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June - 2006 - issue > Women in IT
Dial “C” for Personality
Keerthana Venkatesh
Thursday, June 1, 2006

Soaring towards the skies, Chhavi Kishore, of Broadcom is amongst the young individuals to have filed 12 patents, one to her sole merit and rest with her team. Her success formula? “Broadcom’s India center was just born and I glimpsed opportunities for growth in a new startup.” As a fresher, an established firm would have her maintaining someone else’s work rather than accelerating her career.

Having done MTech. in Microelectronics from BITS, Pilani, Kishore found Broadcom to have the right mix of creativity and opportunity to launch her career. Her experience has helped her travel a long way from being a Design Engineer to an individual contributor to the VLSI division of Broadcom. “There is always something new to learn and update one’s technological skills,” says Kishore, whose passion remains Analog Designing, yet she risked moving into Digital Design and is excited about the prospects she’s earned from it. “A fresher has umpteen opportunities to dirty their hands experimenting,” is her optimistic saga.

She quips in, “Money may be a dominant criterion for younger people in the industry, but priorities slowly shift to technological and corporate progress”. Check-ing projects on hand before joining a company helped Chhavi quit the company she joined from campus soon after induction. She thinks that before a person begins a new task it’s good to explore all avenues before quitting.

“To progress, making your preferences clear to the seniors helps to climb the career-ladder.” Kishore realized her passion towards design and algorithm exploration early in her career and took the bold step to speak to her seniors about her interests. “Doing something with disinterest would neither benefit the individual nor the organization.”

She believes persuasion is the only way to achieve goals. Her personal experience tells her that bagging a project of choice is not possible always, but a small association with it is an achievement in itself. Aiming to emulate her role model, Charles (Chuk) Monahan, Architect with Broadcom U.S., Kishore is bracing herself to become an Architect.

Hailing from the conventional and colorful state of Rajasthan, Kishore has broadminded parents; an IIT’ian father for a paradigm in life, who propelled her to pursue her dreams. Her gratitude reflects in her nostalgia of the days when she was among twenty girls of a strength of three hundred in her batch in the undergraduate course, the only girl in a class of twelve at BITS and the first woman to join Broadcom’s VLSI division.

After her wedding, Kishore relocated to Bangalore and joined Broadcom. While growing with the company, she had one of the most trying experiences as a working mother with a three-month old child. Poise pervades her recollection of that time when she was occupied with a critical project and had to work long hours. “I believe technical skill drops only when perception drops; not with increasing family responsibilities.” This strength of conviction, blanketed by inspiration from her role models has paved her path to win Broadcom India’s Excellence Award for Innovation at Work and has propelled her to work towards publishing a paper- an arena she has yet to explore.

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