualty rate fast forwarded and soon it was only a few others and her leaders left alive at the theater. Agreeing to lay low and keep them informed, Via returned to The Wexley while a nearby yacht provided distraction for nearby humans, infected or otherwise. It would have been easy to slip into apartment via the fire escape as she had so many times, but her absence had undoubtedly been noted. Instead she banged on a first floor window (the front doors were demolished) to grab someone's attention to let her in. Via fibbed she'd been injured on the day of the breakout and suffered amnesia until recently. She'd been taken care of by a small community down at Yankees stadium, but returned when she remembered The Wexley and her former "life".

Gathering intel on the world's events and the city itself, Via doesn't plan on staying long. If there's an opportunity to escape the city for better conditions, she and her comrades will disappear. She hasn't returned for emotional connections and the shallow dramas of other residents. It shouldn't be long before a cure or exodus frees Via.

Pre Outbreak Occupation: Assassin Previous Zombie Experience: Killed a countless amount. Aware how the virus travels, but unknown status on immunity. Marital Status: Single Children: N/A Residence: Studio #606 Years residing at The Wexley: Pre Outbreak Five Years Connections: TBD

[alexandriaisburning]

035: Every Extend [Extra] [Extreme]

CANON FIRE is made possible by the generous contributions of readers like you. Support more writing like this on Patreon. Thank you!

Developed in three months as a student project, Every Extend is almost an “anti-shooter”, playing with the conventions of the shoot-em-up genre. You can’t shoot, and your goal is to destroy yourself intentionally. Detonating yourself sets off a chain of explosions with nearby enemies. A detonation uses up a life, but with careful timing you can chain multiple waves of enemies together, earning enough points for an extra life--or extend. Colliding with enemies or bullets inflicts a time penalty, Respawning is delayed until after the chain resolves, so timing a detonation to capture the most enemies is critical to both earning extends and making use of the limited timer.

Finding the exact timing to maximize your chain gives it a powerful tension, asking you to constantly wait on pulling the trigger until the last possible second. It’s a catchy hook, and alongside its abstract, geometric graphics and electronic soundtrack, has a simple and immediate appeal. That abstract art style might call to mind Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s REZ, which it turns out was a big inspiration for developer Kanta “Omega'' Matsuhisa. Not long after Every Extend’s release it would catch the eye of Q Entertainment, Mizuguchi’s then current company, who would hire Matsuhisa to develop a commercial version with them. 

Every Extend Extra elaborates on the original with Mizuguchi’s signature of electronic music and reactive sound. The original’s vertical SHMUP style format has been altered to match the widescreen format of the PSP, and each stage now has its own unique aesthetic, with an accompanying licensed track. Sound effects are now synchronized to the beat, altering in pitch with each successive chain, giving chains an even more satisfying crescendo. Boss fights have become more complex, with elaborate bullet patterns and multiple phases. The original appeal and rhythm is kept intact, effortlessly mixing in new aesthetic layers and boss mechanics. 

E3 also contains an Original Mode, which claims to be a version of the original game, but it’s mostly a port of the original’s stages into the new engine, missing the original aesthetics and aspect ratio. 

Every Extend eventually received an HD version in the form of Every Extend Extra Extreme, but with many alterations that turn it into essentially another game. The pace has increased drastically, with the desire to play to the more powerful Xbox 360 hardware resulting in a huge increase in the number of enemies. To deal with the limited amount of viable spawn points, a new shield mechanic has been introduced, preventing you from getting hit for a few seconds after respawning. With so many enemies on screen you’re almost guaranteed a large chain, but you’re at a large risk after the shield runs out, urging you to detonate faster. A new rhythm mechanic awards bigger explosions for detonating on the beat, further deemphasizing positioning. It also lacks the variety of aesthetics that E3 has, opting for a more uniform look for all its stages. 

The manic energy of the greater enemy count and extended explosion chains does have its own appeal, but it gets far away from the considered approach of E2 and E3, and feels more in line with the flashy popcorn appeal of other arcade shooters on the Xbox 360. As if they realized that, E4 has an extra mode named The Revenge, which turns the game into a regular twin stick shooter a la Geometry Wars. It’s really no more than a novelty, without any of the deeper mechanics that give those twin stick shooters their long term appeal. 

The final addition to E4 is the Wiz Ur Muzik mode, which syncs up with your personal music collection, though bizarrely it doesn’t use the 360’s built in file management capabilities. Instead you go into a “capture mode” then play the music by switching to the built in media player in the guide menu, which will automatically be captured by the game. It’s a truly bizarre way to introduce this feature, especially when plenty of other smaller downloadable titles managed to integrate music playback more seamlessly. Exactly what changes with your music isn’t very perceptible, so the experience doesn’t feel much different than turning off the in-game music and playing your own on another device. 

E4 is kind of a weird package that doesn’t capture the original appeal, and it’s kind of a shame that it’s the only way to play Every Extend on a modern system, thanks to Xbox 360 backwards compatibility.

Currently, you can purchase a digital version via the Xbox online store and download it to any Xbox from the 360 onward, and a physical version is also available via the Qubed compilation of Q Entertainment games, which also includes Rez HD and Lumines Live. This will likely be the only way to purchase it after next year, which will see the shutdown of the Xbox 360 digital store in July 2024.

The original freeware Every Extend can be found on the Internet Archive, while Every Extend Extra doesn’t seem to have received a digital release, leaving your only official option to purchase a PSP UMD. ISOs of E3 are, of course, easily available. 

[jokerislandgirl32]

Your WK college professor AU sounds interesting! What exactly does it entail? Like what kind of professor is Zach and how does he meet Violet in that AU? :) —CCFM

Thank you for the ask! I love it! Sorry it took me so long to get to 😭!

The Wild Kratts College Professor AU, in my personal opinion, is interesting, lol! This AU started last summer when @m0thisonfire and I started talking about a dream I had with Zach as a professor (it was ver, ummm, interesting, to the point I’m not sharing the details of it here, lol), and we (last summer) and I (this year) just kind of expanded on it from there. Moth did some art work for the AU that I will include below! All credits go to Moth, and I was given permission to include this wonderful piece! (Please check Moth’s other art/works out guys, they are all so good!)

In this AU Zach, and all the adult Wild Kratts Characters, are professors at the same college. The courses they teach are as follows:

Zach: Chemistry

Martin: Zoology

Chris: Biology

Aviva and Koki: Robotics/Engineering (I imagine they co-teach a few classes)

Jimmy Z: Aviation

Donita: Fasion/Design (Dabio is her Teacher’s Assistant)

Gourmand: Culinary Arts

Paisley: Civil Engineering (Rex is her Teacher’s Assistant)

Please see a more detailed explanation below the cut! ⚠️ Be warned there are mentions of intended harm against another, a student x professor relationship (nothing explicit/inappropriate is mentioned), and an age gap! ⚠️

All of the characters interact to some degree, with a lot of the same hero and villains dynamics playing out. The Wild Kratts crew is not technically formed, but all 5 are super close, and the villains similarly interact together and with the Wild Kratts crew as they normally do in the show (they are still somewhat rivals, if that makes sense).

The AU is centered around Zach who, much to his dismay, must work as a professor at a small college in the Southern United States to gain experience before his Alma Mater will allow him to return to their institution to become a robotics/engineering professor. Upon return with a few years of teaching experience, his Alma Mater will also fund his research and inventions, which is Zach’s only motivation to become a professor at all.

A key thing to note is that in the AU, Zach and Aviva have yet to make more than one of their trademark inventions. Zach has only made his invisibility cloak, and Aviva has made the miniaturizer. They both attended college together and were rivals in college, both determined to excel and beat each other as inventors upon graduation.

Financially there are very few ways either can go about this. Zach doesn’t have his company at the start of this AU due to poor financial decisions made by his father, which also leads to other financial troubles for Zach and his mother.

Aviva’s family is unable to support her financially because of health issues/medical bills that have beset her parents. Aviva’s family encourages her to teach instead of becoming an inventor right off the bat, then after she’s saved up enough money she can become an inventor full time.

So, Aviva looks into teaching, and she realizes she can do this by becoming a college professor at another university, and gaining experience at said institution, then her Alma Matar will then hire her full time and fund her research.

Zach learns of her plan, and he decides to copy it, the only problem is he didn’t comprehend the “previous experience” part. This results in him having to take the first available job he can find at another university.

While Aviva becomes a robotics/engineering professor…Zach’s stuck between the choice of biology or chemistry. So, having nearly failed biology in both high school and college (the dissections he refused to do tanked his grade) he opted for chemistry.

Zach’s not excited about being a chemistry professor, but his stubbornness outweighs his ability to quit. So, with only a couple days to spare before the semester begins Zach arrives at the institution he’ll teach at and has to scramble to write lessons plans, pick course material, and get settled into his office and apartment.

How does Zach meet Violet? Wellll, in the bookstore. Zach goes in to see which materials he’ll need for his classes, and Violet’s looking through the books…to…get…them…for…her…classes. And since Zach hasn’t picked out any books for his classes…she “can’t find the materials for Professor Varmitech’s class.”

So…she’s his student! (Hides behind a rock, don’t hate me, this AU’s helping me heal from my traumatic college experience, okay 😭). But everything is all consensual and legal between them! Violet is 18 and Zach’s 23 (pushing 24), the same gap present in my Wild Violet AU.

In this first meeting, Zach and Violet bond over the fact that they want the best course material possible for his classes, so Zach offers her extra credit points if she’ll help him pick the books out. Violet agrees to help, but refuses to accept the extra credit, and they spend a few hours together talking about chemistry and textbooks.

Zach’s initially aggravated by her chipper attitude, but once he realizes who she is (one of his students with disabilities and trauma) and her passion for learning, he starts to…tolerate her, lol.

Violet starts out as a science major, and she takes classes with Zach, Martin, and Chris before she changes her major to elementary education (which happens with Zach’s help because he also happens to be her academic adviser).

Since Zach, Martin, and Chris are all in the science department, they have offices right beside each other, and Zach’s in the middle of the “wild rats.” Violet takes advantage of their office hours for extra academic help, and it’s not uncommon to find her bouncing from office to office after or between her classes. She develops strong platonic relationships with all three of them.

Zach and Violet’s relationship status, however, starts to change when Zach, Chris, and Martin happen upon a student trying to harm Violet one evening, and Zach goes wild, no pun intended. After this Zach and Violet become much closer, her revealing the secrets of her past to him and he to her, and they start to fall for each other and eventually enter a romantic relationship.

I think that’s all I’ll share for now because it’s getting pretty long, lol, but thank you so much for this ask! I’ve been wanting to get some of these ideas out and this was such a wonderful opportunity!

I hope you all enjoyed this read! Feel free to ask for more about this AU if any of you would like!

[187days]

Day One Hundred Eighty-One

Okay, so I clearly jinxed us yesterday, because there was a medical situation in the building today. It didn’t happen in my classroom, and my students had been dismissed for lunch when it happened, so I didn’t have to do anything when the announcement was made to clear the halls, but some of my colleagues had a stressful time. Note: everything is okay now.

As for my day? It was pretty excellent until that happened. I went around the room during both sections of World and quickly checked my students’ multigenre projects. I just wanted to see if they were on the right track, and offer some guidance if they weren’t. Afterwards, I did more in-depth conferencing with anyone who asked, so I stayed busy throughout both blocks, and got to read some really excellent work. 

One of the girls in my Block 2 class has been polishing a short story, and I’ve been giving her suggestions to make it more descriptive, and increase the realism, and it’s turned out really well. I love that she’s stuck with the revision process and really maximized her potential. And two of the boys- two of the boys who were so slow to trust me, and so reluctant to make an effort, at first, then did a 180- turned in their projects early, fully revised, worthy of As. We were all grinning ear to ear over that. I’m so proud of them, and I’m happy they’re proud of themselves. It’s so good. 

This afternoon, there was a little party for retiring staff members. The Principal made a quick speech, and gave a gift to each of them, bust, mostly, we were just hanging out, enjoying a nice day (after all the rain!) and each other’s company, eating some snacks. At one point, a few of us went in to grab drinks, as well. One of my coworkers was gonna buy mine, but The Principal walked in and bought them all. That was a very smooth boss move, I must say. 

We’ve already hired new folks for all of the retiree’s positions but one, but more and more people are opting to leave- headed to other districts, or out of the teaching profession- so there are probably going to be interviews happening throughout the summer. 

[unschool]

Top 4 Online Course Certifications To Pursue in 2023

With 2022 coming to an end, you must wonder what's next. This question is all the more difficult to answer for entry-level individuals, especially if they are trying to get hired. But the most crucial question we often miss out on is what recruiters want.

Comprehending the hiring trends can help smooth job search, and the good news is, we have a way to make it easy for you.

While Unschool, an online learning platform, helps youth to take one step towards employability by offering the best online certificate programs in various domains. It is the platform where you can finally stop trying to fit in a system crafted for the masses and learn in a unique way that brings out the best version of you.

This article will discuss the best online course certifications to pursue in 2023.

Let's get started!

4 career options for 2023

1. Software engineering

One of the most prevalent career options in India is Software engineering. The domain is lucrative and offers high-paying opportunities, and the improved reliance on technology has led to a boom in the IT sector, making it one of the most in-demand fields today. If you are planning to step in the IT field then Unschool is here to guide you with its online courses with a certificate in Cybersecurity-Website Hacking, 

Artificial Intelligence - Machine Learning Algorithms and more.

2. Sales and Business Development

The sales team is the backbone of every business, considering that there is a huge demand for salespeople today. Companies hire people to join the sales and business development teams to provide high revenue generation.

Often used together and interchangeably, sales and business development are different but complementary job roles. Both concentrate on efforts on client management and revenue generation. However, the scope of both these roles is vast, as companies will always require professionals who can help the company grow and generate revenue. 

Likewise, Unschool is offering Job's Program in Digital Marketing. Students seeking a career in digital marketing can opt for this. You can also get jobs with a digital marketing certificate from Unschool. Apply now 

3. Customer success

Customer success is a vital aspect of business with huge demand for talented and skilled people, making it one of the most demanding career options to pursue in 2023. They are the customer-facing aspect of a company, and their performance and customer dealing play a tremendous role in defining a company's reputation.

The duties of a customer success executive possess:

Bridge the gap between the customer and the company

Keep records of customer interactions

Fix customer complaints

Receive feedback from customers and share it with concerned stakeholders

Effective communication with customers

4. Marketing and Communication

The advent of marketing and communications is no secret. The domain has taken the world by storm and impacted how businesses work globally.

No wonder it is one of the most promising career options for 2023! Yes, recruiters are looking for marketing and communication experts to help them thrive. Some of the responsibilities of people working in this area are:

Organize marketing calendars

Create content decks

Conceptualize strategies to boost the brand and drive conversions

Comprehend user psyche and mold the brand strategy accordingly

Press releases

Identify target audience and create content that caters to them

Execute online and offline campaigns and bridge the gap between user and brand

Establish a brand identity

Enable communication through advertisements, newsletters, email marketing, campaigns, press releases, etc.

Unschool's Skill courses offer various online course certifications like Content Writing - Introduction, Copywriting: Introduction to AD world, and marketing-related domains. 

Conclusion

The trends of today set a precedent for the future! According to the report, these are the 4 promising career options for anyone pursuing new avenues. You can check out Unschool to explore online certificate programs and find your dream job.

[collegedunias]

Best Guide to Pursuing MBA in India Career, Scope & Benefits

Are you planning to pursue an MBA in India? An MBA degree opens doors to countless career opportunities, providing students with the skills and knowledge to succeed in the business world. If you are looking for a reputed institution, Jaipuria Institute of Management is one of the best choices. This article will guide you through the benefits, career scope, and why Jaipuria Institute of Management stands out for an MBA in India.

Why Choose an MBA in India?

An MBA in India is highly valuable, offering a blend of theoretical and practical learning. The course focuses on leadership, strategic thinking, and business management. Here are some reasons why you should opt for an MBA in India:

Affordable tuition fees compared to international MBA programs.

Wide range of specializations like Marketing, Finance, HR, and Operations.

Access to leading faculty and industry experts.

Internship opportunities with top companies.

Growing job market with high salary packages.

Best Institutes for an MBA in India

There are several prestigious institutes for an MBA in India, but one of the top-rated institutions is Jaipuria Institute of Management. It is known for its excellent academic curriculum, industry connections, and impressive placement records.

Jaipuria Institute of Management – A Top Choice for MBA

If you are searching for an institute that provides quality education and practical exposure, Jaipuria Institute of Management is the perfect place. Here’s why:

Industry-Oriented Curriculum: The institute offers an updated syllabus that matches industry trends.

Experienced Faculty: Learn from industry experts and professors with vast experience.

Placement Support: High placement rates with top recruiters like Deloitte, HDFC, and ICICI Bank.

Modern Infrastructure: Well-equipped classrooms, libraries, and advanced learning tools.

Networking Opportunities: Regular seminars, workshops, and industry interactions help students build professional networks.

Specializations Offered in MBA in India

When choosing an MBA in India, students can opt for various specializations based on their career goals. Some popular ones include:

Marketing Management: Ideal for students interested in advertising, branding, and market research.

Finance Management: Focuses on banking, investment, and financial planning.

Human Resource Management: Prepares students for roles in talent acquisition, training, and employee relations.

Operations Management: Best for those who want to manage supply chain and logistics.

Business Analytics: Perfect for students who love data analysis and decision-making.

Admission Process for an MBA in India

Getting admission into a reputed institute like Jaipuria Institute of Management requires candidates to follow these steps:

Entrance Exams: Most institutes accept CAT, MAT, XAT, or GMAT scores.

Application Process: Fill out the online application form for your chosen institute.

Group Discussion & Personal Interview: Shortlisted candidates need to clear GD and PI rounds.

Final Selection: Admission is based on academic performance, entrance scores, and interview results.

Career Opportunities After an MBA in India

An MBA in India opens up several career paths in different industries. Here are some high-paying jobs you can get:

Marketing Manager: Handles marketing strategies and brand promotions.

Financial Analyst: Manages investments, budgeting, and risk analysis.

HR Manager: Responsible for hiring, training, and employee management.

Operations Manager: Ensures smooth business operations and supply chain efficiency.

Business Consultant: Advises companies on improving business performance.

Salary Expectations After an MBA in India

The salary after completing an MBA in India varies based on specialization, industry, and experience. Here’s an estimate:

Marketing Manager: ₹8-15 LPA

Finance Manager: ₹10-20 LPA

HR Manager: ₹7-12 LPA

Operations Manager: ₹8-14 LPA

Business Analyst: ₹6-15 LPA

Why Jaipuria Institute of Management is the Right Choice

Choosing the right business school is crucial for career success. Jaipuria Institute of Management offers top-notch education, excellent placement support, and a strong alumni network. Key reasons to choose this institute:

100% Placement Assistance: Top recruiters hire students with competitive packages.

Industry-Driven Curriculum: Courses are designed as per corporate needs.

Practical Learning Approach: Live projects, internships, and case studies.

Strong Alumni Network: Connect with successful alumni across industries.

Conclusion

Pursuing an MBA in India is a great decision for students who want a successful career in business and management. Institutes like Jaipuria Institute of Management provide the perfect platform to enhance your skills and secure high-paying jobs. If you are looking for a bright future, start your MBA journey today!

If you need further information contact:

523, 5th Floor, Wave Silver Tower, Sec-18 Noida, UP-201301

+91 9711016766

infocollegedunias@gmail.com

[shri-venkateshwara-university]

Steps to Build a Successful Career After Diploma in Engineering in Uttar Pradesh Top Colleges & Opportunities

Introduction

A Diploma in Engineering is a gateway to numerous career opportunities in both technical and managerial fields. However, to maximize your potential, you must take the right steps to build a successful career. This guide outlines the essential Steps to Build a Successful Career After Diploma in Engineering in Uttar Pradesh and highlights opportunities in best colleges in Moradabad, best engineering colleges in Moradabad, and best engineering colleges in Hapur.

Step 1: Choose Your Career Path

After completing a Diploma in Engineering, students can choose from multiple career paths:

Pursuing Higher Education: Opt for B.Tech through lateral entry at one of the best engineering colleges in Moradabad or best engineering colleges in Hapur to advance your knowledge.

Getting a Job: Many diploma holders secure jobs in industries like manufacturing, construction, and IT.

Entrepreneurship: Start your own business or consultancy with the skills acquired.

Step 2: Gain Practical Experience

Practical knowledge enhances employability. Consider:

Internships: Many of the best engineering colleges in Moradabad offer internship programs with reputed firms.

Apprenticeships: A great way to gain real-world experience while earning a stipend.

Industrial Training: Some companies offer structured training programs for diploma holders.

Step 3: Enhance Your Skills

To stay competitive, continue developing your technical and soft skills:

Technical Certifications: Specialized certifications improve job prospects.

Communication Skills: Employers prefer candidates with strong communication and teamwork abilities.

Digital Skills: Learn software tools relevant to your engineering domain.

Step 4: Pursue Higher Studies

If you wish to continue education, consider:

B.Tech through Lateral Entry: Many of the best engineering colleges in Hapur provide direct admission to the second year of B.Tech for diploma holders.

Part-Time Engineering Courses: For working professionals looking to upgrade their qualifications.

Specialized Diploma Courses: Short-term advanced courses in areas like robotics, AI, and automation.

Step 5: Explore Government and Private Job Opportunities

Diploma holders have opportunities in:

Government Sector: PSU jobs, railway jobs, and state engineering departments.

Private Sector: IT, manufacturing, construction, and automobile industries.

Multinational Companies: Many MNCs hire diploma holders for technical roles.

Step 6: Build a Strong Professional Network

Networking helps in career growth. Engage in:

Industry Events & Seminars: Many of the best engineering colleges in Moradabad organize workshops and networking events.

LinkedIn & Online Platforms: Connect with professionals and recruiters.

Alumni Associations: Utilize alumni networks for job referrals and mentorship.

Step 7: Keep Learning & Stay Updated

Engineering is a constantly evolving field. Stay updated by:

Reading Industry Journals: Stay informed about the latest trends and innovations.

Enrolling in Online Courses: Platforms like Coursera and Udemy offer specialized courses.

Attending Webinars & Conferences: Enhance your knowledge by participating in technical events.

Conclusion

The journey after completing a Diploma in Engineering in Uttar Pradesh is full of exciting possibilities. Whether you choose further education at the best colleges in Moradabad, gain experience at the best engineering colleges in Hapur, or enter the workforce, the right steps will ensure a successful career. Invest in skill development, networking, and continuous learning to stay ahead in the competitive job market.

[digitalaamir]

Best Digital Marketing Course with Placement: Unlock Your Career Potential

In today’s fast-paced world, the digital space is thriving, creating a plethora of opportunities for individuals and businesses alike. Digital marketing has emerged as a vital skill set, making it one of the most in-demand career options globally. However, navigating this competitive field requires not only expertise but also the right support for landing a job. That’s why enrolling in the best digital marketing course with placement can be a game-changer for your career.

This comprehensive blog will guide you through everything you need to know about choosing the best digital marketing course with placement, its benefits, the skills you’ll learn, and tips to excel in your digital marketing career.

Why Choose a Digital Marketing Course with Placement?

The digital marketing industry is evolving rapidly, and employers are constantly seeking skilled professionals to manage their online presence. A digital marketing course that guarantees placement offers you more than just knowledge—it provides a direct pathway to your dream job. Here are some reasons why opting for the best digital marketing course with placement is an excellent choice:

1. Comprehensive Learning Experience

Courses designed with placement in mind often have well-structured curricula. They focus on practical skills like search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, email marketing, and analytics—making you job-ready.

2. Hands-on Projects

The best digital marketing course with placement ensures you get hands-on experience by working on real-world projects. This not only strengthens your portfolio but also builds confidence in executing strategies.

3. Job Assistance

Placement support typically includes resume-building workshops, interview preparation, and direct referrals to hiring companies. These courses bridge the gap between your education and employment.

4. Industry Exposure

Courses with placement often collaborate with top companies, giving you access to industry trends and networking opportunities.

What to Expect in the Best Digital Marketing Course with Placement

If you’re wondering what makes a course stand out, here’s what you should look for:

1. Updated Curriculum

The digital marketing landscape is constantly changing. The best courses stay updated with the latest trends, tools, and strategies to ensure their students remain ahead of the curve.

2. Expert Faculty

Learning from industry experts who have hands-on experience can provide insights that go beyond textbooks. Their mentorship will help you navigate challenges and opportunities in the field.

3. Certifications

A course that offers certifications from platforms like Google, HubSpot, and Facebook adds credibility to your resume. These certifications act as proof of your expertise and enhance your employability.

4. Placement Guarantee

The hallmark of the best digital marketing course with placement is its job assistance. Look for programs that have a proven track record of placing students in reputed companies.

5. Flexible Learning Modes

Whether it’s online or offline, the best courses offer flexibility to accommodate different learning preferences and schedules.

Key Skills You’ll Master in a Digital Marketing Course

A robust digital marketing course equips you with a diverse skill set. Here’s a breakdown of the key areas you’ll excel in:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Learn how to optimize websites to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) and drive organic traffic.

2. Social Media Marketing

Master the art of creating engaging content and advertising campaigns on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

3. Content Marketing

Understand how to create and distribute valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.

4. Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

Get hands-on experience with paid ad platforms like Google Ads to drive targeted traffic and increase conversions.

5. Email Marketing

Learn how to craft effective email campaigns that build customer relationships and boost sales.

6. Analytics and Reporting

Gain expertise in using tools like Google Analytics to measure campaign performance and make data-driven decisions.

Top Benefits of Enrolling in the Best Digital Marketing Course with Placement

Enrolling in a best digital marketing course with placement comes with numerous advantages that extend beyond just learning:

1. Career Kickstart

You can enter the workforce immediately after completing the course with guaranteed placement.

2. High Demand for Digital Marketers

The demand for digital marketers is soaring, which is expected to continue. This ensures job security and growth potential.

3. Lucrative Salary Packages

Skilled digital marketers are often rewarded with competitive salaries and opportunities for advancement.

4. Global Opportunities

Digital marketing is a universal skill that opens doors to global career prospects.

How to Choose the Best Digital Marketing Course with Placement

Selecting the right course can make all the difference in your career. Here are some tips to help you choose:

1. Research the Institution

Look for reviews, testimonials, and the institution’s track record in placing students.

2. Check the Curriculum

Ensure the course covers all essential areas of digital marketing and includes hands-on projects.

3. Explore Placement Support

Find out which companies the course is tied up with and the kind of job roles offered to graduates.

4. Assess Flexibility

If you’re a working professional, opt for a course with flexible timings or online options.

5. Compare Costs

While affordability is important, prioritize quality and placement over price.

Best Digital Marketing Courses with Placement in 2025

Here’s a quick list of some reputed courses that guarantee placement:

Google Digital GarageFree certifications with hands-on learning.

Simplilearn’s Digital Marketing Specialist ProgramIndustry-recognized certification with placement support.

HubSpot AcademyComprehensive content marketing courses with free certifications.

Coursera Professional Certificate in Digital MarketingAffordable and globally recognized, with flexible schedules.

UpGrad Digital Marketing CourseLive projects, one-on-one mentorship, and job assistance.

Tips for Excelling in Your Digital Marketing Career

Even after completing the best digital marketing course with placement, continuous learning, and self-improvement are key to success. Here are some tips to help you grow:

1. Stay Updated

Follow industry blogs, attend webinars, and learn about the latest tools and trends.

2. Build a Portfolio

Showcase your skills through personal projects, freelance work, or internships.

3. Network

Connect with industry professionals on platforms like LinkedIn to learn from their experiences and gain insights.

4. Experiment and Analyze

Test different strategies and use analytics to refine your campaigns.

5. Never Stop Learning

The digital marketing field is ever-evolving. Keep upgrading your skills to stay relevant.

[chennaicomputech]

What are the benefits of renting a laptop in Chennai? 

Laptop rental in Chennai have emerged as an excellent solution for individuals, businesses, and organizations looking for cost-effective, flexible, and convenient alternatives to purchasing new laptops. These services offer a wide range of options, allowing users to rent laptops for various durations and specifications, without the hefty investment. With benefits such as access to the latest technology, maintenance support, and no long-term commitments, laptop rentals have become a popular choice for those seeking temporary or project-based computing solutions.

Benefits of Laptop Rental in Chennai

Laptop on hire in Chennai offer numerous advantages, catering to the growing demand for flexible technology solutions for individuals, businesses, and organizations. Here are some of the key benefits:

Cost-Effective: Renting laptops can be significantly more affordable than purchasing new devices. This is particularly beneficial for startups, small businesses, or students who need high-performance laptops for a short period. By renting, users avoid the high upfront costs and can choose from a variety of options to fit their budget.

Flexibility: One of the standout benefits of laptop rental services is the flexibility they offer. You can rent a laptop for any duration—be it for a day, week, or even several months. This makes it an ideal solution for short-term projects, business trips, or temporary work requirements. Additionally, customers can easily upgrade or exchange devices based on their needs.

Access to Latest Technology: Desktop rental in Chennai often provide access to the latest models with advanced features, allowing users to stay up-to-date with the newest technological trends without having to commit to buying expensive equipment. Renting gives you the opportunity to work with powerful laptops designed for gaming, video editing, or other high-performance tasks.

Maintenance and Support: Most laptop rental companies offer maintenance and technical support as part of their service. This ensures that any issues you encounter with the device are promptly resolved without extra cost. The laptops are regularly checked, cleaned, and serviced, minimizing the risk of breakdowns and ensuring smooth usage.

Convenient for Corporate Needs: Companies in Chennai can benefit from laptop rentals for conferences, training sessions, or employee deployments. Renting multiple laptops for corporate events is a hassle-free and cost-effective way to equip employees with the necessary tools without having to invest in bulk purchases.

Environmentally Friendly: By opting for laptop rental services, you contribute to reducing electronic waste. As laptops are reused and circulated, the demand for manufacturing new devices is reduced, which helps in minimizing environmental impact.

Conclusion

Computer rental in Chennai provide a practical, affordable, and flexible solution for individuals and businesses looking to meet their technology needs without the burden of high costs or long-term commitments. With the benefits of access to the latest models, expert support, and customizable rental plans, renting laptops is an ideal option for a wide range of uses, from personal projects to corporate events. 

[dechnsign]

Problem of Every Graphic/Visual Designer

Have you ever used other design softwares instead of Adobe?

If not, Are you the one carrying a legit subscription?

IF NOT, Then are you using it for making personal projects or doing client work?

Let's discuss all of this in the post.

We designers usually get introduced to the world of digital design with softwares like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and sometimes CorelDRAW.

But how many of you have heard the names of Inkscape, Gimp, CavalryApp, DaVinci Resolve, and Kdenlive?

These are a part of a category called open source softwares.

Adobe has been the market leader when it comes to digital design. They have been adding innovative features to make the processes easier. The way digital design is today is because of the amount of focus they have put in to benefit their customer.

Even they have tried to make their plans cheaper for the first year for working professionals to make their services accessible. But the fact that the amount of money we as design students spend on learning that is graduation is already very high for a middle-class family, needless to say.

Also, if we complete this line of education. Then comes the career opportunities. If somebody goes for full-time employment, chances are that you may get the subscription if you opt for an established company.

But if you want to work as a freelancer. Then again things are different. Because you initially do not take the risk of investing the money in softwares for the first year and then paying a massive amount to continue the next year. As the price is much higher as compared to the first year.

I left Adobe Creative Cloud Suite in the year 2019 and shifted completely to open-source applications after my boss in my first job told me to do so. Thank You, Sir.

But the problem is that, except for Figma, I do not enjoy the exciting features of the softwares I use.

Like the pen tool in Illustrator made my illustrations look so good that I miss it.

The last proper digital caricature and portrait was done by me in Photoshop.

The last proper animation also I think was what I did in After Effects.

I want companies and other designers to understand that if you are hiring candidates, then Adobe can be an important factor while hiring.

Open source softwares also deliver 75-80% of the results regarding features with whatever is available.

But how many people do you think can afford these highly priced softwares?

And will it be legal for somebody to freelance with such softwares?

Let me know about your views in the comments section. Let's see if Adobe too becomes a part of this discussion.

Video Credits: Movie Name: Roti Kapada Aur Makaan Channel Name: Ultra Bollywood (YouTube) Typeface: Open Sans Softwares: DaVinci Resolve and Figma

[priyansh5585]

Best Work-from-Home & Office Jobs in Jaipur for Women

Jaipur, the Pink City of India, is not just famous for its rich culture and heritage but also for its growing job market. Over the past few years, job opportunities for women have significantly increased. Whether you are looking for a flexible work-from-home job or a full-time office role, Jaipur has plenty of options to explore. From HR jobs in Jaipur to hotel jobs in Jaipur , Rajasthan, this city offers diverse opportunities for women across different industries.

Why Choose Jaipur for Work?

Jaipur is a rapidly growing city with many startups, multinational companies, and tourism businesses. The cost of living is lower compared to metro cities, making it an ideal place to work and grow professionally. Companies are now offering women-friendly jobs with flexible working hours, good salaries, and a balanced work environment.

Top Work-from-Home Jobs for Women in Jaipur

With the rise of digital technology, many women prefer to work from home due to personal responsibilities or convenience. Here are some of the best work-from-home jobs available in Jaipur:

1. Online Teaching & Tutoring

Women who have expertise in a particular subject can opt for online teaching. Many educational platforms offer opportunities to teach school and college students from the comfort of home.

2. Content Writing & Blogging

Content writing is one of the most in-demand work-from-home jobs. Women with good writing skills can work as freelancers or full-time writers for various websites, blogs, and digital marketing agencies.

3. HR & Recruitment Jobs

HR jobs in Jaipur are widely available, and many companies offer remote positions for HR professionals. Women can work as recruiters, HR consultants, or talent acquisition specialists from home.

4. Data Entry & Virtual Assistant

Data entry and virtual assistant roles are great options for women looking for simple and flexible work. These jobs require basic computer skills and can be done from home.

5. Digital Marketing & Social Media Management

Many businesses in Jaipur are shifting online and require professionals to manage their digital presence. Women skilled in social media, SEO, and digital marketing can take up freelance or full-time roles.

Top Office Jobs for Women in Jaipur

For those who prefer working in an office environment, Jaipur has several job opportunities in various sectors. Here are some of the best office jobs for women:

1. HR Jobs in Jaipur

Human resource management is a great career option for women. Companies in Jaipur are hiring HR executives, managers, and recruiters to handle employee relations and recruitment processes.

2. Hotel Jobs in Jaipur, Rajasthan

Jaipur is a top tourist destination, which makes the hospitality industry a great sector for women. Jobs in hotels range from front desk executives and guest relations managers to event planners and chefs.

3. Banking & Finance Jobs

Women with a background in finance can find great opportunities in banks and financial institutions. Roles like customer service executives, loan officers, and financial advisors are in demand.

4. Teaching & Academic Roles

Schools, colleges, and coaching centers in Jaipur offer good job opportunities for female teachers and lecturers. Women with experience in teaching can find well-paying jobs in the education sector.

5. Retail & Sales Jobs

Retail chains and malls in Jaipur often hire women for sales executive, customer support, and store manager positions. These jobs offer good salaries and incentives based on performance.

How to Apply for Jobs in Jaipur?

Applying for jobs in Jaipur is easy. Women can use online job portals, company websites, and recruitment agencies to find suitable job openings. Networking with professionals and joining online job groups can also help in getting the right opportunity.

Conclusion

Jaipur is a city full of opportunities for women looking to build their careers. Whether you are searching for work-from-home jobs or office-based roles, the city has something for everyone. With growing industries and women-friendly workplaces, now is the perfect time to start your job hunt in Jaipur! opportunities and growth potential. Whether you’re an employer or a candidate, Salarite is your ultimate partner in navigating the dynamic world of startups and MSMEs. Visit Salarite to explore more and take the next step toward success.

[yamuna111]

Success Beyond the UPSC Exam: Career Opportunities After Joining Coimbatore’s Leading IAS Academy

Becoming an Indian Administrative Services (IAS) officer is a dream for many aspirants across the country. The rigorous preparation process, long hours of study, and dedication required to succeed in the UPSC exams can often overshadow the fact that the journey doesn’t end with the exam itself. In fact, the benefits of joining the best IAS academy in Coimbatore extend well beyond securing a prestigious government job.

In this blog post, we will explore the various career opportunities available after preparing with the top IAS academy in Coimbatore and how the skills acquired during the IAS preparation process can open up several other professional paths.

1. Skills Acquired During IAS Preparation

The preparation for the UPSC exam isn’t just about studying for a single exam; it’s a holistic process that shapes an individual’s capabilities, outlook, and skill set. Here are some key skills that aspirants gain when they enroll in the best IAS academy in Coimbatore:

Analytical Thinking: IAS aspirants are trained to think critically, solve complex problems, and make decisions based on data and reasoning.

Time Management: The extensive syllabus and vast array of subjects require exceptional time management skills, which are invaluable in any profession.

Public Speaking & Communication: Being an IAS officer demands clear and effective communication, and this skill is honed throughout the preparation phase.

Leadership and Administrative Skills: The academy nurtures leadership qualities, which are beneficial in any corporate or government role.

These skills aren’t just useful for cracking the UPSC exam—they are applicable in various other career paths too.

2. Career Opportunities Beyond the UPSC Exam

Although the ultimate goal for most aspirants is to clear the UPSC and become an IAS officer, there are many other rewarding career options available for those who prepare at the best IAS academy in Coimbatore. Let’s explore some of these potential careers:

a. Teaching and Mentoring

One of the most natural career transitions for an IAS aspirant is to become a mentor or a teacher. Many top coaching institutes, including those in Coimbatore, hire experienced mentors who have either cleared the UPSC exams or have a deep understanding of the subject matter. Becoming a mentor or teacher can be incredibly fulfilling as it allows you to shape the next generation of civil servants.

Real-World Example: Many former IAS aspirants who didn’t clear the UPSC have found success as teachers in IAS coaching centers, providing insights and guidance to students, helping them succeed in exams.

b. Government Sector Roles

Even if you don’t clear the UPSC exam, there are numerous other roles in the government sector that require the same set of skills and knowledge. The preparation at the best IAS academy in Coimbatore can help you land jobs in various public sector undertakings (PSUs), public administration roles, and other government services.

Real-World Example: Candidates who fall short of the IAS exam cutoff often get selected for roles in ministries, state administrative services, and even in government-owned companies.

c. Corporate Sector Roles

The comprehensive training that you receive at a best IAS academy in Coimbatore can be highly valuable in the corporate world as well. With expertise in management, leadership, and analytical skills, IAS aspirants are well-equipped to take on strategic roles in top multinational companies (MNCs) and startups.

Real-World Example: Many aspirants who opt for the corporate route work as business consultants, project managers, or executives in industries such as banking, finance, and operations management.

d. Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs)

For those passionate about social work and making a difference in society, NGOs provide an ideal platform to utilize their knowledge of governance and public policy. Having studied subjects like governance, politics, economics, and sociology, an aspirant from the best IAS academy in Coimbatore can contribute significantly to the social sector by working with NGOs.

Real-World Example: Several IAS aspirants who were unsuccessful in the UPSC exam have moved on to successful careers in NGOs, contributing to various developmental projects and initiatives.

e. Entrepreneurship

The skills developed through IAS preparation, including problem-solving, leadership, and decision-making, are highly transferable to the world of entrepreneurship. Many aspirants who have undergone training in top IAS academies start their own businesses or startups. They often excel because they have a deep understanding of economics, law, and administration.

Real-World Example: Numerous ex-IAS aspirants have gone on to build successful businesses in sectors like education, technology, and consultancy, leveraging their insights into public policy and governance.

3. Benefits of Joining the Best IAS Academy in Coimbatore

While the best IAS academy in Coimbatore is primarily known for its UPSC coaching, the exposure and opportunities it provides can enhance your career, whether you become a civil servant or choose another path. By enrolling in one of Coimbatore’s premier IAS institutes, you gain access to:

A Network of Like-Minded Individuals: Connecting with fellow aspirants can open doors to opportunities in various sectors and can help in collaborations and business ventures.

In-Depth Knowledge: The academy imparts knowledge that is useful in many sectors beyond the civil services, from corporate jobs to social services.

Personal Growth: The challenging curriculum and rigorous preparation process at the best IAS academy in Coimbatore ensure that you grow not only as an aspirant but also as an individual capable of taking on diverse challenges in life.

4. Conclusion: The Future Beyond UPSC Success

The journey of preparing for the UPSC exam is undoubtedly transformative. Whether or not you clear the exam, the skills, knowledge, and experiences gained at the best IAS academy in Coimbatore can significantly enhance your career prospects. From teaching and mentoring to corporate roles and entrepreneurship, there are countless opportunities that make the most of your hard-earned expertise.

So, whether you’re preparing for UPSC or contemplating a career shift, the lessons learned during your IAS preparation can guide you towards a successful future.

Call to Action:

If you’re ready to take the first step toward a fulfilling career and explore all the opportunities available to you, consider enrolling in the best IAS academy in Coimbatore today. Learn more about the various career options available after IAS preparation and how our comprehensive training can help shape your professional future.

[collegedunias]

Top Reasons to Pursue an MBA in India: A Student’s Guide to Success

Pursuing an MBA in India is a smart choice for students who aim to elevate their career prospects in the field of business and management. With a robust economy, globally recognized institutions, and affordable education, India has emerged as a top destination for management studies. This guide will help you understand why an MBA in India is the right choice and highlight the opportunities at prestigious institutions like SIBM Pune.

Why Opt for an MBA in India?

India is home to some of the best MBA in India colleges, offering excellent academic programs, industry exposure, and global opportunities. Here are the key reasons why students prefer an MBA in India:

Affordable Education: Indian MBA programs are significantly more affordable compared to their international counterparts while maintaining high standards.

Top-Ranked Institutes: Institutions like IIMs, XLRI, and SIBM Pune are globally recognized for their quality education and industry relevance.

Diverse Career Opportunities: Students graduating with an MBA in India find opportunities across various industries, including finance, marketing, IT, healthcare, and entrepreneurship.

Networking Potential: Indian MBA colleges host students from diverse backgrounds, helping you build a strong professional network.

Placement Support: Most Indian business schools offer comprehensive placement assistance, ensuring students start their careers on the right foot.

SIBM Pune: A Leader in MBA Education

When it comes to premier institutions offering an MBA in India, SIBM Pune (Symbiosis Institute of Business Management) stands out as a top choice. Renowned for its academic excellence, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and strong industry connections, SIBM Pune has consistently ranked among the best MBA colleges in India.

Why Choose SIBM Pune?

World-Class Curriculum: The programs at SIBM Pune are designed to align with the latest industry trends, offering a mix of theoretical knowledge and practical exposure.

Experienced Faculty: The institute boasts highly qualified and experienced faculty members who guide students through their academic and professional journeys.

Industry Collaboration: Strong partnerships with top companies provide students with opportunities for internships, live projects, and placements.

Campus Life: The vibrant campus life at SIBM Pune includes various clubs, events, and activities that foster holistic development.

Placement Excellence: The institute has a stellar placement record, with top recruiters from across the globe hiring its graduates.

Specializations Offered at SIBM Pune

SIBM Pune offers a variety of specializations to cater to the diverse interests and career goals of students. These include:

Finance: For students interested in investment banking, financial analysis, and portfolio management.

Marketing: Perfect for those aiming to excel in brand management, digital marketing, and sales strategies.

Human Resources: Focused on talent acquisition, employee engagement, and organizational development.

Operations Management: Ideal for students interested in supply chain management and logistics.

Benefits of Pursuing an MBA in India

Choosing to pursue an MBA in India comes with several advantages that benefit students both academically and professionally. Here are some notable benefits:

High ROI (Return on Investment): Affordable tuition fees combined with high salary packages post-graduation make an MBA in India a value-for-money option.

Cultural Diversity: Studying in India exposes students to a mix of cultures, languages, and traditions, enriching their learning experience.

Global Opportunities: Many Indian business schools, including SIBM Pune, have collaborations with international universities, offering students global exposure.

Entrepreneurial Support: With India’s startup ecosystem booming, MBA programs here equip students with the skills to start and manage their ventures successfully.

How to Get Admission into SIBM Pune?

Admissions to SIBM Pune are competitive but achievable with the right preparation. Here are the steps to follow:

Qualify for SNAP: Students must appear for the Symbiosis National Aptitude Test (SNAP), a national-level entrance exam.

Meet Eligibility Criteria: Candidates need a minimum of 50% in their undergraduate degree (45% for reserved categories).

Prepare for GD-PI-WAT: Shortlisted candidates are invited for Group Discussions, Personal Interviews, and Written Ability Tests.

Focus on Academics and Personality Development: A strong academic background combined with excellent communication skills increases your chances of selection.

Career Opportunities After MBA in India

An MBA in India opens doors to a multitude of career paths across industries. Graduates from top institutes like SIBM Pune often secure roles in:

Consulting: Advising businesses on strategy and operations.

Marketing Management: Driving brand growth and customer engagement.

Finance: Managing investments, analyzing markets, and financial planning.

Operations: Streamlining processes and improving efficiency.

Entrepreneurship: Launching and scaling your own business.

Tips for MBA Aspirants

Start Early: Begin your preparation for entrance exams like SNAP well in advance.

Build Soft Skills: Focus on communication, leadership, and analytical skills to excel in GD-PI rounds.

Stay Informed: Keep yourself updated on current affairs and industry trends.

Seek Guidance: Connect with alumni and professionals for insights and advice.

Choose the Right Institute: Opt for a reputed college like SIBM Pune that aligns with your career aspirations.

Conclusion

Pursuing an MBA in India is an investment in your future. With exceptional academic programs, cultural diversity, and vast career opportunities, India offers the perfect platform for aspiring business leaders. Institutions like SIBM Pune ensure that students receive not only quality education but also the tools and opportunities to succeed in the competitive corporate world.

Take the first step toward a bright future by exploring your options for an MBA in India. Start preparing today, and unlock endless possibilities for personal and professional growth!

If you need further information contact:

523, 5th Floor, Wave Silver Tower, Sec-18 Noida, UP-201301

+91 9711016766

infocollegedunias@gmail.com